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Relative Dementias Author: Mark Michalowski Review Relative Dementias is the first Doctor Who novel for author Mark Michalowski. He has previously written short stories, and spin-off stories but this is his first foray into the world of Doctor Who novel writing. First novels from authors can often either be brilliant, or awful. A great idea can be thought of, but poorly executed, or a real gem of an author can be discovered in 80,000 words. Hopefully Michalowski will be the latter. The Doctor takes Ace to London, to meet Countess Gallowglass who runs a postal retention service for aliens. From ehre he picks up his post, including a card from a UNIT friend, Joyce Brunner asking for help with mysterious happenings surrounding her mother at a home for Alzheimers patients, Greystairs. They therefore travel to the home, but en-route The Doctor mysteriously lands the TARDIS and locks Ace out of the console room whilst a meeting takes place. They then arrive and try to find Joyce, with Ace very upset. They soon find that there are mysterious happenings at the home, and a patient, Eddie has escaped. Whilst investigating seperately from The Doctor, Ace discovers a transmat in Greystairs basement that leads to a space ship where a number of people, including Joyce are attached to a parallel processing array. She disconnects some of them and leads them to safety, but before she can escape herself she becomes trapped and can only escape through an airlock into the ocean, and she finds herself in the Orkneys. There, she finds a student and his brother conducting a survey who have found a mysterious object. On land, a couple with their dog arouse suspicion as they are duplicates of people in Muirbridge, local village to Greystairs. Greystairs henchwoman Megan then follows Ace at the orders of her boss, Sooal, but is eventually killed. Meanwhile, The Doctor connects himself onto the processor array and overloads it. Sooal relaises what is happening, but he is eventally freed by Ace and Joyce's son, Michael. They go off and find Eddie, who turns out to be the leader of a group of aliens, the Tulks, who Sooal is trying to revive the memories of so he can get access to a weapons cache on the spaceship. All the Tulks are revived, then are killed by Sooal once they have given up their secrets. The couple from The Orkneys then make their presence felt and we discover they are Annarene intent on gaining the weapons too. They are all eventually defeated, and are transported into the stasis booth the weapons are stored in. It is then revealed that Ace got The Doctor to pick her up from the Orkneys by sending a postcard, picked up by The Doctor at the same time as Joyce's. This clears up who The Doctor met and deprived Ace from seeing at the start of the story. The overwhelming feeling you get having read this book is how well it was planned and executed. There are 'wheels within wheels' throughout the book, and information is carefully drip fed to the reader on an almost need to know basis. This keeps the interest throughout in the book and makes it a page turner. The storylines are such that there are severla different threads ongoing, and these are all carefully re-integrated so that the plot can come to its climax. Delving into The Doctor's past from a different perspective, then taking it out of context is a very interesting idea. In the story, the UNIT characters of Joyce Brunner and her son Michael knew the third Doctor only a few weeks earlier, but being confronted with the seventh Doctor outside of UNIT business is interesting. The characters also gel well with Michael having suffered indirectly at the hands of The Doctor, and it is good to see the other side of the stories. Think of the catering assistants on the Death Star, pressed into service but their deaths were rejoiced, leaving widows and orphans. Ace is chartacterised well here too, and we appear to see her growing up a bit throughout the story as the bigger picture is revealed. Her petulence at the biginning is replaced by responsibility in the final outcome. The biggest problem though is that the dialogue of The Doctor and Ace doesn't really read terribly authentically. You just can't put a lot of the words in the mouths of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred. This lets the story down, but it is still a good read. The characterisation in the story is very well thought out, with the aliens well chosen. The overall plot with Sooal, the Tulks and the Annarene allied to UNIT personnel out of context makes for an interesting read. Ally this with The Doctor and Ace, with a home full of Alzheimers patients and the story is fleshed out wonderfully. The Humanity of the old folk and the Brunners, juxtaposed with Sooal and the Annarene is a very good combination. Military steel from Megan and Michael also adds to the rich mix of characters. Even the brothers on their expedition in the Orkneys appear to have been well thought out and add to the story well, giving a great basis for a good story to play out. Overall, Relative Dementias is an excellent story that shows good planning and execution on behalf of the author, Mark Michalowski. There are many plot threads that are carefully woven together at the climax of the story, and unlike many others the book doesn't appear to end suddenly. The dialogue of The Doctor and Ace does not appear to fit that well though, but this is the only real criticism of a book that will stand up to repeated reading, and is one of the better past Doctor adventures. Rating:  |