Past Doctor Adventures #8 --- "Eye of Heaven" by Jim Mortimore
Jim Mortimore is an author I am more intrigued by than enamoured by. Prior to reading this book, the two works by him I had indulged in had been the audio story The Natural History of Fear and the short story From Eternity, both of I which I found relied more on concept than telling a cohesive story, tripping over themselves in an attempt to impress the consumer with philosophical ramblings. Eye of Heaven, I am pleased to say, is not the same. A character piece first and foremost, Eye of Heaven does leaps and bounds for Four and Leela, two characters from an era of TV that had very little in way of characterisation, something this novel aims to fix.
Thirty years ago, Horace Stockwood abandoned his best friend on the island of Rapa Nui, a stolen artefact in hand. From the clifftops, great statues watched him leave. Now, funded by two mysterious strangers - an extravagant man in a scarf and a savage woman - he returns to Rapa Nui to find a plan centuries in the making unfolding.
(CONTAINS SPOILERS)
As I said before, this book is mainly a character piece. Written primarily in first person - and primarily from Leela's perspective - Mortimore uses ridiculously well written trains of thought to develop his characters, which gives this book a brilliant cast, who we all see inside the heads of at different times. In particular, the mournful and grief-stricken Stockwood is strangely compelling for a one off appearance, his complex and spiral of self hatred for his mistake constantly and believably ways on him throughout the novel. However, it's the Doctor and especially Leela who get the best work here. Four is written pitch perfectly in the book: enigmatic, brilliant, utterly alien but with this humorous, distinctly human undertone that grounds him, exemplifying every single character beat that makes him my favourite incarnation of the Doctor. However, he takes a backseat role in this novel to Leela, who is very much our main character this time around with a majority of chapters getting carried out from her point of view. I haven't seen many of her TV appearances, but I think this book alone has turned her into one of my favourite companions. This is early Leela, and the whole reason her and the Doctor are on Earth is to allow Leela to become used to modern society (even if they are only in the 19th century). Seeing Leela diligently but clumsily stumble her way through life in the 1800s, as a shockingly endearing friendship with Stockwood forms, is joyous to read and, along with the fantastic flashbacks to Leela's childhood, cements her as conceptually deep and interesting.
Besides the fantastic stuff with the characters, this book's main draw in has to be its massively unique structure because hell will freeze over before Mortimore can write something normally. Every chapter here is out of order, flipping between different points in the narrative and this, whilst making Eye of Heaven something truly special, both helps and harms the book. The first half nails this concept, the chapters flicking back and forth between the voyage to Rapa Nui and the build up to it; we'll see things in the future we won't quite understand before going back and finding the story all fitting together, which is how a non-linear storyline should work and it does here. Unfortunately, Mortimore then decides to add even more plot threads into the mix, jumping even further into the future later on and ends up just spoiling his own book. For instance, there's this great sequence where Leela and a character called Royston find themselves stranded at sea with only a dying blue whale keeping them afloat. It's a little far-fetched but its tense as all hell and I was on the edge of my seat reading it. Unfortunately, before it can conclude, we flash forward without warning and find Leela and Royston safe and well, spoiling its own plot thread (which doesn't even resolve anyway, we're just told in dialogue how they got out of this seemingly impossible situation. They escaped because luck by the way).
It's in the second half, where this structure issue occurs, where the book also mainly faulters. Whilst the first half is a moderately paced voyage across the ocean that takes time to develop its plot and characters, the second half suddenly finds itself with too many ideas to offload and so tries to fit them all into a space that really needed to be longer to accommodate its concepts. On one hand, you have a plot where Leela defends Rapa Nui from Peruvian slavers in a number of (admittedly poorly written) action sequences and on the other hand you have the unfortunately rushed exploration of what would've otherwise been a fascinating alien landscape, where the origins of the Moai are revealed, through an overly long expository monologue from the Doctor in the last few chapters however, leaving no time for the reveal to actually tie into the story. Honestly, this books main focus is a Gulliver's Travels style voyage across the ocean with, though despicably written, miscellaneous pirates as the main antagonists, that is besides the character of Richards who's part to play in the book was shockingly small considering she's considered its primary villain. It's really unfortunate these last few chapters try to cram what should've been a majority of the book into themselves because it ruins a number of genuinely great ideas from Mortimore that worked really well on paper.
Eye of Heaven is a truly unique book, from its structure to characters, presenting itself unlike a majority of Doctor Who novels out there. However, it manages to shoot itself in the foot on more than one occasion trying to conform to this idiosyncratic structure, which begins to only harm itself when taken too far. Mortimore remains an interesting writer to me, not exactly exemplary or somebody to be held in the highest echelons of Doctor Who writers, but his works won't disappoint creatively and Eye of Heaven is no exception.
8/10
Pros:
+ Does leaps and bounds for the character of Leela, writing her to be a truly standout and different companion
+ Four is written to utter perfection as the distillation of the character's best qualities
+ Has an especially strong side cast, with Stockwood in particular impressing
+ Written incredibly uniquely, with a structure that makes the whole book very memorable
+ Brimming with some fantastic concepts
+ The flashbacks to Leela's childhood are beautifully written
+ The Peruvian slavers and their leader - DaBraisse - are despicable antagonists
Cons:
- Causes its story to become convoluted and messy when attempting too complicated a structure
- Second half is a noticeable step down in quality
- For somebody who is meant to be a major antagonist, Richards is a really ineffectual character
- Crams too much of its story into the final few pages, giving it an incredibly rushed and anticlimactic ending
- Action sequences are rather clunkily written
