Review: S2 Torchwood Novels
I think the degree to which I'm obsessed with this show is reflected in the fact that I bought tie-in novels for the first time since I was a teenager. Since I hadn't heard any good reviews for the first three novels, I only purchased Something in the Water by Trevor Baxendale, Twilight Streets by Gary Russell and Trace Memory by David Llewellyn.
These reviews contain spoilers for all three novels, all of TW S2, and generic spoilers for DW S4.
It was pretty clear that the writers had all been told to incorporate certain ships into these novels: all three are pretty strong on Tosh/Owen, and both Twlight Streets and Trace Memory have Jack/Ianto, while Something in the Water seems to have a bit of Jack/Gwen, but not too much. I have the impression that both Llewwellyn and Baxendale had seen scripts up to either To the Last Man-- in both of their novels, the Tosh/Owen interactions are much more like the sweeter tension between them in episodes 2.01-2.03, rather than being marked by the bastard!Owen that emerges in Meat. Gary Russell, as everyone knows by now, had clearly read all the scripts up to 2.13, and so we get a more nuanced view of Tosh/Owen. All three of the novels also feature at least one past lover of Jack's, which is actually not something we see that often in the show, and two of them are pretty clearly set up as parallels to Ianto in some way.
As you'd expect with tie-in novels, the standard of writing varies between crap and decently mediocre, although it's pretty obvious that each of the writers could probably do a far better job if given more time, and if they didn't have to incorporate certain elements pertaining to the series as a whole.
Something in the Water
I thought that the premise of this novel could have made a fairly decent episode, but overall it falls a little flat. Baxendale usually gets the character voices right, but he does so by taking a trademark feature of the character's voice and over-using it, without giving us any deeper characterisation. We get lots of sarcastic!Ianto, and flirty!Jack, but not much to really hint at what motivates them. There isn't really any nuance in how Jack interacts with different members of his team-- he flirts with Owen, and Gwen, and a little bit with Ianto. And when a former lover of Jack's gets killed he doesn't seem to be particularly upset over it: not that we need complete emo wangsting, but it does seem a little out of character for Jack not to be upset at all. There are also hints that Tosh and Gwen have a closer friendship than is portrayed on the actual show-- I actually wish that they were portrayed as better friends on the show, but as it is, it felt a little forced.
It's not all bad though-- I like I said, the premise is actually pretty decent: that a grindylow/water-harpy type creature has come through the Rift (actually, it's like an amalgam of every nasty creature from Professor Lupin's Defense Against the Dark Arts class), and is trying to incubate its young in the throats of unsuspecting humans, resulting in an epidemic of what everyone thinks is flu. For those of us who have been watching Doctor Who this season, we have another species who is trying to take over the earth because their planet has been "lost"-- I suspect that this is probably intentional.
As you'd expect with Torchwood there are some rather cracky plotholes. An example of the first-- in an early scene, Tosh and Gwen are sitting in a diner, mucking about singing Torchwood version of the Ghostbusters theme (I wonder if this is a shout-out to Army of Ghosts?), which includes them yelling out the word "TORCHWOOD" at the top of their lungs. Then when an old guy approaches them two minutes later and says "I know you're from Torchwood" they're all "OMG, how do you know about Torchwood; we're the most super-sekrit organisation evah!" But of course it turns out that he didn't know because they were shouting it out for the whole world to hear; he knows because he was shagging Jack fifty years ago.
Overall, I think I'd give this novel two stars out of five-- It's a decent idea, but it doesn't quite get there.
The Twilight Streets
This was the novel that I was most looking forward to reading, due to other reviews that I'd read, but I have to confess that it fell a bit flat for me.
The premise of this novel is that there is an ongoing Manichean battle between the Light and the Dark, and that when Jack got rid of Abaddon, he screwed up the balance between them. Abaddon, according to our old friend Bilis Manger, was actually like some sort of pest-control working on the side of Light, and now that he's gone, the Dark is getting stronger. This is actually kind of cool-- the whole Manichean thing is part of old-school Whoniverse lore, after all (see The Key to Time), but this makes it a whole lot more complicated, because it screws with the assumption that Light easily corresponds to Good, while Dark corresponds to Evil. There is the suggestion that Bilis is able to travel through time because he made some sort of Faustian pact, which resulted in him becoming some sort of servant of the Light-- it's not mentioned explicitly, but it brings to mind the role of Lucifer as the bringer of Light.
