Retrospective: Mark Clapham by John Seavey 2/4/04
It must be difficult to be Mark Clapham. Or, at least, it must have been for a while. Imagine that you're writing for both the New Adventures, Virgin's line of original novels featuring fan-favorite Bernice Summerfield, and for the BBC's line of Doctor Who novels... but every single time, you're working with a co-author. First, you collaborate with Lance Parkin on Beige Planet Mars... but everyone assumes Lance wrote all the good bits. Then, you collaborate with Simon Bucher-Jones on The Taking of Planet 5... but everyone assumes Simon wrote the good bits. Then you collaborate with Jon de Burgh Miller on Twilight of the Gods... and it's the last book in the line, and not well received. Then, you just don't get a commission for another few years entirely. It wasn't until Hope that Mark Clapham was actually able to definitively demonstrate his full range of talents as an author... but despite his range of previous credits, it still feels like the work of a first-time writer.
One thing you can say about Clapham, he does have a good prose style. It's good enough to blend in with Lance Parkin and Simon Bucher-Jones, two writers who don't lack for wit, and it works to make Twilight and Hope pleasant and engaging reads. The characters get good dialogue (with the unfortunate exception of Tehke), the jokes are funny, and the imagery is vivid and clear. The characters are also engaging and realistic (if such a term can really be applied to time-traveling cyborgs and otherdimensional gods), with their hopes, fears, and dilemmas feeling all too sensible.
However, Clapham's plotting still needs work, to be honest. His biography in Hope suggests that he put in little work on the plots of Beige Planet Mars and The Taking of Planet 5, and that he was primarily responsible for the plot in Twilight of the Gods (and, of course, entirely responsible for the plot of Hope.) This seems to fit with the observed trends; the latter two have crucial problems with their plots that take otherwise very good novels and keep them from really soaring. His plots feel far too straight-forward to engage a reader; Twilight of the Gods describes the actions Benny needs to take to save the galaxy at the beginning, and apart from a few obstacles here and there, she takes exactly those actions with exactly that result. In Hope, the novel's ostensible villains are defeated with a third of the novel remaining... meaning that there's only one possible direction the story can go, depriving the surprise of any surprise. What twists there are, are unengaging; the question of whether Clarence and Chris can avert a civil war on Vremnya seems utterly irrelevant when Benny is struggling over the fate of Life As We Know It.
But this isn't to say that there's no merit to Clapham's stories. Far from it. Hope, his first solo novel, is a wonderful exercise in world-building. He creates Endpoint and invests it with a level of detail and believability that brings it to life on the page... and creates a fascinating ruler for it in Silver, who runs everything with the studied ruthlessness of a Medici prince. The first two-thirds of the novel function as a wonderful character study of a character interesting enough to get his own line of books -- which makes it all the more frustrating, in the end, to see the subtle character shading of the first two-thirds of the novel give way to a melodramatic megalomaniac who shouts a lot about his master race.
But that just means I'm more interested, not less, to see more from Mark Clapham. I think his work to date hasn't been perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I spotted areas for improvement in a lot of his writing. But I also saw potential that makes me believe he's very capable of improving to a high level indeed, and I hope that I get to see that.