Falls the Shadow by: Daniel O'Mahony - A Re-Review

Falls the Shadow is a book which has been described as 356 pages of an excuse for pain and torture, and this cynical analysis is a Schrodinger analysis.  It is both correct and oh so incredibly wrong at the same time.  Daniel O’Mahony’s only entry in the Virgin New Adventures line of novels is a book with pain and suffering as a major theme, but hidden within its pages is a much deeper story about the insanity of the universe and what happens when time travel goes wrong.  In essence, the novel is O’Mahony’s answer to Marc Platt’s Ghost Light: the TARDIS ends up in a Victorian manor house which is inhabited with crazy people.  There is a professor doing his own experiments with a daughter who is insane, a visitor to the house who does not like the inhabitants, and eventually god-like beings who throw even more of a wrench in the mix.  O’Mahony subverts the Seventh Doctor formula of this story by having the TARDIS crash land in the house and the Doctor doesn’t actually have a plan.  He, Ace, and Benny are all stuck in a home where their only goal is to survive with their sanity intact.

The trick to writing a longer Doctor Who book is to ensure that the prose is excellent, and Daniel O’Mahony shows an incredible skill in writing his own little universe in microcosm.  The prose is lyrical from the simple description of characters walking down a corridor, to having someone’s blood sucked by vampire orchids, and even the end of the universe.  There are several references, obvious and subtle, to classic literature, the works of Stephen King, poetry, and pop songs of the era.  O’Mahony uses these allusions to plant the idea in the reader that Falls the Shadow means different things and there is an open end to the ways that it can be interpreted.  It’s certainly a style which can get the reader to work their way through the book within 24 hours and have a review up within an hour of finishing the book.  The villains of the piece are Gabriel and Tanith, the Light analogues in this retelling of Ghost Light.  They are representations of how the universe came to be and the spark of madness and unravelling which occurred when Professor Jeremy Winterdawn played with dimensional transcendentalism and interstitial time.  They are both insane and the source of the torture in the novel.  They are psychopaths, sociopaths, and up the garden paths.

There is a trio of characters living in the house already who have found themselves living out their own little soap opera love triangle of insanity.  Harry Truman is a man with a disfigured face, Justin Cranleigh is an explorer who has gone insane, and Cassandra Winterdawn has gone blind.  There is a moment early on in the novel where the scene is established as Cassandra opens a wardrobe in which hides Benny and carries on a conversation with Cranleigh as if she isn’t there.  The reader won’t immediately associate with the character being blind, making the reader question what this house, this Shadowfell, is really hiding.  It’s a device used early on to make the story work, as the reader no longer knows just what they can expect from the book.  Cranleigh and Truman are introduced as two sides of a standard love triangle, but by the midpoint there is something revealed about each of them that makes them somehow more insane than they were initially introduced to be.  While they are crazy Jane Page, an English assassin has come to the house with no real identity of her own to kill Winterdawn because of reasons.  Page isn’t her real name, she doesn’t actually have a real name and O’Mahony intentionally leaves it ambiguous if she’s a real person or just a construct of Gabriel, Tanith, Qxeleq, Shadowfell, or the overactive imaginations of the characters in the house.  O’Mahony evokes the Gray Man mythos for the beginning of the universe and the initial species who has tea with Benny and influences Ace’s decisions.  He is not an analogue for the Doctor, the Doctor is in the story after all, but he is an analogue for something bigger, something different.  Overall, Falls the Shadow may not be a book for those weak of heart or stomach, but it is one that leaves an impression and says something and nothing at the same time.  It is a paradox, and a brilliant one at that.  9/10.

Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by: Brandon Sanderson

One important aspect of Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire is that while it is the first installment of a trilogy it’s also telling a complete story from beginning to end, leaving the reader satisfied.  The Well of Ascension was published a year after The Final Empire’s publication which continues the trilogy and shifts the focus of the story from a heist, to a story that’s more political in nature.  While the first novel was defeating the big bad Lord Ruler and saving the day, The Well of Ascension is what happens next.  The climax of The Final Empire leaves a dictatorship with a power vacuum and Sanderson uses The Well of Ascension to focus on how the world can begin to rebuild, and the grimy aspects of that long process.  Vin has become the focus of a religion among the ska as responsible for freeing them from their chains, Elend has found himself the king, and the rest of the original crew have traded thieving for politics.  Elend has written a complicated constitution as the monarchal dictatorship becomes a representative democracy and several disgruntled nobles assault the city.  Luthadel under siege is the state in which most of the novel occurs, giving The Well of Ascension a more desolate and depressing atmosphere than the initial book.  Sanderson sets from the outset to give the reader a story that isn’t the happily ever after for the characters, but only the real beginning of their troubles.

Straff Venture, Elend’s father, serves as the primary antagonist of this novel, and like The Final Empire, he remains in the distance throughout the book, while his effects are felt.  Straff has the city under siege, with a true invasion only stopped by a political rival, Lord Cett,  This is a double-edged sword, however, as once Straff appears as a villain he is found to be more underwhelming, sending underlings to do his dirty work and not really being that impressive of a villain overall.  He has a Mistborn who gets a plot with Vin throughout the novel, bringing her story to the forefront.  Zane Venture is a character who has a voice in his said, the voice revealed not to be insanity, but a Mistborn who provides a foil and mirror for Vin.  Both come from an abusive father figure, but while Vin eventually made it out of her abusive upbringing, Zane didn’t.  Sanderson uses Zane as a character who thinks he’s able to get out, but is somehow more stubborn to the possibility of help, forcing himself into some sort of learned helplessness.  He’s also a character who the reader doesn’t really get to see the thought process of as he doesn’t get his own point of view chapter outside of smaller portions of other chapters.  This means that Zane is only perceived by the reader through the reactions of others, and that is primarily Vin.  Vin’s growth throughout The Well of Ascension is a continuation of working through her own self-doubt: she’s defeated the Lord Ruler and has found mutual love with Elend, but everything about the world is telling her that it is going to come crashing down.  She’s only really brought up because she has found a support structure to surround herself with throughout the book, but that doesn’t stop the doubt from greatly effecting her actions and sense of self-worth.

