Echoes

Telos Publishing The Severed Man

Author	George Mann
Published	2004
ISBN	1-903889-43-X (paperback) 1-903889-44-8 (deluxe hardback)
Featuring	Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 28/7/05

The Severed Man is effectively the first half of a two-parter. The last chapter ends with "The story continues in Time Hunter: Echoes". Fortunately I'd bought Echoes already and so didn't mind this too much, but be warned. The Severed Man stands up quite well as a standalone read, but I find it hard to imagine someone reading it and not being at least curious to know how the story continues.

(Having said that, I'd be astonished if the two novellas were originally conceived as two halves of a pair. My guess is that David Howe spotted similarities in the proposals and chose to turn this coincidence into deliberate links, thus avoiding "whoops, two identical plots in Season 25" syndrome. They don't otherwise have much in common.)

So what's The Severed Man about? Primarily... weirdness. Sometimes it's Sapphire and Steel, or even at one point it becomes an Avengers episode. Honore and Emily hop from era to era, pursuing the truth behind mysterious occurrences. Worryingly the cover says "1892" and the back cover says "sinister murders in Victorian London", but to my astonished delight this book isn't about Jack the Ripper! I don't believe he's even mentioned.

The regulars' characterisation is interesting too. Mr Mann [1] has been thinking about what it means to be Honore and Emily... what it's like to be able to see what Honore sees all the time, how Emily feels about her amnesia and her abilities. These aren't cut-and-pasted "Doctor and companion" substitutes, as we've seen at times even in the better Time Hunter books. That's good. There are also references to previous books in the series (complete with footnotes), but I'm less ecstatic about those. I suppose theoretically they're a good thing, an attempt at weaving a coherent fictional universe, but in practice they're just continuity references.

[1] - sorry, couldn't resist.

The ideas behind this novella are nifty and I like the writing and characterisation, but its actual details are perhaps less memorable than some of the other novellas. (Though having said that, I can't remember many details about The Cabinet of Light either... highly acclaimed book, but not primarily trying to be a page-turner.) It's more of a mood piece. You won't know what's going on and even by the end everything isn't tied up, but the journey you follow is interesting. The severed man himself is memorable and the book certainly never sinks into the kind of gratuitous "who cares?" weirdness that bedevils this kind of writing.

In an odd way, ending with "to be continued" actually helps the book. It makes the story seem bigger; this isn't the usual worthy-but-slim fare but the start of something larger. I liked it a lot. It's well written, it's thoughtful and I'm happy about having bought it. To be blunt, I personally don't feel much brand loyalty to Emily and Honore... their Doctor Who connection is sufficiently tenuous that I wouldn't feel pangs if I stopped following them. However the general standard of Telos's novellas is sufficiently strong that I'm glad to have read them.