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Title: Beltempest (Doctor Who Series) by Jim Mortimore ISBN: 0-563-40593-7 Publisher: General Distribution Services Pub. Date: November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Beltempest
Comment: Jim Mortimore again demonstrates his healthy desire to throw large chunks of matter around the Dr Who universe; he did it in the anti-grav environment depicted in the novel Parasite, and in Beltempest he throws a whole solar system into a blender.Moons disintegrating, spaceships falling out of the various skies and breaking apart, planets moving in and out of orbit, even a nice, quiet beach on the TARDIS explodes, just before the TARDIS herself is flung who-knows-where. And it's all caused by Bel, the formerly life sustaining sun of the Belannia system. As a main-sequence star, it shouldn't be doing the cosmic equivalent of winking on and off, thus wreaking apocalyptic havoc on all the various inhabited planets and moons of the hapless system.
The novel goes from the Doctor lying on a beach to suddenly being thrust into the role of saviour for every living being in the danger zone. And he's pretty darn impressive, as a killer-asteroid smiter, a tsunami-stopper, and as a general all-around hero for planetary refugees having trouble getting off planets that are breaking up underneath them. Of course, he can't save everyone, alas. He displays more whimsical humour and spritely wit in this novel than I've seen in a long time, and though it gets a bit much at times--is the Doctor really that insensitive about all the carnage going around him?--the Doctor merely seems to be coping with death in the only way he knows how. I would say, though, that a few of his speeches do seem to go on a bit longer than normal for the Doctor, and a few of his attempts at humour are a bit strained. But, generally, he's very charismatic in this outing.
So things are good here; even Sam has lots to do, just as busy as the Doctor (they both get around a lot in this book, almost at a lunatic rate--one minute we're on Belannia II, then Belannia XII, then Belannia VIII, then some moon somewhere, then--omigosh!--what are these new planets just entering the system?).
The final section of the novel is the most frustrating, because explanations for all the cosmic mayhem get very surreal. Frankly, I'm not sure I grasp everything that happened. But the Doctor suddenly, uh, gives birth, Sam is possibly immortal and having a guilt-trip about some aspect of her past that isn't really her past (brought on by weird messages from an unknowable cosmic entity), planets are alive but in danger of death due to waste material shot into the sun by the Belannians, and a private little war breaks out, adding tragically to the casualties. I'm not sure the problem lies in the hasty nature of the final whirlwind section--the whole book had been pretty breathless and frenetic as far as I'm concerned, and the pace at the extended wrap-up really just seems the same to me--so much as the author's insistence on focusing on philosophical closure, rather than clean, orderly explanations for what's been going on in terms of the plot. My brain says I did get an explanation for all the cosmic death and rebirth, but that is was given to me in rather garbled fashion, mixed in with all the moodiness. Maybe it was so BIG, so cosmic, that I couldn't really grasp it all. Anyway, I come away from Beltempest understanding how Sam, after numerous rebirths and transformations, finally achieved peace at the end of the story. I'm not as clear on why the Belannian solar system finally got sorted out.
Rating: 3
Summary: Great story mostly, but where's the end?
Comment: This book consists of two main sections separated by a short interlude. The first part is one hundred and eighty pages long and the second part is fifty-nine pages long. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that the last section is quite a bit shorter than the first, and this is what kills the story dead. The shorter section is just as important to the story (indeed, it's where most of the major developments occur) but things are skipped over at a ludicrous rate. This culminates at the conclusion where we go from the potential destruction of an entire solar system to the resolution of the story inside two pages without any explanation. We aren't told anything about how the regulars escaped certain death, what the eventual fate of the star system and it's billions of inhabitants are, whether the aliens survived and just what on earth happened to Sam.
This was an extremely frustrating conclusion to the story, as I had been greatly enjoying the first two hundred or so pages. There are some fascinating discussions on religion and the power of a leader. Never do these become overbearing or tiresome. In fact, they were by far my favourite parts of the beginning and middle of the book. I grew impatient during the Doctor sections and the long explanations of the Beltempest star life cycles and wanted to get back to the sections I was enjoying. That said, I thought the Doctor got a very good showing in this book. While he's not given a lot to do, he handles his role with a lot of humour and charm. Jim Mortimer manages to give the Doctor the innocence that we've seen in VAMPIRE SCIENCE and SEEING I without falling into the trap of "the Doctor as a congenial idiot".
This book could really have benefited from a stricter editor. The prose was quite literally all over the place; in some places it's utilitarian, in others it tries to be poetical and in others it's incomprehensible. It's as if Mortimer was having major mood swings while writing this and let whatever whim he was experiencing at the moment dictate the tone of the prose he was currently creating. This would not necessarily be a bad thing, except that it leads to a few areas of incoherence where the reader is left unsure of what actually happened. And I'm not speaking about the author being deliberately ambiguous, I'm talking about confusion over how characters got to certain places, why people were trusting the Doctor without question, where some characters had been inserted into the narrative, etc. I don't mind having to piece together things without help from the author, but I am annoyed when people start following the Doctor around when they actually have more of a reason to stay where they are. Characters and character motivation are not something that feature heavily in this book.
The story contains the same faults as the prose. At times it's brilliant and at other times (such as the aforementioned non-ending) it's missing. I can just imagine in the future an editor standing over Mortimer demanding that he finish writing the chapters he's doing before moving on to the next good idea. "No, Jim, this is a great idea and you already have the first seventy-five percent of it finished. All you have to do is to finish writing the ending and it will be brilliant."
To sum it up, this is a very good book that's let down by some very big flaws. It's odd that a story that feels so rushed is actually about thirty or forty pages shorter than the Doctor Who range average. If Mortimer had taken the time to flesh out some of the good ideas that were present here (and bothered to write an ending), I think BELTEMPEST would stand to be one of the all-time best Doctor Who books. As it exists now, it's a bit of an oddity.
Rating: 4
Summary: A good read.
Comment: A good read, novel in its format. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to other Whovians. Obviously, the vast difference in opinions between myself and the other reviewer show that this novel has something--check it out and decide for yourself.
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