Dead Romance

Bernice Summerfield: Virgin New Adventures #19

by Lawrence Miles

Chrissy Summerfield is bored by life in 1970s Britain. Nothing ever happens. Until, that is, the ritual murders, the arrival of the mysterious Chris Cwej, and the invasion from another dimension.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Hugo · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Dead Romance’ is a pretty flawed novel for many reasons. Firstly (well, first thing aside from this pretty shit cover) the entire book is told through a first person perspective by the main character Christine Summerfield, who is intentionally characterised as untrustworthy and also likes drugs quite a bit. Most of your enjoyment of this book will vary on whether you enjoy this type of protagonist, as there are plenty of anecdotes and what-not sprinkled throughout. On one hand this works in favour of enhancing the feeling of reading through a journal, but it’s also not the most entertaining thing to read.

The plot involves some gods trying to take over a universe stored in a bottle for reasons I cannot recall, partly thanks to the gimmicky prose, and also there’s some stuff about clones and it’s all a big part of some intergalactic war. What makes this somewhat interesting is the domestic angle it is framed in, one of the redeeming parts of the narration. Of course, all this is drowned in excessive edge, drugs and of course some sex because why not?

Despite how unimpressed I may sound this book is fairly enjoyable throughout, both in intentional and unintentional ways. There is quite a lot going on and for the most part everything is fairly well resolved. Without spoiling anything, the two twists at the end are solid, and the second one specifically actually got me thinking quite a bit, despite feeling a bit rushed. I would recommend this book if it sounds like something you’d enjoy, chances are you’ll get some fun out of it.

[Leo H · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a massive fan of Lawrence Miles' work I'm ashamed this has sat on my shelf unread for so long. Fantastic, obviously, it's been so long since I read any of his other books but I'm confident saying this is one of if not the best. And the addition of two short stories and a mind-bogglingly vast essay on the physics/cosmology of the universes of his work are the icing on the cake.

[Alex Sarll]

The only book I've ever read which establishes canonically that Kenickie songs (and album tracks at that) are still sung in the 26th century. Not that I knew this going in. I read this because of the Time War behind the Time War (and I use the word 'behind' advisedly, given Miles' response to 'The Name of the Doctor' - like the Doctor, many of us have now seen terrible things in the course of the war, things we cannot unsee), because after the last Doctor Who season finale, I wanted to read the one novel I'd not yet read by the man who influenced it so. And it is very good, though this one was more of an influence on Russell T Davies' farewell, The End of Time, with the Time Lords planning an escape to Earth that would not go well for Earth's current inhabitants. This is far more effectively cosmic, though, with universes nested like Russian dolls, cosmic horrors unleashed from the Vortex, creatures made of space which possess statues...especially with the London setting, I got echoes of Arthur Machen at times.
Also included in this edition are a poetic essay about the mechanics of space-time, a short story which prefigures 'The Doctor's Wife', and one with the image of a modern statesman riding a mammoth. Miles may be somewhat churlish about how he expresses it, but you can see why he gets annoyed.

[Nik Kuleznev · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this book genius and a work of art. The narrative contains several extremely unexpected and shocking plot twists after which everything came together and made sense, bit twisted and strange though, but still it made sense. And reading it is just like a river flow – so engaging and captivating, never ever getting bored or tired of reading.
This book has shown me how limitless the possibilities of telling a DW story (and any fiction story for that matter) are! It's like nothing I've ever read before, highly original and individual, so I cannot recommend it enough.

[Luca Signorelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a novel that in many ways defies description, and almost 20 years after its release still retains on me a grip few other recent SF has. It's also probably the second best Doctor Who related novel ever written (the other being Daniel O'Mahoney "Cabinet of Light")... even if the Doctor is never mentioned, not even once. I won't spoil the content, other than telling you that the world ended October 12th, 1970, and there's nothing we can do about it.

[Cara M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird and interesting and wildly paced and very cool. I'm missing a lot of the context, but I love anything with tragic post-companions and the Time Lords as the terrifying powers that they are, and a complex cosmology that doesn't make anything feel simple or easily sorted out.

