The Severed Man

Telos Publishing Echoes

Author	Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett
Published	2005
ISBN	1-903889-45-6 (paperback) 1-903889-46-4 (deluxe hardback)
Featuring	Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 3/8/05

A particularly good one. I'm not wild about its characterisation of Emily and Honore, but otherwise a strong story with emotional weight that's built around its characters.

I'll start with that minor grumble. Emily and Honore bicker too much. They're reminiscent of all those private investigator teams we've seen before in films and books or on TV... a little sarcastic, a little snappish. Witty repartee, of course. That's not Honore and Emily. Personally I see them as more comfortable together than that. I don't notice them wasting energy trying to score points off each other, but instead they get on with the job at hand.

Echoes also continues (and concludes) the story from The Severed Man. I've quite enjoyed it here as an experiment, but I'd have soon got grumpy had Telos's novellas all started cliffhangering into each other. It's the best kind of continuation... it adds to the book if you've read its prequel, but it doesn't feel like The Severed Man Part Two and you can read and enjoy it on its own.

There are different timezones, though not quite in the usual fashion. We learn personal histories from different eras, the most startling feature of which is someone so much like Henry VIII that I wondered if the authors were trying to make some sort of point. He has the same physical description, the same force of personality and similar, er, marital drives, although the real Henry wasn't evil like this. In the end I don't think any such parallels were intended, but that was a little disconcerting.

The prose is okay rather than stunning, but I liked (and was fond of... which isn't the same thing) the characters and the authors' use of them. There are painful secrets and revelations. Difficult decisions must be made. This isn't the best Time Hunter novella yet, but I felt it had the strongest ending. Iain McLaughlin also wrote Blood and Hope, the 5th Doctor Telos novella set in the American Civil War which I similarly liked for its emotional strength. I've never read anything by Claire Bartlett before (apparently "short stories and two scripts for a Doctor Who spin-off audio range") but based on this I'd be happy to see more from both of them.

A common fault of much literary Who is that it can drift too far away from character drama, erring in the guns-and-spaceships direction that Russell T. Davis said he deliberately avoided with the new TV series. One can sometimes want for warmth of character, or people about whom one wants to keep reading. If we had more books like Time Hunter: Echoes, I'd be happy.