Meanwhile, Elend Venture has his own demons to fight as the studious man has been put into a position where he has to lead a group of people and avoid becoming a dictator.  Elend is a man with a naïve optimism that everyone is looking for the fairness, which is obviously not happening.  He begins the book as the king of the new empire, and Sazed, a Terrisman servant responsible for memorizing several faiths, sends him an advisor to actually make him a king.  Elend is someone who also suffers from similar self-doubt to Vin and throughout The Well of Ascension he builds himself up to be a good leader before being deposed for his previous inability to act as a king.  He’s a fascinating character because of this, as the election of a new king forms a large portion of the novel, giving Elend a status as a main character.  This overcoming of self-doubt becomes a major theme throughout the book, especially as it ends with a hook for the final installment taking up the last 200 pages of the book or so.  The climax of the novel is excellent and while Vin and Elend are the primary driving forces throughout The Well of Ascension, the rest of the crew and the new characters get their own chance to shine.

Lord Renoux in The Final Empire was already established to be an imposter, but it is revealed by the end of that book that he was a kandra, a shapeshifter which eats the bones of others to take their forms.  They have contracts with humans which they must be fiercely loyal and OreSeur, is the kandra’s true name, now under contract with Vin.  Sanderson has created a fascinating shapeshifting species here as while the kandra can impersonate humans to near perfection, that’s all it is, an impersonation.  There really is something alien about the character through dry wit as OreSeur impersonates a wolfhound throughout the novel, not a human.  He becomes Vin’s constant companion and bodyguard in essence, and adds an espionage flavor to the political machinations.  Sanderson also really introduces a second magic system to go side by side with Allomancy here.  Ferruchemistry is essentially a mirror to Allomancy and while mentioned in the first book, it is put into practice here.  While there are plenty of other characters in the over 700 page novel, it is this that really should be enough to sell the book if it hasn’t as The Well of Ascension is a continuation of the series by shifting the tone and forcing the characters through different situations and down a very different path.  9/10.

Interference - Book Two: The Hour of the Geek by: Lawrence Miles

Metatextual analysis is weird.  It’s looking at a text through a lens dependent on the existence of other texts which changes the context of the text you’re looking at.  For instance, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a play that only works within the context of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Including metatext in your work is a gamble, it can become like Stoppard and excellent, but it can also come across like say Hell Bent where it comes off as pretentious.  Interference Book One: Shock Tactic was the start of a book published in two parts, finished with Interference Book Two: The Hour of the Geek.  Miles introduces metatext to the first installment, but it really is the second installment which fulfills the metatext of what Miles is doing, writing an analysis of Doctor Who as a program.  The 300 pages of this novel analyzes what Doctor Who means, who the Doctor is, who the companion is, and somehow manages to predict to what the show would evolve into with scary accuracy.  Unlike the first review I wrote, this isn’t going to explore Miles’ plot, it’s largely a continuation of part one and is excellent, but I’ve said just about everything that I can about that aspect of the book.

Miles plays with the idea that the Doctor is dead, he has been dead since The Monster of Peladon, caused by a paradox on the planet Dusk.  Killing the Doctor at this point is his razor to cut canon in two.  It’s the Tom Baker era where the expanded universe started to take shape with Doctor Who Weekly and of course the 90’s already gave the world the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures.  It’s cutting everything up and telling the reader to just enjoy the ride.  It’s a story, stories matter.  There’s the setup for future arcs and the promise that this tangled web is going to be untangled eventually, but for now enjoy the ride because it’s important.

The character of I.M. Foreman is Miles metatextual answer to the Doctor as a character, a runaway from Gallifrey who has quickly used up their regenerations for a good show.  They mean merely to entertain.  Their final life is even female and their place on Dust is one of self-discovery becoming what they need to become, who they need to be to serve the frame story.  Gallifrey is going to be destroyed one of these days, restored, and destroyed again because of some enemy and Foreman won’t be there, but perhaps they can save it.  From that description everything from Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the Doctor to stories like Hell Bent, The Timeless Children, and Death in Heaven have their roots here which is odd.  It’s not like Miles was a fan of the revival, but he’s been unintentionally pulling the strings all along.  Like the Eighth Doctor here, he just doesn’t seem to know that’s what’s happening with him.

The Eighth Doctor here is broken.  Sam leaves him and Fitz suffers a terrible fate at the hands of Faction Paradox, while Compassion begins to live up to her name while being forced into the role of companion.  Sarah Jane sees what he has become, and he turns his back on her.  He is a pawn in some cosmic game of creating interference for brainwashing purposes.  The geek is eating everything up and there really isn’t much that is bringing everything back.  Spaceships made of bone provide some of the visceral imagery found in this book’s pages while the story finds its way to an unsettling conclusion.  It goes beyond the pulpy fiction of most Doctor Who and into something greater.  Miles is writing something that he never intended to return to, he was saying goodbye to something he loved while leaving his mark.  It’s something that I think needs to be read to be fully understood.  While Shock Tactic took over 1,000 words to discuss, this one doesn’t need nearly as many, it’s cutting the fact and setting up the Doctor as damaged with a clone and a construct as companions leaving Sam in some sort of happiness, something that the VNAs would never do.  It leaves you thinking and perhaps that’s what the best works can do.  10/10.