Virgin New Adventures #21 - “The Left-Handed Hummingbird” by Kate Orman

Huh? What’s this? I missed a review! Where has my witty and likely genius evaluation of The Dimension Riders gone? Well, I’m afraid it fell into the void. Anyway, with that note out of the way, let’s talk Kate Orman. The books don’t really tend to have specifically celebrated writers like the audios have. Whilst Tim Foley, John Dorney and James Goss are all talked about ad nauseum when it comes to the aural landscape, the literary one has very few. Really, the only big ones people widely tend to get excited about are Paul Cornell and Kate Orman, with maybe Lawrence Miles if you’re looking at the EDAs. With the others already having proven themselves as worthy of the hype, how exactly does Orman hold up on her first ever novel?

The Blue: a latent psychic force that has followed death and destruction for centuries. At its heart is a conspiracy dating back to the Aztecs and one The Doctor is now firmly wrapped up in, especially when it is discovered the connection he has with a fearsome ancient deity.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Truth be told, I have read Vampire Science before but I don’t particularly remember it so really this is my first impression of Kate Orman’s writing style. And what do I think? Well I think this is probably the most unique prose I’ve seen come out of the Doctor Who books yet. Lawrence Miles may be rich on ideas and Paul Cornell may be rich in most everything but Orman has a particular style to her writing that I really dig. It’s fast, witty and smooth as butter, gliding the reader through the story at a comfortable million miles per hour. Easily my biggest takeaway from The Left-Handed Hummingbird is that Kate Orman is an author with a fantastic voice to her and a really breezy way of writing novels.

And that’s not all, she also manages to work in a not insignificant amount of genuinely laugh out loud humour into this book. It’s pretty dark for the most part, dealing with depression, PTSD and the end of the world but very often will be actively hilarious, especially with the running gag of Ace’s never ending gun stache or the fun little subversion of the “it’s bigger on the inside!” moment years before the revival ever did it. It also really interestingly plays with formatting to create tension, with highlights during the various dream sequences and the climax on the Titanic, with a timestamp counting down until the ship sinks. It was a brilliantly immersive technique that truly set The Left-Handed Hummingbird apart from its fellow VNAs.

Past the style, I also found its characters, specifically our main cast, to be excellent. With perhaps the exception of the Doctor, who I found to be a little too brooding, basically every character was on top form but most of all Ace. The VNAs really struggle with writing New Ace, despite her being such a draw for the series, because the authors will look at her brief and go “oh ok, so I’m meant to be edgy” and all maturity goes out the window. Not with Orman however. Orman writes Ace to be a battle-scarred and torn apart woman who can never go back to how she once was, constantly at odds with the Doctor but unable to break herself from him. Benny was also consistently fantastic, although I’m still a little rocky on her as a companion. I struggle to think of her as anything other than just alright at the moment as I really don’t think she’s had a single moment to shine yet, despite having been around for over ten books now.

However, I think the best character here has to be our antagonist - the living god Huitlizin. An ancient Aztec warrior emboldened by psychic tech and psychopathy, he is an omnipresent force that parasitically worms his way into the story, hanging over every moment and bit of tension. His possession of the Doctor is honestly terrifying and the sheer fact that you can believe for a moment he might actually win and overpower our intrepid hero (despite that obviously not happening) speaks to his ability. Huitzilin is most definitely up there with the Sentience from Nightshade and The Hoothi from Love and War for best VNA antagonist and he’s a very big reason this book works so well (even if I never really understood what the Blue was meant to be past anomalous psychic thing).

However, I do have a distinct number of complaints with The Left Handed Hummingbird, and a lot of them stem from one simple fact: this is Kate Orman’s first novel and you really can tell. It feels like a lot of ideas shoved into one book without enough time for any of them to develop. The pacing is incredibly fast to the point where there is little time for any plot point to develop, things moving on too quickly from one moment to another with absolutely zero time to breathe. By the fifty page mark, Ace has been hospitalised, Benny has murdered a man and the Doctor is literally dead, and that’s before he starts growing feathers. It’s too much too quickly and the thing this book really needed was a second to breathe and some slow moments between action set pieces.