[Zac Hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes a lot to make epistolary prose outside of the short story, its natural home, work for me. It's the biggest reason why I keep bouncing off House of Leaves.

Miles managed to defy the odds and constraints of the form. It's fucking brilliant.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong first person effort from the New Adventures, once again (after The Mary-Sue Extrusion) taking a sideways look at the ongoing “Gods” conflict in the wider series. It’s more involving than that really, a story about a messy, seemingly ordinary person caught up in a bizarre universe-shattering conflict; it all feels massive and domestic at the same time, which is exactly the sort of dimension-bothering that the plot is full of. Chris Cwej and the Time Lords (barely disguised for license reasons) come out of this much worse for wear. It’s impressive stuff.

4.5

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the forward by author Lawrence Miles says this Mad Norwegian Press reprint of his 1999 novel Dead Romance is really for two groups of people those who are Virgin New Adventures fans who missed it the first time round and those who've been reading the Faction paradox books. Well I fall into the first category having come into the Virgin New Adventures very late. I came to Dead Romance aware of its reputation as one of (or even the) best of that book range. So in short: Dead Romance is what Doctor Who is at its best: daring and original even a decade after its original publication (and several years after this reprint).

Perhaps the most refreshing element of Dead Romance is its narrator. With the character of Christine Summerfield and her notebooks Miles brings a refreshed air with a first person take on the Doctor Who universe. Christine is a much different character then her better known "sister" Bernice yet she retains the characteristic wit and sarcasm of Bernice even when the end of the world is literally at hand. The success of Dead Romance lies mainly in the characterization of Christine and how she interprets both the world and the incredible events around her.

Yet while Christine is the novel's emotional and physical center there is her relationship with Chris Cwej. Making a welcome return after last being seen in the final seventh Doctor New adventure Lungbarrow here is a Chris Cwej considerably different from the one of earlier novels. While he is definitely a continuation of the companion he is a changed man with distorted memories and now working for a mysterious group of time travelers (as they're referred to in this edition) By novels end is almost unrecognizable and the result is one of the Doctor Who ranges most disturbing looks at life after the TARDIS.

What makes Dead Romance stand out is its format and its plot. In an unusual twist Dead Romance is told from a first person perspective. As I said earlier much of the novels success is how the narrator Christine Summerfield interprets both the world and the incredible events around her. That helps make the novel's plot even better. Inside Dead Romance is an incredible tale of universes and worlds on the brink of destruction told from the perspective of a 23 year old drug addict forced into an incredible world of aliens, time travel, and universes in bottles. Add on some frank takes on sex, drugs and the end of the world and the result is one of the most daring Doctor Who related novels. Or to put it in a one word: brilliant!

A quick note on this edition though. While the original Virgin edition references Time Lords and other elements of the Doctor Who universe this edition doesn't so much. This is due to the fact that this novel is put into a place in the Faction Paradox universe. While some of those who read the original might be annoyed, as someone who didn't I found it interesting and far from annoying. In fact for those readers in the know, capable of reading between the lines or proud owners of Lars Pearson's I, Who 2 it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

Included in this reprint are two shorts stories and an essay by Miles related to his creation Faction Paradox. While I read each of these I admit to be bewildered by the first short story entitles Toy Story, baffled by the essay on the workings of the Faction Paradox universe (though that could be from not reading any of the books related to it) and enjoyed the final short story entitled Grass. My thought on these is that if you know quite a bit about Faction Paradox who should enjoy them otherwise you might want to skip them.

Dead Romance has earned a reputation over the years as one of the best Doctor Who related novels. With its characters, fresh narrative approach and fantastic plot Lawrence Miles shows us what Doctor Who is capable of at its best. Whether you are a fan of Doctor Who or science fiction or something else this is a novel that must be read to be believed. In short: it's brilliant!

