 |  |  |
 | Reviews for Strange England |
|
| | |
There is 1 review so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 8 September 2024 |
|
| Rating: |   6 |
Simon Messingham's first novel is not his best. I have read others that I thought were really quite good, especially Tomb of Valdemar and The Indestructible Man. Strange England lacks the plotting and strong characterization of those novels. It is another of the bubble universe or mental landscape stories that the Virgin Doctor Who book editors seem to like. The TARDIS plops down our crew in a landscape that looks like a typical 19th-century country estate. However, the landscape and people in it are "not right" in peculiar ways. The presence of our TARDIS crew leads to a wave of violent attacks by giant insects, killer fur babies, and various hybrid creatures. Ace gets kicked into the "real world" near the house at the center of the fake world, the connecting incident being a fire that burned down the house. This real world, though, is just as pointlessly nasty and violent as the virtual one, and virtual beings in the "real" world still have both a presence and an effect. So Messingham does not have it quite clear enough what is virtual and what is real. Then, there is the violence. This novel has heaps and heaps of violence, described in graphic detail that goes on and on. It seems to be there mostly as filler, which is another disturbing quality of the book. That is, there is no reason for much of the violence in terms of plot. It seems to be there because Messingham couldn't think of something else for the characters to do. Additionally, the plot device, the key that opens the explanation, does not require that so much of the action be this violent. It could all have been handled another, cleverer, way. A last problem for me is Messingham's characterization of Doctor 7. This Doctor just hangs around "thinking" and letting everyone else get into trouble. His dialogue just did not, to me, sound like Doctor 7. All that aside, there are some very interesting bits in this novel, some ideas that could have born sweeter fruit.