Anyway, Jack screwed up that balance between Light and Dark, and as a result Bilis has punished him throughout time. He killed Jack's lover from the 1950s (who appears to be something of a Ianto-clone), and he's basically locked Jack out of a certain section of Cardiff (Butetown) for a hundred years or so. Throughout the novel, Bilis takes the rest of the Torchwood team prisoner in Butetown, and inside their own minds, where they live through an alternate version of the future, in which Jack is held prisoner, so that his life-energy can be used to control the Rift, Tosh becomes a latter-day Yvonne Hartman, Owen becomes some sort of Darth Vader figure (but with less heavy-breathing), Gwen kind of goes along with it, and Ianto and Rhys form a resistance movement (and I have to admit, that last part is kind of cool). Jack has to enlist the help of Idris Hopper (the secreatary from Boom Town), who apparently has some sort of screwed up crush on Jack; Idris randomly snogs him, and later sends one of his female underlings to do the same thing, but it just feels kind of pasted-on. I don't mind Jack snogging people other than Ianto, but it just felt too heavy-handed.
I think a lot of people liked it because the resolution of the story hinges on the feelings that Jack and Ianto have for each other, and while this is true, I felt that the actual interactions between the two of them felt a bit stilted. I normally don't like the adage of "show, don't tell", because all writing is about "telling" on some level, but it really applies to this book. One line that I've seen squeed over quite a bit is "His [Ianto's] love for Jack had brought him back", but there wasn't actually that much in the book that made me feel that there was something between them. There's also the infamous "Abba" conversation, in which Gwen attempts to get Ianto to discuss his sexuality with her. I suspect that Gwen-haters will like this one, because it involves Gwen asking Ianto all these really personal questions at a really inappropriate time, and ends with Ianto telling her to STFU because she doesn't know anything about him really. I'm not a Gwen-hater though (and I actually like the idea that Ianto and Gwen are actually pretty good friends), so to me it just seems a bit out of place. Furthermore, the scene in which Ianto gets all jealous of Idris just seems a little... petty. It doesn't gel with the way that I see him.
Speaking of characterisation, Russell definitely goes down the path of parallels between Jack and the Doctor. Just look at this:
Jack stared at the people milling around the park. And again, that feeling of pride in humanity hit him. So much wrong with the planet, so much wrong with their lives if they only realised, and yet nothing would stop them. As a people and as individuals, calamity might hit, but they always found a way to bounce back. Twenty-first century humans were great.
Channelling Ten there, Jack? Then, of course, there's the next paragraph:
And somewhere was an ancestor of his. Walking around, unaware that one of the descendents from a colony world 3,000 years into the future was sat in Cathays Park, Cardiff. At least he hoped they were unaware.
I hate to tell you Jack, but unless the inhabitants of the Boeshane Peninsular were incredibly inbred, you've got way more than one ancestor out there right now. In fact, the way that these things work out, just about everyone whose line continues for the next 3000 years is probably your ancestor, which means that odds are you've shagged a number of your own ancestors, and you may well actually be one of your own ancestors, like in that episode of Futurama where Fry sleeps with his own grandmother. Oh, and speaking of that episode, Jack, you might really want to remember the bit where Bender gets stuck and has to spend a thousand years or so buried, waiting for his friends to find him... just sayin'.
As others have mentioned, there are a LOT of references to things that happen later in S2 in this novel, and that is pretty cool. The novel is set sometime between Meat and Reset, but due to the flashes of the future, there are references to things that happen later on. Apparently there actually was an incident with a toaster involving Tosh and Owen, which made me happy and sad at the same time. There are lots of hints about undead!Owen that you wouldn't really pick up on if you hadn't seen Reset, references to things that happen at Gwen's wedding, there's some reference to Cardiff being blown up... etc. I think I would have enjoyed this more, however, if the characterisation had been more believable. I'm actually wondering if this novel had to be significantly re-written due to the fact that they decided at a rather late stage to give the undead storyline to Owen instead of Ianto-- certainly much of it feels very rushed.
I give this novel two and a half stars out of five.
Trace Memory
I actually rather liked this novel-- it's easily the best out of the three, in my opinion. There is still a bit of clunky writing in it, but overall the characterisation is good, and it actually made me feel for the characters.