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2694932.html

I don't quite get the immense reverence shown to Lawrence Miles and the Faction Paradox concept by the more literary end of Whovian fandom; on the other hand I thoroughly enjoyed this, even though it is a book in the series of Bernice Summerfield novels where she doesn't appear at all except as a personality of the far future, the Doctor appears only in distorted form, and the one continuity character is Chris Cwej. Paradoxically, this makes it a rare case of a Who book that one can readily recommend to non-Whovian readers because it is so very detached from the main narrative - indeed, Miles stresses that it should be considered as taking place in a pocket universe detached from the main timeline of the Whoniverse.

That's all beside the most important point, which is that it's a really good read. Christine Summerfield, the slightly reliable narrator, fills up numerous notebooks writing about how the world ended in October 1970; there are many many references to the pop culture of the late 1960s, in a slightly different timeline to our own; the Time Lords are restored to their original position of dubious god-like beings, manipulating the physical forms of their allies (that's a new one) and much else; the whole universe is a grim place, and yet I found myself immersed in it. It's a rare example of a diary-format novel where the narrator actually survives; but to what end? I found it a complex, multi-layered story, but one that did at least keep me reading with satisfaction to the final page.

[London Cormac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been going on a bit of a journey through the works of Lawrence Miles after reading Alien Bodies and really enjoying it. My favourite author is Douglas Adams, and Miles really did feel like he had something distinctly adamsian about his writing. Since then, I've read Interference, and found it to be a pretty good romp with great ideas and abysmal pacing, and I've just finished reading Dead Romance, which I found to be a pretty good romp with great ideas and abysmal pacing.

I wonder if this is going to be a pattern?

Let's start with the positives. Dead Romance is filled with evocative and interesting ideas. Unlike Interference before it, however, which had a million different ideas with only one or two being fully fleshed out, Dead Romance has a much stronger focus on the idea of pocket, or bottle, universes. The idea of an artificially constructed universe inside a universe, the inhabitants of which consider the Bottle universe to be about as real as a dollhouse. The idea is evocative enough, but Miles actually integrates it pretty seamlessly with the political commentary he's making in this book, primarily about the levels of worth in our society, and how different people are treated differently based on entirely arbitrary social constructs. Good shit, and done far more subtly than Interference, which, admittedly, isn't saying much, given that Interference was about as subtle with it's politics as an anvil, but, hey, baby steps.

The highlight of this book for me, however, was something I rarely consider such: the prose. Unlike Alien Bodies, which had a pretty traditional style and structure with some flashbacks, and Interference, which dipped it's toes in experimental waters with it's multiple perspective characters and occasional digressions into script presentation, Dead Romance goes whole-hog into experimentation, with the book being presented in a rambling, stream-of-consciousness fashion told disjointedly by a young woman who happens to be a big fan of cocaine. It really works, for the most part: we really get a sense of who Christine is and the time she lives in just in the way she tells the story alone, and the rambling style allows Miles to sneak in digressions in a much more natural, flowing manner than either Interference or Alien Bodies.

Which brings me to the negatives. The Plot. Or, rather, the lack thereof. I've heard accusations that Alien Bodies and Interference don't have a plot, but they do still have protagonists and antagonists, a clear overarching story, mysteries to solve, friends becoming enemies and enemies becoming friends, all that stuff. Dead Romance, on the other hand, really doesn't have a plot at all. It's a drunken lurch through a street of disconnected events, people, and places, with the air of someone saying "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened". I get that this is part-and-parcel with the stream-of-consciousness style, but it left me feeling cold a lot of the time, especially when pretty much every character bar-Christine is pretty unlikable, so when all this Big Important Stuff is happening and Christine is only just a spectator, I find it difficult to really care.

Perhaps that's The Point. But if it was, then I would have liked less rambling on about locations, characters, and events that we never actually experience first-hand anyway, because they really don't serve any purpose than to tacitly acknowledge some arc running through the book series that Dead Romance as a part of but isn't any more, references to which probably could have done with being exorcised, seeing as how this is now a Faction Paradox book and not a New Adventures book, we probably don't need foreshadowing for what's going to happen next in the New Adventures series that I imagine 12 people in total read.

