Time for another book! We are going to read together The Many Hands
Please discuss below - no need to finish it first, discuss as you go along but please add spoiler tags!
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This is what I said at the time (bit wordy, I’m afraid, but with no real spoilers).
The Many Hands: Book the First
[In which the Doctor runs around a great deal and a soldier is hit by stone chips at a surprising distance:]
Well I’m exactly 100 pages into Paul Dale Smith’s new NSA, The Many Hands and so far it suffers from some of the issues which have affected other books in the range.
Before I go any further I should point out that I think Smith is one of the top 2 or 3 writers to come out of Doctor Who - ‘Heritage’ is one of my favourite books in the BBC range, his two short stories for the Enlightenment fanzine are up with Magrs and Moffat in terms of quality, and ‘The Albino’s Dancer’, his Time Hunter novella, is excellent.
As a result ‘The Many Hands’ is very readable - the characterisation of the two leads rings true, and when the author takes the time there’s some really lovely writing in it. But the problem is that there’s not a lot of time given over to anything other than moving the story on via one action scene after another.
The story starts in the middle of one such scene, with a stagecoach careening through the Old Town of Edinburgh (or as the Doctor amusingly points out, just ‘The Town’ at this stage in the city’s life) with the Doctor on top battling a dead man and Martha elsewhere running through the streets to get in front of the coach and stop it, new series style, with yet another handy sonic screwdriver function. From there, the next hundred pages are a series of run/get captured/run/get captured escapades - and it’s not even the cliche of a series of set pieces joined together by linking narrative, as each breathless bit of running away blends into the next with barely a space for a linking sentence or two between.
To add to this, even the Doctor/Martha’s escapes are simplistic to the point of non-existence. There’s rarely a clever escape plan - they simply run away in a manner reminiscent of the Pertwee years, or some fortuitous distraction appears to capture their captors’ attention. Again, it’s all exciting stuff on one level and if that’s the audience it’s aimed at then The Many Hands works perfectly, but there’s little to engage the brain or cause the reader to mentally applaud authorial/Doctoral ingenuity (in which, of course, the books are just mimicking the TV series pretty closely).
It takes all of 100 pages in fact, for something original to occur, with the appearance of the titular hands. That’s more than a third of the way through the book.
Smith knows his trade though and he can invest even this kind of thing with a degree of talent lacking in real journeymen writers like Justin Richards or Trevor Baxendale. As it stands the majority of the book would never have held my attention when I was one of the famed intelligent 12 year olds that Who fiction likes to think of as its intended audience, but there are moments when you can see that there is such a book hiding beneath the 100 mile an hour romp.
The problem is that there’s no time given over to thought or introspection - nobody except (occasionally) the Doctor and Martha seem to think about anything, with the result that everyone bar the two leads comes across as fairly cardboard. When someone does think about something other than what’s going on around them, the results are excellent - Martha’s musing that certain characters were exhibiting ‘rather more ambition than humans were comfortable with from their corpses’ is a great line, as is the Doctor’s subtle manner of manipulating the soldier, McAllister. It’s just that there’s not enough time spent on this kind of thing, as all the available word count is spent on pushing the Doctor round Edinburgh with sundry baddies on his tail.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of this that there’s at least one key moment in the first part of the book which appears to make no sense. The scene in question, involves a soldier, apparently beyond rifle range of Doctor, taking a potshot at him anyway. The shot only misses by ‘a few feet’ (making the claim that the shot was a sign of a stupid, inexperienced soldier a bit strange) - and yet another solider manages to get himself hit in the face by splinters from the rock the bullet hits, even though he’s also presumably behind or in line with the initial shooter. I might be being dense here, but it seemed a curiously inexplicable incident to me, and all I can think is that the frantic pace of the prose means that little mistakes like that are more likely to slip through unnoticed.
The whole thing is, to be honest, a little odd. Smith is a very good writer and he’s a very, very good Who writer. He’s shown this repeatedly in the past in other books and stories and he shows it in flashes even here. And if the guidelines for an NSA are the exact same - as is reputedly the case - then why is this book lacking the layers of ‘Heritage’, the poetry of ‘Blossom’ or the razorsharp cleverness of the plotting of ‘Recursion’? The Many Hands is an enjoyable if somewhat brainless read and I doubt if Smith is capable of writing something not worth reading, but on the basis of the first 100 pages or so it’s simply not in the same class as his earlier work. My nine year old son would probably enjoy it, but my 12 year old daughter who reads Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz and the like would, I suspect, find it a bit frenetic and lacking in depth.
The Many Hands: Book the Second
[In which a sinister creature is born, an underground street is explored and the Monro family tree turns out more complicated than expected]
And now it gets even odder.
Having described the first 100 pages of ‘The Many Hands’ as one single continuous chase sequence, involving a series of featureless supporting acts following the Doctor and Martha through Edinburgh, I now find myself viewing the remaining 141 pages as anything but.
It’s almost like two completely different novels: the first suffering from the usual NSA issues and the second an excellent Gothic horror/cool steampunk (sort of) sf novel.
It really is as abrupt as that - simplistic run around shenanigans with pretty flat characters for the younger kiddies until page 100, atmospheric and creepy grown up novel filled with fully rounded individuals from page 101 onwards.
Suddenly the book is peppered with believable characters acting in an intelligent manner. McAllister, rather than simply reacting to whatever the Doctor does, becomes a far more rounded individual, capable of thinking and acting for himself. The Monro men make a substantive appearance in the story for the first time and add immeasurably to the mix. Even the Doctor stops rushing about and begins to act in a more Doctoral fashion.
The jokes also get better - Martha’s confusion about whether Monro’s description of himself (“we are the Chair of Anatomy”) is the name of his species is both a a great joke at the expense of Russell T Davies’ naming conventions for alien races and a subtle and neat plot point, for instance.
The setting too is more interesting after a round century’s worth of pages. Previously everything had been set in and around a generic Royal Mile, so blandly described that even I, a lifelong Edinburgh Man, was often confused as to where the TARDIS crew were supposed to be unless a street name was provided. Now the action moves into a well-described Surgeons’ Hall, about a blockaded church and down into Mary King’s Close, all places filled with oppressive darknesses and creepy and cobweb filled rooms and corridors in which Smith allows his descriptive powers full range. There’s no doubting where anyone is at any time by this point in the book and as the actual action (as opposed to the earlier page-filling action) takes place, the book continues to open out, with an intriguing and unusual set of villains and a reasonably well thought out conclusion (the final epilogue chapter though is a real disappointment, returning to the realm of cliche for no obvious reason).
So this was my first doctor who novel! I love that it was a Ten and Martha story. It felt like a solid mid tier series three story. Especially love that I’ve been to Mary kings close and old town Edinburgh so I could really picture the setting well. Nice bit of historical figure meets alien weirdness. Overall believable tone of being an episode from 2007 that I somehow missed.
I found this book to be fine but nothing special. Listened to it today and it feels like a book that i will have forgotten tomorrow. 10 and Martha was greatly written I just found the story to be a bit meh.
As someone who has been to Edinburgh many times, it was a treat to see many familiar locations in the book.
Basic story, but I enjoyed it.
This book actually focused on a real person, Alexander Monroe, which is a little odd for the novels. Also, must have been hard not to go check on Jamie when he was right down the road. Anyway, the book itself was a strange story, one that I wasn’t as intrigued by as I had hoped to be honest. But some of the characters like the military captain were pretty interesting. It also jumped out at me at how often Martha wondered how the Doctor would handle a situation. Davros says in the series about how he changes his companions, and here we see a part of that where a companion is acting alone and are trying to make decisions of how to handle the situation based off how the Doctor would handle it.