NA #13 Deceit

Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans

In Brief: Ace returns. And now carries a big gun.

To be honest Ace returning is really the only notable thing that can be said about Deceit. It's an extremely poor effort as a novel. While things start off promisingly and for at least the first half it feels like events might lead up to something interesting it just all falls apart by the end (and easily has the worst "defeat" of the enemy since Genesys). Not even the main villain Lacuna, a large-headed megalomaniacal lesbian with a giant vat of brains, can spruce things up. The big problem is that Darvill-Evans, despite being the editor of the New Adventures, seems unable to trim anything from the book. It's looooooong with many scenes that just go on and on with no purpose. Characters are captured, escape, have a gun-fight and are captured again.

Especially after the mid-point 20-page gun-battle the reader really starts to realise that many scenes can be skimmed as they add little to the plot. They just seem to be there since if the whole thing were actually a movie or tv-episode it would look sort of neat. I assume that the author was more trying to novelise a Doctor Who movie he'd really like to see but didn't realise that it's not as simple as just describing what you see in your head. Narrative sense and plot coherency are also helpful.

Also despite the rather camp Lacuna and her brains the book is extremely "macho", with Doctor Who-comic cross-over Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer (don't ask) being a cross of Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger (we get a lot of descriptions of his bulging muscles). This macho grunting butchitude extends to new-Ace, who instead of being the character we knew has transformed into Sarah Connor/Ellen Ripley after a few years in "the future". I don't understand the reasoning behind having her come back and rejoin the Doctor and the infinitely more interesting Bernice. I suspect that perhaps the desire was to have a more "action"-based character to contrast with the other more cerebral denizens of the Tardis.

It ranks as one of the biggest misfires in Whodom since they had an Australian and/or Matthew Waterhouse wander into the ship (and later outdone by having Catherine Tate foisted on all of time & space).

But what else to say about Deceit? As I said it's just really not good. And unlike other lesser books in the series it's not even ambition-gone-wrong (Witch Mark this means you). It tries to be a big futuristic space "epic" and just ends up being tedious and stupid. Possibly the low point in the series so far.