| RELATIVE DEMENTIAS by Mark Michalowski |
| Story ? Synopsis: Collecting his mail from Earth, 2012, the Doctor gets a postcard that leads him to check out an old folks home in Dumfries, 1982. There, a pioneering technique to treat Alzheimer's disease turns out to be just a front. A band of war criminals, the Tulks, have had their memories repressed, but mad scientist Sooal is able to break their conditioning. Once this is achieved, they unlock the stasis chamber where they kept their weapons. At which point, he guns them down. But then learns he was being watched and helped by two rogue members of the Annarene Protectorate, who want the Tulkan weaponry to start their own empire. The Doctor manages to trick Sooal and the rogue Annarene into using the transmat back to their ship - having redirected it instead into the stasis chamber where the weapons were being stored. |
| Review:- A trip to Scotland offers hope for the suffering, but there's more going on under the surface... Michalowski's debut Dr Who novel has a weighty plot, a heavy subplot, and a couple of decent mysteries. However, it's less than the sum of its parts. The opening scene with Countess Gallowglass is a smug little cameo presumably intending to broaden the Doctor's appeal, though failing miserably. So the Doctor gets his letters kept for him, woo-hoo. Of course, it's here that the key sleight of hand takes place... while the reader is bored rigid, presumably. To Dumfries the Doctor goes, before pointedly putting Ace's back up in a scene which is at least explained later. This, and Ace's subsequent feeling of a stalker are connected, though the latter is presumably meant to be confused with Michael, the tedious UNIT drop-out. Ostensibly, matters merely concern the missing patients at an old folks home where there's an experiment to find a cure for Alzheimer's. Now, when tackling an issue like this, it's best to treat it seriously, given that non-sufferers will not understand the pain caused to the families of sufferers. It's not a clever idea to treat it as a common-or-garden ailment like influenza, except when you can be bothered to expand on the trauma felt by your characters in relation to their recovered memories, which in a cliched twist, turn out to be of alien mass murderers. So, that's one fault. Another problem is the curiously small feel to the locations, as if everyone is tripping over each other's feet in a farce. The strand with Ace on what turns out to be Orkney makes a useful distraction from the Doctor dashing into the spaceship or his lodgings, but when he makes the dumbo decision to hook himself into the nasty alien machine, you do start to wonder what the writer is playing at. Though I must say the Stacy Chambers gag does at least pay-off quite well, and it's more of a surprise that the Doctor is too doped to crack it. It doesn't help either that the Tulk seem a pretty dull bunch once we learn about them. Even as supposed terrors who've had a severe punishment that they're trying to cheat their way out of, they just seem terribly boring. It gets worse when rogue members of the Annarene Protectorate are exposed and reveal that they're using Sooal to double-cross the Tulks and get hold of a load of weapons. What should seem quite a gripping plot is somehow rendered totally trivial. Once Ace departs to Orkney and her other version comes out of the shadows and into events in Dumfries, then coherence begins to develop, although with the rest of the plot being what it is, this is only a partial victory. Since the Tulk plot forms the bulk of the story, their rather cursory deaths come as a surprise, but the Annarene strand does at least keep things ticking over until the rather neat conclusion. Obviously, it's a poor lookout for the Alzheimer's patients, but the book isn't about them. The only other loose end is the utterly worthless subplot about Michael, who bears the Doctor a grudge. The idea that the cosy UNIT family is a myth is not new, but nor is it devoid of depth. But the motive presented seems so petty that sympathy for Michael is non-existent, though the suggested depth of the Doctor's relationship with his mother begs many more questions, that again, are just window-dressing. When the Doctor has to manipulate two old people to create a diversion, Ace is aghast, but really, would she rather have died? The ends seem to me to justify the means. But then, the problem with the simple view is that it doesn't recognise wider views. On the whole, this is a book of unfulfilled promise that continually devalues itself and its audience. However, it does have a pretty nice cover. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |