Walking to Babylon by: Kate Orman

 

With the switch to the Bernice Summerfield novels, the New Adventures lost their ability to do any real time travelling plots inherent in Doctor Who plots.  It becomes interesting when Kate Orman contributes the first time there would be any real time travel elements included in the series as well as being a sequel to Ben Aaronovitch’s The Also People, more so than Ghost Devices was despite featuring the People.  Kate Orman once again looks into the psychology of the main character post-The Dying Days where she has already cut off every last shred of her relationship with Jason Kane, but at this point there is already a lot of both subtext and straight up text that she clearly still loves the man.  This is already the tenth novel in the series and Jason has appeared in several of the other novels, mainly Beyond the Sun and Deadfall, but it is really interesting because Jason is nowhere to be seen in Walking to Babylon.  This doesn’t feel like an oversight on Orman’s part, he is explicitly absent which in retrospect makes it incredibly weird that the audio adaptation brought in Jason Kane but didn’t actually add much for him to do except be part of the People plot which was heavily truncated, existing God, Clarence, and the Worldsphere entirely with a decent amount of the residuals going to creating a plot for Jason as well as changing the motivations for the two main People characters who were included.

 

Walking to Babylon has a brilliant plot about two rogue People finding their way to Ancient Babylon where they are attempting to avert a war, a very specific war that is never named but heavily implied to be a Time War involving the Time Lords.  The interference with the timelines is what permeates this novel as everything builds towards a point where it is revealed that despite these specific People not being responsible for the Path through time, but another People being secretly stoking the war.  One stroke of genius was concluding the novel on the Worldsphere with a denouement involving characters from The Also People and So Vile a Sin appearing to support Benny in what is essentially emotional turmoil.  John Lafayette is a character from the early 20^th century, included here to be a love interest to Benny and the other emotional center of the novel.  John is a reserved Edwardian gentleman who is shoved into an ancient culture who is more sexually liberated with institutionalized sex work and a major supporting character being a religious prostitute.  Orman is brilliant at creating a romance between John and Benny while setting the book in an epistolary format, mainly from publications Benny wrote or her own personal memoirs, with the footnotes representing the many sticky notes which cover passages of Benny’s diary.  We get to see this relationship grow between two people out of time, one very experienced, the other inexperienced.  The sexual repression and liberation of John Lafayette which is paired with the romantic feelings and sexual encounters without being gratuitous.  This is no Timewyrm: Genesys, as Orman addresses a lot of what sex work entails and how it culturally works in Babylonian society.  Orman’s prose is also just beautiful and the book is such a slow burn it makes everything feel real.

 

Overall, Walking to Babylon is a perfect reflection on what the Bernice Summerfield novels have been leading to and how writers have dealt with the production issues of having to write a divorce.  While not the first book to address this fact, this is the one that parses out what Benny feels about Jason without ever needing to have Jason in it.  It’s also such an exploration of history and alien societies.  10/10.