The premise: Michael, a guy from 1953 (who looks-- surprise, surprise-- a bit like Ianto), turns up in the Hub in a puff of strange radiation from the beginning of time. All of the Torchwood team has encountered him at some point in their past, but Michael's future. Jack is particularly affected, as Michael was (or will be) a lover of his. We get to see snippets of all of the Torchwood team's pasts, which is rather cool. I'd heard that Owen's past contradicted Fragments, but I didn't see it-- I just thought that the Owen snippet was set before he met Katie.
Michael was a dock-worker in 1950s Cardiff when a ball that he and some others were unloading exploded. This ball was full of timey-wimey alternate-potential stuff, and as a result, Michael is now being bounced around through the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century, somehow tied to the current Torchwood team. He's also being chased by the the Vondrax, a species from the beginning of time who want to get rid of Michael due to all the dangerous alternative-world-wibbly-wobbly potential that he's absorbed. They are very Doctor Who-ish, which I quite like. Much of the narrative focuses on what happens when Jack meets Michael in the 1960s-- I won't go into it too much, because this is actually very well written, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I'll just say that you get a great sense of how lonely Jack is throughout the twentieth century, which ties into why his twenty-first century team is so important to him. Everything that we learn about Jack in this book fits in really well with the Jack we see in Torchwood.
The Jack/Ianto interactions in this book were easily the best of the three. They aren't that extensive (the book focuses more on the relationship between Jack and Michael, which should also be enough to warm the cockles of a slashy fangirl's/boy's heart), but the interaction that do occur suggest that Jack and Ianto are comfortable with each other, and that they get each other. They aren't constantly lovey-dovey or anything, but they genuinely care about each other, and it's more than just shagging. The key scene occurs when Ianto asks Jack if he should be jealous of Michael, but then tells Jack to go to him, and squeezes his hand on the way out. The "Should I be jealous?" question implies that Ianto does have some right to be jealous, but the key thing here is that he's NOT actually jealous (unlike in The Twilight Streets where he gets all catty)-- he understands why Jack feels the way he does, and he lets him do it. To me, this says FAR more than any "his love for Jack had brought him back" ever could.
That's exactly how I like my Janto.
This book gets three stars out of five from me, which, honestly, is about as much as I think that any tie-in novel can hope for.
These reviews contain spoilers for all three novels, all of TW S2, and generic spoilers for DW S4.
It was pretty clear that the writers had all been told to incorporate certain ships into these novels: all three are pretty strong on Tosh/Owen, and both Twlight Streets and Trace Memory have Jack/Ianto, while Something in the Water seems to have a bit of Jack/Gwen, but not too much. I have the impression that both Llewwellyn and Baxendale had seen scripts up to either To the Last Man-- in both of their novels, the Tosh/Owen interactions are much more like the sweeter tension between them in episodes 2.01-2.03, rather than being marked by the bastard!Owen that emerges in Meat. Gary Russell, as everyone knows by now, had clearly read all the scripts up to 2.13, and so we get a more nuanced view of Tosh/Owen. All three of the novels also feature at least one past lover of Jack's, which is actually not something we see that often in the show, and two of them are pretty clearly set up as parallels to Ianto in some way.
As you'd expect with tie-in novels, the standard of writing varies between crap and decently mediocre, although it's pretty obvious that each of the writers could probably do a far better job if given more time, and if they didn't have to incorporate certain elements pertaining to the series as a whole.
Something in the Water
I thought that the premise of this novel could have made a fairly decent episode, but overall it falls a little flat. Baxendale usually gets the character voices right, but he does so by taking a trademark feature of the character's voice and over-using it, without giving us any deeper characterisation. We get lots of sarcastic!Ianto, and flirty!Jack, but not much to really hint at what motivates them. There isn't really any nuance in how Jack interacts with different members of his team-- he flirts with Owen, and Gwen, and a little bit with Ianto. And when a former lover of Jack's gets killed he doesn't seem to be particularly upset over it: not that we need complete emo wangsting, but it does seem a little out of character for Jack not to be upset at all. There are also hints that Tosh and Gwen have a closer friendship than is portrayed on the actual show-- I actually wish that they were portrayed as better friends on the show, but as it is, it felt a little forced.
