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Tuesday, April 13, 2021

The Banquo Legacy by: Andy Lane and Justin Richards

 

The issue with the run of Eighth Doctor Adventures post-The Shadows of Avalon and before The Ancestor Cell involves an inability to understand how to utilize Compassion in her nature as a human TARDIS.  Coldheart and The Space Age are the most egregious in sidelining her, both giving her absolutely nothing and The Fall of Yquatine putting her through an assault storyline without ever actually resolving what it means.  Her penultimate appearance in the range is The Banquo Legacy a book by future range editor Justin Richards and Virgin New Adventures veteran Andy Lane which could only be accurately described as an unconventional gothic horror mystery adventure.  The format of the novel is told through two separate accounts of supporting characters, “The Record of Inspector Ian Stratford” and “The Account of John Hopkinson”, meaning that the Doctor, Fitz, and Compassion are all sidelined for the first third of the book, not appearing outside of the prologue for sixty pages.  This device allows Lane and Richards to give the reader a good idea of the situation at Banquo Manor, its inhabitants, and the murder investigation already going on.  The Banquo Legacy primarily concerns a series of macabre experiments in group learning and telepathy in mice.  This becomes a gruesome thriller as the head scientist, Richard Harries, is murdered and eventually rises from the grave.  The evocative image of the rat in the skull is really where the murder finds its ending, and is a great representation of what the book is trying to do.  It essentially represents the characters as lab rats with a looming specter of death hanging over them.

 

Ian Stratford arrives at Banquo Manor looking into a missing persons case, something that Scotland Yard has a vested interest in as the experiments have been causing quite a stir.  Stratford’s narration reads almost like a Sherlock Holmes short story, and feels like this is the half of the story contributed by Andy Lane, as he wrote All-Consuming Fire in a similar vein and Young Sherlock Holmes books.  Stratford is the one who actually brings the Doctor and company into the plot and serves as an outsider looking in, a character whose own peaceful outlook in the village surrounding Banquo Manor is crashed down around him while discovering the experiment and the murders.  This is contrasted with the naïve John Hopkinson, who feels more like the primary narrator as he seems to be someone affected by the experiment, although he is certain he hadn’t been to Banquo Manor before his arrival.  He acts cold and clinical and is there in the capacity as a lawyer and is already coming because of a suicide of a mutual friend.    This becomes especially apparent when the Doctor is murdered a little after the halfway point of the novel and there is a wonder if this is actually going to be an end.  It’s this middle of the book where the story falls at least a little flat, not moving quickly as the switches between the two narrators become rapid, chapters taking up less than a page and the pace not actually increasing with the changes in chapters.  The mystery eventually deepens when the plot involving a Time Lord Agent plays into the conclusion, but until then there is a long stretch where things just fall flat.

 

There is this mistrust and naivety with the rest of the characters as the narrators’ own observations of the Doctor, Fitz, and Compassion (or the woman Compassion has overtaken in this story) makes the reader unsure of exactly if this trio can actually be the TARDIS team as we know them.  Seeing the Doctor, Fitz, and Compassion from an outsider’s perspective is something that makes this book unique.  Fitz especially is affected as being someone who on the surface seems incredibly shallow, being unable to keep up his cover story of being German with the Doctor as his boss and not really doing anything to solve the murders.  While this is something that wouldn’t work if every story featuring Fitz, but because it is a one-off here it really works well.  Compassion on the other hand is partially sidelined in the prologue, which made my heart drop as it seemed Richards and Lane were going down the route of Coldheart and The Space Age, but putting her in the body with a supporting character actually makes her appearance great.  This is one where seeing her coldness form the outside is interesting as the emotional nature of the woman she is inhabiting sometimes bleeds through.  There’s also some genuine compassion in Compassion here with the ending of the book for her in particular being dark and harrowing.

 

Overall, The Banquo Legacy does a lot of things correctly, setting up the end of an arc incredibly well, but falling flat in a few places as its own story, especially in the second act where things don’t take any time to move along.  The Doctor’s fake out death is also something that doesn’t work being seen from the outside, especially as the range wasn’t ever going to end with this book.  It’s a good read, but one that needs at least a little patience.  7/10.

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