Down by: Lawrence Miles

 

Lawrence Miles is a Doctor Who author with a reputation: he is the one author who BBC Books allowed to go above the 290 page limit that the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures stopped at.  Lawrence Miles writes long books.  Interference is a 600 page book split into two volumes.  So it is no surprise when his first of two Bernice Summerfield novels, Down, is a book which pushes the page-count to the longest Bernice Summerfield book yet, coming in at 311 pages, and one of the general longer ones (if not the longest).  The forward by Miles actually sends readers to his website where there are things that he had to cut from the book and placed just on his website.  This interesting little tidbit is perhaps some of the best description of what Down is, a book which is in desperate need of an editor who will cut things out.  This review isn’t covering the cuts that Miles includes on his website, but just the text that is included in the paperback release.  This is a book that does a lot of things, and with a book that does a lot of things you’d expect it to be a longer book, but the first third of the book is devoted down to setup of the setting and some of the characters without actually giving the reader much of the actual plot.  This is partially due to Lawrence Miles’ tendency to write plots that are obfuscated in mystery and comedy.  The setting here is Tyler’s Folly, which is initially set up as a Dyson sphere (an artificial planet that is hollow), but is revealed to be an actual planet full of people believing in some sort of hollow planet conspiracy theory.  There are also space Nazis who capture Bernice and the reintroduction of the People from The Also People.

 

From that last descriptor of the book, you wouldn’t be wrong in feeling that Lawrence Miles wrote a comedy, because that’s kind of what it is, with Bernice commenting on the artificial supporting cast and being flummoxed by the reappearance of the People which is sort of a twist for her, but not for the reader.  Miles takes cues from Ben Aaronovitch’s previous work and makes it something that Dave Stone would right, published immediately after a great Dave Stone book.  It feels like Down wants to capture that feeling of The Also People, but that book worked so well because it was Ben Aaronovitch firmly in his own style and coming right off Head Games as a reflection of what the VNAs were doing at the time.  With Down, there isn’t that much to actually reflect on as there had only been four books published and not enough of a story arc actually developing.  Miles seems to try and develop a story arc with God returning and the villain being one of the People, !X, and the whole idea of Tyler’s Folly being the pseudo-Satanic version of the Worldsphere, with a program called MEPHISTO who is really behind things.  The pastiche of action movies and few nods to Doctor Who also feel really out of place coming right off Ship of Fools and its murder mystery pastiche, but Miles makes it interesting by not making it an outright comedic parody, but trying to get Benny annoyed.  The whole hollow Earth/Tyler’s Folly is secretly the Garden of Eden/there is a cult that worships Lillith is by design to be annoying, yet somehow a fun type of annoying.  Miles is just making out how conspiracies are something that collapse immediately under any investigation and the interludes where Benny is essentially telling the tale which are a great use of metanarrative.

 

Overall, Down is definitely not the absolute best Benny book, as the previous two had been going on such a high streak, but it is still a very fun time.  It has the big problem of being a grab bag of ideas wrapped up all in one very long package and that is to the book’s detriment, but it does end up reintroducing the People to the narrative and kind of gives us something to look forward to as they are going to play a part in the future, but it’s got a lot of problems that stop it from being one of Miles’ best. 7/10.