It's not all bad though-- I like I said, the premise is actually pretty decent: that a grindylow/water-harpy type creature has come through the Rift (actually, it's like an amalgam of every nasty creature from Professor Lupin's Defense Against the Dark Arts class), and is trying to incubate its young in the throats of unsuspecting humans, resulting in an epidemic of what everyone thinks is flu. For those of us who have been watching Doctor Who this season, we have another species who is trying to take over the earth because their planet has been "lost"-- I suspect that this is probably intentional.
As you'd expect with Torchwood there are some rather cracky plotholes. An example of the first-- in an early scene, Tosh and Gwen are sitting in a diner, mucking about singing Torchwood version of the Ghostbusters theme (I wonder if this is a shout-out to Army of Ghosts?), which includes them yelling out the word "TORCHWOOD" at the top of their lungs. Then when an old guy approaches them two minutes later and says "I know you're from Torchwood" they're all "OMG, how do you know about Torchwood; we're the most super-sekrit organisation evah!" But of course it turns out that he didn't know because they were shouting it out for the whole world to hear; he knows because he was shagging Jack fifty years ago.
Overall, I think I'd give this novel two stars out of five-- It's a decent idea, but it doesn't quite get there.
The Twilight Streets
This was the novel that I was most looking forward to reading, due to other reviews that I'd read, but I have to confess that it fell a bit flat for me.
The premise of this novel is that there is an ongoing Manichean battle between the Light and the Dark, and that when Jack got rid of Abaddon, he screwed up the balance between them. Abaddon, according to our old friend Bilis Manger, was actually like some sort of pest-control working on the side of Light, and now that he's gone, the Dark is getting stronger. This is actually kind of cool-- the whole Manichean thing is part of old-school Whoniverse lore, after all (see The Key to Time), but this makes it a whole lot more complicated, because it screws with the assumption that Light easily corresponds to Good, while Dark corresponds to Evil. There is the suggestion that Bilis is able to travel through time because he made some sort of Faustian pact, which resulted in him becoming some sort of servant of the Light-- it's not mentioned explicitly, but it brings to mind the role of Lucifer as the bringer of Light.
Anyway, Jack screwed up that balance between Light and Dark, and as a result Bilis has punished him throughout time. He killed Jack's lover from the 1950s (who appears to be something of a Ianto-clone), and he's basically locked Jack out of a certain section of Cardiff (Butetown) for a hundred years or so. Throughout the novel, Bilis takes the rest of the Torchwood team prisoner in Butetown, and inside their own minds, where they live through an alternate version of the future, in which Jack is held prisoner, so that his life-energy can be used to control the Rift, Tosh becomes a latter-day Yvonne Hartman, Owen becomes some sort of Darth Vader figure (but with less heavy-breathing), Gwen kind of goes along with it, and Ianto and Rhys form a resistance movement (and I have to admit, that last part is kind of cool). Jack has to enlist the help of Idris Hopper (the secreatary from Boom Town), who apparently has some sort of screwed up crush on Jack; Idris randomly snogs him, and later sends one of his female underlings to do the same thing, but it just feels kind of pasted-on. I don't mind Jack snogging people other than Ianto, but it just felt too heavy-handed.
I think a lot of people liked it because the resolution of the story hinges on the feelings that Jack and Ianto have for each other, and while this is true, I felt that the actual interactions between the two of them felt a bit stilted. I normally don't like the adage of "show, don't tell", because all writing is about "telling" on some level, but it really applies to this book. One line that I've seen squeed over quite a bit is "His [Ianto's] love for Jack had brought him back", but there wasn't actually that much in the book that made me feel that there was something between them. There's also the infamous "Abba" conversation, in which Gwen attempts to get Ianto to discuss his sexuality with her. I suspect that Gwen-haters will like this one, because it involves Gwen asking Ianto all these really personal questions at a really inappropriate time, and ends with Ianto telling her to STFU because she doesn't know anything about him really. I'm not a Gwen-hater though (and I actually like the idea that Ianto and Gwen are actually pretty good friends), so to me it just seems a bit out of place. Furthermore, the scene in which Ianto gets all jealous of Idris just seems a little... petty. It doesn't gel with the way that I see him.
