I toyed with not writing this one at all – the back pain has returned, and I have to push through it and work, so spending time writing doesn’t feel like the best idea. But I decided I’d go back to writing on the phone in bed to give my back a rest, and honestly, this makes for a good distraction.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned to K that while the blog has seen a healthy increase in regular visitors, I’ve seen an exodus of newsletter subscribers since I shifted to this new format – about 5-10 people unsubscribe every time I publish a new edition. It wasn’t a complaint – I was confused whether people like the new, more frequent posts or not. Well, you folks decided to make me eat my words, because there has been a torrent of new subscribers in the last week, putting us at our highest subscriber count yet.
So to those new subscribers – Hello! This is a very self-indulgent newsletter/blog, with updates on my work (usually comics lettering) and life, essays on comics, books, films and writing. Sometimes all at once. Feel free to say hello in the comments or via email!
Work has been good, other than the back pain. I had one day of lettering work during the week, along with some tinkering on the font, which I need to get preview-ready soon for possible use in a book.
I had hoped to spread this month’s work out evenly over the three remaining weeks of January, but my writers had their own crises in the first week back from the holidays, so I received a bunch of scripts later than I’d anticipated, which means everything’s been shoved into the last two weeks. Fortunately, some of the books I’d scheduled here don’t need to be delivered till February, so I’ve got some leeway which I plan to use to give my back a rest. This does mean a bit of a rush in coming weeks, but hopefully nothing I can’t handle.
In other work-related news, over on sktchd.com, David Harper interviewed Ram and Evan about Dawnrunner, and Ram and Dan about The One Hand and The Six Fingers (a.k.a. Project Gemini as it’s been internally referred to for years).
On the blog, I had some shower thoughts about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials.
Links for the week:
- Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore in conversation.
- Francis Spufford on whether there remains anything to be rescued from the rubble of organised Christendom.
- Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in “digital sweatshops”.
- Dan Fox on Aki Kaurasmäki, Ian Curtis, Alasdair Gray and Poor Things, and the idea of luminous mundanity.
No movies this week, but my Doctor Who-related book binge continues.
The Star Beast is Gary Russell’s novelisation of Russell T. Davies’s first 60th Anniversary special. BBC Books have decided to release novelisations of all four specials, of which three are currently out, and the fourth, I believe, will be out later this month.
If you’re familiar with Doctor Who novels or the Big Finish audio plays, the name “Gary Russell” doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence. Russell isn’t the most imaginative writer, and one tends not to expect immortal prose from him. But given someone else’s story here, I’m happy to say that he’s put in enough work to make a contribution. This novelisation is competently written, with some charm, and there are neat formal tricks like adding in-universe correspondence between chapters to fill out the world of the story. It retains all the character of the tv story while adding little throughlines that help, like Stew from the steelworks.
Mind you, that doesn’t suddenly make it essential – I can’t imagine what would do that other than RTD himself adapting it like he did Rose. But if you’re nostalgic for novelisations, and liked the special, this isn’t a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale (reread) is tenuously related to Doctor Who in a very “time can be rewritten” way, in that it was originally a standalone sf novel, which was revised and republished as a Faction Paradox novel, then once again republished as a standalone book. You can still see traces of the Faction if you peer intently, but who knows, those might’ve been part of the original version.
In practice, it’s as standalone as it gets, and unlike much of Doctor Who or Faction Paradox, it makes for a very easy sell in its high concept – a time traveller from the future works in Sherlock Holmes’s house as a maid in order to study him for her PhD and finds herself embroiled in his life and his cases.
The first half of this book is great. Hale captures the characters of Holmes and Watson quite well, and her protagonist is charming and occasionally arrogant in ways that contrast well with Holmes. As one might expect, a romance brews between her and Holmes, and while it can be accused of being (and is likely inspired by) fan fiction, Hale manages to sell it on a character level such that it doesn’t jar too much. Further, she captures the 19th century tenor in dialogue quite well (though I noticed a couple of modernisms and Americanisms slip in, and more knowledgeable people than me will likely find more).
The reason I hesitate to recommend it unreservedly though is the second half. When I first read the book, about a decade ago, I was entirely put off by it. This time, knowing what was coming, I managed to see what Hale was trying to do with it, and yet, I’m not sure the book works as a whole. I’ll try and talk about it without posting any actual spoilers, but it will involve discussing the nature of the book, and you might want to wait till you’ve read the book itself (which is available to borrow on Kindle Unlimited, at least in India).
A little more than halfway through the book, we find out, along with the narrator, that we are not in fact in a mystery adventure where Holmes and our plucky heroine hunt down the killer, but a horror novel, where history is being violated to void it of its potential. This comes with a variety of violations taking place against our main characters as well.
Sure, this is signposted throughout the book by clarifying that the world our heroine finds herself in isn’t the clean Victorian world of Doyle’s stories, but the real Victorian era, with several poverty, class inequality, misogyny and so on. And even the romance between Gillian/Rose and Holmes manages not to portray Holmes as basically a man with modern sensibilities stuck in the 1800s, like some historical romances tend to. But that’s unlikely to prepare the reader for the sheer escalation in grim content that occurs halfway through.
By the end of the book, it’s difficult to tell if the atrocities and indignities depicted in the second half add up to anything worth saying other than that horror is part of the nature of this universe. It’s not as if the book engages with the specific horror of the Victorian era – this is an out-of-context problem through and through, both for Gillian and for Holmes.
This is also the place I feel the book stops being standalone and begins a direct conversation with adventure fiction such as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, given that, in its core concept, it’s a mashup of the two, and emerges from their fandom. I don’t know if the horror of the second half makes any kind of sense if you’re not reading it as being in conversation with adventure fiction, and if you are reading it because, say, you like Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, I highly wonder quite how you would enjoy it.
In short, it’s pulling a tonal shift to say something deliberate and disturbing, but I’m not sure how well it manages to say it. To be sure, the tonal shift is the reason this book stuck with me, and why I wanted to read it again. But for one, I’m not 100% sure it does anything beyond adding shock value, and another, this is what prevents me from recommending the book to someone who’d want to read sf-flecked historical fiction or vice versa.
What’s happening here is narrative substitution – one story being disrupted to tell you than in fact, you were reading a different story than you thought. But what that story turned out to be, I’m not sure I could tell you.
(After I wrote this, I had a brief conversation with K about this book, and we talked about horror movies like Lamb and The Outwaters which are also deliberately off-putting and yet manage to be memorable beyond that, or ones that simply pull off a narrative substitution, such as The Empty Man. It reminded me how much I value being wrong-footed by a story, and I wanted to come back here and note that none of the above means I disliked the book – I just don’t know quite what to think about it, and that’s a state I’m comfortable staying in. All it means is that I wouldn’t straightforwardly recommend this book as a fun sf mystery adventure, which it is intently not.)
I’ve been reading a few other things, but haven’t finished any one of them. I also listened to a few Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays that, rather than inflicting on you in a status update, I’d prefer to post about individually and link back to in the next one.
My favourite thing I’m currently reading is Russell T. Davies’s The Writer’s Tale – a 700-page nonfiction tome about writing Series 4 of his Doctor Who. I was about to post on BlueSky lamenting that I had to read a physical book with tiny print when BBC Books could just release an ebook already, when I thought to check the Kindle Store, and found out that there is in fact an ebook version, and I’m now happily 150 pages into it.
Short one this time, mostly because I haven’t watched any movies. Should correct that next week.