It also could’ve used just one story rather than five. The structure of this book moves on from location to location exceedingly quickly, moving from Mexico City, to an ancient Aztec empire, to London in the 1960s, to the Titanic and not one of the sections feel aligned with the others. This format makes the whole novel feel very clunky at times and the parts lack a lot of cohesion, ending often abruptly with little flow to a lot of the characters, who’ll die and reappear out of order often. And that’s another thing, this book plays with time travel a lot but in the end it just convolutes itself. I’m still a little foggy on how exactly the climax played out and why Cristian ended up surviving in the end.

The Left Handed Hummingbird was an easily digestible but by no means hollow read - a fun and passionate adventure with some great moments, interesting ideas and an all time antagonist. The blistering pace could slow down and the structure needs a little work, but these are all things that come with experience. I think it’s safe to say I am now more excited than ever to read more Kate Orman and I look forward to whatever she has to offer me next.

8/10

Pros:

+ Electric prose

+ Perfectly captures our main cast

+ Has a great sense of humour

+ Huitzilin is one of the VNAs best antagonists so far

+ Creatively messes with formatting to create effect

Cons:

- Feels very much like a first novel

- Different sections of the book lack cohesion

- Pacing desperately needs to slow down

- The time travel elements end up convoluting the plot

Easily the best of the alternate universe cycle so far, Kate orman makes her doctor who novel debut and comes in with a BANG, if this is supposedly her worst book I look forward to see how her future books are like, this book is a bit rough around the edges with the flow of the prose sometimes being a bit jump starty and perspectives changing to quick with no indicator as to when it occurred (this could also be a PDF error but I don’t think so) and if this is fixed I cannot wait to see ormans more character oriented stories (The room with no doors….) as the character stuff is amazing here, we get a really nice look and introspective into the status-quo of each of the tardis team and their relationships with each other, the trust between the doctor and ace is deteriorating rapidly and Benny is stuck in the middle of that unsure if she should leave, but can she leave the doctor and ace on their own? Ace feels connected to the doctor, like they’re one in the same but their actions and personalities differ so much to the point it causes strife between them, Benny puts it well when she says “'I guess you can't stuff three personalities this strong into a phone booth and not have some conflict.” The dynamic between the three of them is great and while I like the fact that these issues have been addressed in a clearer way than any other book with this trio so far has, I would 1) like to see more of Benny as much as she’s a player in this one I still feel that she’s sidelined compared to ace, and 2) is like to see a conclusion to this, we don’t need to solve the doctor and aces complex love for eachother yet but I’d like to see them come to some sort of getting along (similar to how they all were at the beggining of shadowmind) so the team doesn’t feel as toxic, or if not at least expand on it more like this novel… overall this is great, a great plot, setting and character work from orman. Can’t wait to read more!

I think this book takes a bit to find its legs. The first couple chapters had me in love instantly, but once they hopped backwards in time the first time I started having doubts. The chunk of the story taking place in Tenochtitlan (expectedly) border on orientalism, and I found myself a bit confused on what the gang was trying to accomplish on a scene-to-scene basis. That particular feeling didn't fully let up until the final act, but the character writing and overall vibe more than made up for it to me. Orman is, as always, a character writer. Between this, Vampire Science, and The Year of Intelligent Tigers, I've found that Orman's writing has such a clear understanding of the appeal of spending time with these characters. She understands our main crew well enough to use their emotional conflicts devastatingly, and, as usual, our newly introduced sort-of-audience-surrogate Cristián is immediately lovable. Hummingbird isn't quite as much of a winner as Orman's later contributions, but it still delivers the industrial-strength hurt/comfort Doctor torture she'd become known for.

If I was a more principled man this would probably be a 7.5/10. Fortunately, I have no backbone and am a massive sucker for Ace+Seven, their headbutting, and seeing my favorite guys get emotionally and physically destroyed. So I'm giving this one a 9/10. Happilyeverafter.

Incredible, incredible book. Just an insanely well-written fascinating meditation on violence. It occasionally verges on Von Dannikenism, but I think it mostly manages to avoid it. Very, very interesting, Kate Orman is just an incredibly good writer.