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Saturday, May 25, 2024

Trading Futures by: Lance Parkin

 

When most people draw parallels between Doctor Who and the James Bond franchise it is the Jon Pertwee era’s first three years or so, being mostly Earthbound with a sense of working with the government.  Beginning around 2013, the serial The Enemy of the World was also included in this discussion due to its world spanning scale and focus on espionage and action.  It’s specifically a tone and stylistic flair similar to the James Bond films over the books by Ian Fleming and their drier, more methodical style.  While the BBC Books have often taken direct inspiration from past eras of Doctor Who in terms of the stories that they commission to tell, it was actually quite a surprise to come upon Trading Futures, an Eighth Doctor Adventure that is directly Lance Parkin’s tribute to James Bond and what Doctor Who largely brought from it.  There are international organizations, several female characters with utterly ridiculous names, and a plot that at almost every turn provides a twist and turn.  Heck, the novel even opens with a cold open sequence that leads into what would be the gun barrel sequence of a Bond film.  Surprisingly, especially from what I usually expect from Parkin, Trading Futures is a light affair, dealing with a time travel service that is marketed primarily towards the general public, wrapped up in several prophecies of doom, and dealing with world governments that need to be saved.  Okay, that sounds like it could be a dark, political thriller, but Lance Parkin’s prose is incredibly light and there’s this general sense of urgency throughout that makes it an incredibly engaging read.  It’s probably helping that despite references to their previous adventures, the four remaining elementals, and Sabbath, Trading Futures is actually pretty friendly to the general reader.

 

Anji’s plotline is perhaps the one with the most emotional weight, deciding that she can use Baskerville’s services to go back in time and stopping Dave from dying way back in Escape Velocity.  There’s been a lot of focus recently on Anji’s grief, especially in Anachrophobia and Hope, but Trading Futures is one of those novels that actively feels as if it punishes Anji for it.  Baskerville, it is revealed, is a con artist at his heart, not actually having the ability to transport people back in time and the prophecies are all created by Baskerville and the fulfilment of the fourth is what the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji have to divert.  There ais also a fleet of Onihr surrounding the Earth that Fitz gets himself mixed up in.  Like Anji’s arc drawing on her grief from Dave, Fitz once again finds himself pretending to be the Doctor, something that even the prose at points acknowledges as a possibility by having several sequences with Fitz without referring to Fitz as Fitz, but just as the Doctor.  The Onihr are relegated to comic relief and feel like Russell T. Davies largely drew on them in designing the Judoon, at least visually.  The idea is that they wish to be the new Time Lords but are completely incompetent, making them largely easy (ish) work for Fitz to deal with.  The Doctor is essentially in the role of James Bond for the novel, and that’s generally one of the weaker aspects of the novel, mainly because the plot keeps putting him in Bond situations and Parkin can’t quite make the commentary on the differences of the Doctor and Bond as respective leading men.  There’s also some of the colonialism and imperialism baked into the Bond formula that Parkin doesn’t really reckon with, there is a character called Malady Chang that Anji impersonates which particularly rubs me the wrong way since Malady is East Asian while Anji is Pakistani.  The entire plot just conflates cultures and it almost seems like Parkin realizes it but doesn’t do anything about it.

 

Overall, Trading Futures is a great little Doctor Who novel that works so well because it’s sending up what is essentially the other British cultural touchstone in the 1960s and 1970s which was getting its own, far more successful reboot in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It does have problems, mainly because author Lance Parkin isn’t really examining enough of the formula he is playing with along with the tropes, but it does make for such a good time.  8/10.

1 comment:

  1. If you enjoy reading fact based espionage thrillers, of which there are only a handful of decent ones, do try reading Bill Fairclough’s Beyond Enkription. It is an enthralling unadulterated fact based autobiographical spy thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots.

    What is interesting is that this book is so different to any other espionage thrillers fact or fiction that I have ever read. It is extraordinarily memorable and unsurprisingly apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why?

    Maybe because the book has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”; maybe because Bill Fairclough (the author) deviously dissects unusual topics, for example, by using real situations relating to how much agents are kept in the dark by their spy-masters and (surprisingly) vice versa; and/or maybe because he has survived literally dozens of death defying experiences including 20 plus attempted murders.

    The action in Beyond Enkription is set in 1974 about a real maverick British accountant who worked in Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) in London, Nassau, Miami and Port au Prince. Initially in 1974 he unwittingly worked for MI5 and MI6 based in London infiltrating an organised crime gang. Later he worked knowingly for the CIA in the Americas. In subsequent books yet to be published (when employed by Citicorp, Barclays, Reuters and others) he continued to work for several intelligence agencies. Fairclough has been justifiably likened to a posh version of Harry Palmer aka Michael Caine in the films based on Len Deighton’s spy novels.

    Beyond Enkription is a must read for espionage cognoscenti. Whatever you do, you must read some of the latest news articles (since August 2021) in TheBurlingtonFiles website before taking the plunge and getting stuck into Beyond Enkription. You’ll soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit. Intriguingly, the articles were released seven or more years after the book was published. TheBurlingtonFiles website itself is well worth a visit and don’t miss the articles about FaireSansDire. The website is a bit like a virtual espionage museum and refreshingly advert free.

    Returning to the intense and electrifying thriller Beyond Enkription, it has had mainly five star reviews so don’t be put off by Chapter 1 if you are squeamish. You can always skip through the squeamish bits and just get the gist of what is going on in the first chapter. Mind you, infiltrating international state sponsored people and body part smuggling mobs isn’t a job for the squeamish! Thereafter don’t skip any of the text or you’ll lose the plots. The book is ever increasingly cerebral albeit pacy and action packed. Indeed, the twists and turns in the interwoven plots kept me guessing beyond the epilogue even on my second reading.

    The characters were wholesome, well-developed and beguiling to the extent that you’ll probably end up loving those you hated ab initio, particularly Sara Burlington. The attention to detail added extra layers of authenticity to the narrative and above all else you can’t escape the realism. Unlike reading most spy thrillers, you will soon realise it actually happened but don’t trust a soul.

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