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JULY 2010

Gary Russell has been writing Who for something like twenty years now. Any-one would think that he’d be running low on ideas. Not a bit of it. The Glamour Chase is full of intriguing concepts, some of them pretty bizarre.

The blurb is surprisingly misleading; although everything mentioned happens in the book, the description leads one to expect some kind of time-altering threat to history. In fact, this story involves the Earth being caught up in a feud between two alien species - the peaceful Weave, and the warlike Tahnn. The Tahnn are fairly dull - your usual storm trooper-style invasion force, picking fights across the Galaxy. The Weave are rather more interesting - a civilisation of shapeshifters made of wool. Yes - you read that right. Although there’s an obligatory bit of technobabble to make it clear that it isn’t actually wool, but some complex cellular web that looks like wool, for all intents and purposes the Weave are a race of fairytale creatures who can magically knit themselves into different shapes. They’re unusual in other ways too - they’re interlinked, with each other and their spacecraft, and they have numbers instead of names. Even this is given a little twist, as the numbers don’t follow an ordinal pattern, but the intrinsic pattern of nature known as the Fibonacci Sequence. These peculiar details give the Weave the feel of something far more alien than the usual run-of-the-mill spacemen.

It’s 1936. With the Weave ship buried underneath a village, and boisterous, jolly spiffing archaeologist Enola Porter (the sort of character who might appear in a PG Wodehouse story) is about to dig it up. So there’s a hint of peril to the timeline on the face of it, as surely the discovery of alien life in 1936 would have terrible consequences for established history. In the event, this is neatly brushed aside, as the focus here is more on the characters than the plot-driven. 6011, the Weave girl who lost the Doctor so very long ago. Oliver Marks, so terribly affected by the merciless attack of the Tahnn. Old John, who turns out to be far older than anyone could have realised. Most of the characters could have benefited from a more in-depth examination, but the length of the novel precludes that. Nonetheless, they’re all affecting, and are linked by the disruption to their lives caused by the ongoing feud between Weave and Tahnn. What the story is really about is the affect of war on the lives of everyday folk, exploring this through some of the most peculiar of events.

The regulars are each well-portrayed. Amy gets abducted, while the Doctor goes around being terribly Doctorish. It’s Rory who comes off best here though, his character being explored in greater depth than in any other novel to date. We get an inkling of how and why he became a nurse, the true depth of his feelings for Amy and his respect for the Doctor, and we match the Doctor’s growing appreciation of him. And quite right too, as we, from our post-Big Bang viewpoint know that he’s the unsung hero of Series 5. It’s a fine example of the way this book focuses on the importance of good characterisation. All that stuff with the reality-altering Glamour, the magical recombination of the Weave and the monstrous nature of the Tahnn’s secret weapon are fun and intriguing. Yet it’s in the quiet moments where we see Rory’s compassion for those suffering that this novel really succeeds.