Speaking of characterisation, Russell definitely goes down the path of parallels between Jack and the Doctor. Just look at this:
Jack stared at the people milling around the park. And again, that feeling of pride in humanity hit him. So much wrong with the planet, so much wrong with their lives if they only realised, and yet nothing would stop them. As a people and as individuals, calamity might hit, but they always found a way to bounce back. Twenty-first century humans were great.
Channelling Ten there, Jack? Then, of course, there's the next paragraph:
And somewhere was an ancestor of his. Walking around, unaware that one of the descendents from a colony world 3,000 years into the future was sat in Cathays Park, Cardiff. At least he hoped they were unaware.
I hate to tell you Jack, but unless the inhabitants of the Boeshane Peninsular were incredibly inbred, you've got way more than one ancestor out there right now. In fact, the way that these things work out, just about everyone whose line continues for the next 3000 years is probably your ancestor, which means that odds are you've shagged a number of your own ancestors, and you may well actually be one of your own ancestors, like in that episode of Futurama where Fry sleeps with his own grandmother. Oh, and speaking of that episode, Jack, you might really want to remember the bit where Bender gets stuck and has to spend a thousand years or so buried, waiting for his friends to find him... just sayin'.
As others have mentioned, there are a LOT of references to things that happen later in S2 in this novel, and that is pretty cool. The novel is set sometime between Meat and Reset, but due to the flashes of the future, there are references to things that happen later on. Apparently there actually was an incident with a toaster involving Tosh and Owen, which made me happy and sad at the same time. There are lots of hints about undead!Owen that you wouldn't really pick up on if you hadn't seen Reset, references to things that happen at Gwen's wedding, there's some reference to Cardiff being blown up... etc. I think I would have enjoyed this more, however, if the characterisation had been more believable. I'm actually wondering if this novel had to be significantly re-written due to the fact that they decided at a rather late stage to give the undead storyline to Owen instead of Ianto-- certainly much of it feels very rushed.
I give this novel two and a half stars out of five.
Trace Memory
I actually rather liked this novel-- it's easily the best out of the three, in my opinion. There is still a bit of clunky writing in it, but overall the characterisation is good, and it actually made me feel for the characters.
The premise: Michael, a guy from 1953 (who looks-- surprise, surprise-- a bit like Ianto), turns up in the Hub in a puff of strange radiation from the beginning of time. All of the Torchwood team has encountered him at some point in their past, but Michael's future. Jack is particularly affected, as Michael was (or will be) a lover of his. We get to see snippets of all of the Torchwood team's pasts, which is rather cool. I'd heard that Owen's past contradicted Fragments, but I didn't see it-- I just thought that the Owen snippet was set before he met Katie.
Michael was a dock-worker in 1950s Cardiff when a ball that he and some others were unloading exploded. This ball was full of timey-wimey alternate-potential stuff, and as a result, Michael is now being bounced around through the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century, somehow tied to the current Torchwood team. He's also being chased by the the Vondrax, a species from the beginning of time who want to get rid of Michael due to all the dangerous alternative-world-wibbly-wobbly potential that he's absorbed. They are very Doctor Who-ish, which I quite like. Much of the narrative focuses on what happens when Jack meets Michael in the 1960s-- I won't go into it too much, because this is actually very well written, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone. I'll just say that you get a great sense of how lonely Jack is throughout the twentieth century, which ties into why his twenty-first century team is so important to him. Everything that we learn about Jack in this book fits in really well with the Jack we see in Torchwood.
The Jack/Ianto interactions in this book were easily the best of the three. They aren't that extensive (the book focuses more on the relationship between Jack and Michael, which should also be enough to warm the cockles of a slashy fangirl's/boy's heart), but the interaction that do occur suggest that Jack and Ianto are comfortable with each other, and that they get each other. They aren't constantly lovey-dovey or anything, but they genuinely care about each other, and it's more than just shagging. The key scene occurs when Ianto asks Jack if he should be jealous of Michael, but then tells Jack to go to him, and squeezes his hand on the way out. The "Should I be jealous?" question implies that Ianto does have some right to be jealous, but the key thing here is that he's NOT actually jealous (unlike in The Twilight Streets where he gets all catty)-- he understands why Jack feels the way he does, and he lets him do it. To me, this says FAR more than any "his love for Jack had brought him back" ever could.
That's exactly how I like my Janto.
This book gets three stars out of five from me, which, honestly, is about as much as I think that any tie-in novel can hope for.