Book review: Walking To Babylon, by Kate Orman

[elfs]

Oh, good grief. Fifteen months ago, fallenpegasus bought me a copy of Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman, a sequel of sorts to Ben Aaronovich's Doctor Who novel The Also People, which is sometimes regarded as the finest Culture novel ever written by someone other than Iain M. Banks. I've finally gotten around to reading it.

It is actually a very good novel. Ms. Orman has an strong grasp of plot, the novel proceeds along at a good pace and the complications are fit for the circumstances. She has excellent characterizations; I think she got Bernice down much better than Paul Cornell, who wrote the much less cleanly imagined Oh No It Isn't. There are moments in the book where she really has a grip on a character's emotions and the tension crackles along. The relationship between Beni and John Lafayette is just awesome, and when the inevitable love scene wanders into the book she writes with that kind of deft and delightful "I don't have to tell you everything to make this work" touch that I, and too many contemporary writers, are just too damned clumsy to make happen.

The premise of the book is straightforward: Beni is summoned back to the Worldsphere, the Dyson sphere in which live The People, a collection of billions of individuals all hiding out from the rest of the universe, living in an AI-mediated utopia, all under the watchful eye of a prime AI who calls itself God and manifests itself to other people as a WalMart ikon. Someone on the sphere has broken the treaty with the timelords and created an interdimensional gateway to ancient Babylon. Beni is an archeologist and a former Doctor's companion and is therefore best equipped to find whoever it was and fetch them back.

If Ms. Orman has a singular problem, it is that she can't pick a point of view and stick with it. Although she signals the transitions clearly, there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for her constant shifts from Beni in the first person to John in the third to some bystander observer nearby. This isn't the "three points of view" technique of David Weber to illustrate a battle, or the "two voices" strategy of romance novels to show a relationship. It seems that she simply picked whatever point of view she thought she could get away with. It's a workable technique, but here it feels choppy. The book is speedy reading and the shifts seem to come fast but not light. But that's my only real complaint. The story's fun.

There's a weird disconnect that's not the author's fault: Beni belongs to Virgin Publishing, but Dr. Who belongs to the BBC, and the two parted ways a while ago. Somehow, Ms. Orman has managed to write a book in which a companion to The Doctor visits a world in cold war conflict with The Timelords and hangs out at (and with) a house that last hosted The Doctor and several companions-- without ever once mentioning The Doctor, Timelords, The Tardis, or any other BBC trademark. It's quite remarkable how well she pulls this off.

As for The People, Ms. Orman once said to me that she had only read The Also People and was unaware that she was trafficking in goods that, as Mr. Aaronvich puts it, "he got off the back of a lorry." She does a great job of handling those goods of dubious provenance. God and the Worldsphere's populace are in full swing when they're the subject of a chapter. There's a little less detail in places, but when she puts her mind to it Ms. Orman can make a world as wacky as anything Ben or Iain writes. Her description of the Freak Accidents Interest Group is a moment of strong clarity, and her insight into what's wrong with The People, and her so much stronger handling of that insight, make Walking to Babylon a worthy companion to other Culture novels on your bookshelf. Or your Dr. Who bookshelf. Or maybe just your bookshelf, just because.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In this case the book will shift from a third-person telling of the story to a (clearly marked) "Extract from the memoirs of Bernice Summerfield." There are times when it feels like Ms. Orman makes the shift just because she couldn't figure out quite how to make the story work from the POV she was working with, so she shifts to the new one, then back out because she needs to tell the reader about something that's happening outside of Beni's POV, or about some omniscient narration viewpoint that wouldn't work from Beni's POV, and then back again.

It's not a terrible flaw, until the end. There's a two page section where Beni literally intervenes to announce that she is the narrator of the whole story and tells you, "I want to quote from my memoirs exactly as I wrote them because I think it captures how I was feeling that morning." It's an awkward writerism moment, especially since, unlike ever other "extract," this one is entirely italicized.

It's a good first book, and it's a bit like looking at a newly graduated design and illustration student's portfolio: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, no settled style quite yet. Orman knows her SF, at any rate: the "how the war will progress" prologue reads right up there with Banks' "how the AI escaped" scene from Consider Phlebas for conviction without revealing too much handwavery.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Embarrassingly, it was my seventh book, I think. :-) I blame 80s TV for ingraining in me the bad habit of random, rapid POV shifts - I'm basically reproducing the style of "Doctor Who" at the time, and it doesn't actually work that well on the box, let alone the page!