Oh No It Isn't! by: Paul Cornell

The British pantomime tradition is a form of theater that I am for the most part, unfamiliar with and as such reading a novel that takes place inside a pantomime becomes an interesting task for one such as myself.  The flagship novel in Virgin Publishing’s line of Bernice Summerfield novels begins with Oh No It Isn’t! written by Paul Cornell, the creator of the character of Benny way back in Love and War, and picks up where The Dying Days left off with Bernice Summerfield an actual professor of archeology with her own book deal.  I mean she already published and had no intention of writing a sequel, but she just had a really bad divorce and is attracted to one of her students.  Yeah, Benny has already had a pretty weird year and it’s about to get weirder as she takes an archeological expedition to the planet Perfecton, home to an ancient civilization of the Perfectons who have connections to the People from The Also People.  In orbit around the planet, however, are the Grel, a race of squid-like humanoids obsessed with creating facts who bombard the planet with missiles sending Benny on an adventure into Pantoland where she’s joined by her students (as the Seven Dwarves), her cat Wolsey (who is sentient), her colleague Professor Arthur Candy (who becomes a woman), and the ship’s crew as Menlove Stokes from The Romance of Crime and The Well-Mannered War looks on trying to find a solution to the problems.

Creating this fantastical environment for Benny to react to is a great way to start off the novels, while not having to begin any real overarching series plot.  Cornell creates a believable way for Bernice to get to the planet and has Benny like a fish out of water and utterly confused.  The parts of the pantomime our characters play alter as Benny alters the reality around her through several breakings of the almighty fourth wall.  Her first character is that of Dick Whittington, a pantomime role often done by a woman in drag, leading to several Dick jokes from the pussycat Wolsey who gained sentience to serve as companion to the adventure.  They go through several fairytale tropes before saving the day.  Benny keeps her general wittiness about her yet has a reserved sadness.  Her robotic room servant Joseph brings one of her students early on in the book for a bit of romance and you really get to see how bad losing Jason Kane at the end of Eternity Weeps has left her.  She thinks the student, Michael Doran, she’s brought is cute, but cannot bring herself to do any lovemaking with him as it would be wrong.  She has the desire to do it all, but she controls herself making her mood even worse.  It falls deeper once she goes into pantoland and sees Doran as one of the dwarves who are infatuated with Benny and able to see through the character.

Benny then becomes a princess ala Cinderella in the pantomime before finally manifesting as the character of Aladdin and having to fulfill the plots of those stories, all the while Wolsey and the dwarves sort of tag along for the ride.  Being not your traditional seven dwarves, they make for some good comic relief along with Dame Candy, the quintessential Panto Dame.  Menlove Stokes and the rest of the faculty’s plot only really ties in at the end of the novel and it is easy to see why it was cut out when Big Finish adapted this book for an audio drama in 1998 (only a year after its release).  Stokes is still the funny character we’ve seen and Cornell populates the University of Dellah with interesting people such as a pair of old ladies who constantly bicker and a Pakher Professor, but they don’t really hold a candle to the comic adventure that Benny has embarked on in the rest of the novel.  As a novel, it is not quite perfection, but it at least gives us a good base to start on the series for Bernice Summerfield as well as give us a jumping on point for new readers outside of Doctor Who’s sphere of influence. 9/10.