This is more of a nitpick than anything else, but Lawrence Miles needs to have more faith in his ideas being crazy and unique and weird on their own, without telling us how crazy they are. I imagine Christine probably would have gotten pretty jaded about all this crazy stuff pretty quickly, but every time something new happens Christine feels the need to tell us how this is totally as crazy as it sounds, you guys. Where is the Lawrence Miles who had faith in his audience to understand that The Shift was a cool idea without having to beat us over the head with it?

I was going to give Dead Romance three stars, but upon reflection, the Good Shit is Good Enough Shit that I'm gonna bump it up to Four Big Ones. If you're the kind of person who won't let a rubbish plot get in the way of great ideas and good storyTELLING, then Dead Romance is definitely worth a look.

[Julia]

Christine Summerfield è una ragazza di 23 anni che vive a Londra, e nei suoi quaderni racconta di come il mondo sia finito quel 12 Ottobre del 1970, con lei come unica sopravvissuta.

È un libro scritto in prima persona, sottoforma di pensieri buttati giù di getto, a volte senza una vera coerenza logica, con flashbacks, flashfowards e divagazioni. Inoltre è scritto postumo agli eventi in base ai suoi ricordi, e quindi Christine non è una narratrice affidabile.

Miles in questo libro introduce il concetto di Universo-bottiglia (letteralmente, un intero universo in una bottiglia). L’autore, sia qui sia nei suoi libri per la serie The Eighth Doctor Adventures, voleva utilizzarlo per insinuare che le Virgin New Adventures e le Eighth Doctor Adventures si svolgano in realtà in due universi separati (con un universo dentro un universo dentro un universo, ecc…). Peccato che invece molti autori delle EDA le abbiano al contrario intese come dirette continuazioni delle VNA (ma questa gatta da pelare la affronterò al momento di leggere i libri dell’Ottavo Dottore, quando arriverà il giorno).

Non c’è molto altro che posso dire senza svelare troppe cose e credo che questo sia un libro apprezzabile proprio per la sua aura di mistero. Ma mi piacerebbe comunque discutere delle rivelazioni presenti, quindi se siete curiosi continuate a leggere, altrimenti no.

SPOILER:

La vita di Christine viene messa a soqquadro quando incontra Chris Cwej. Quest’ultimo non è più il ragazzo che conoscevamo: i Signori del Tempo lo hanno assunto come loro agente e gli hanno apportato delle modifiche dandogli dei miglioramenti fisici e perfino la possibilità di rigenerarsi (seppur con conseguenze molto più deleterie sul suo fisico rispetto a un normale gallifreyano). Hanno anche alterato i suoi ricordi, facendogli credere che il Dottore fosse una persona malvagia per lo aveva rapito e torturato e che i Signori del Tempo lo avessero salvato da lui (assicurandosi così la sua fedeltà). La situazione con gli Dei di Dellah è peggiorata a tal punto che i Signori del Tempo devono cercare un posto sicuro in cui nascondersi, cercano un’alleanza con il Popolo (modificando il loro trattato in modo da permettere loro di sviluppare il viaggio nel tempo) e perfino pensano di chiedere aiuto ai Dalek (non mi sembra una grande idea).
Alla ricerca di questo posto sicuro, i Signori del Tempo scoprono una tecnologia sviluppata dagli Dei: un Universo-bottiglia. Questo universo è molto più semplice del loro, per esempio non esiste il viaggio nel tempo. Chris viene mandato in avanscoperta per trovare un pianeta adatto in questo universo per i Signori del Tempo.
E, sorpresa, sorpresa, si scopre che Christine vive proprio in questo universo-bottiglia (e non in quello “reale”).

(E ora immaginate tutto quello che ho appena scritto senza usare, nemmeno una volta, le parole: Signore del Tempo, Tardis, Gallifrey, Dalek, Dottore. L’intero libro è una sciarada.)

Ma le sorprese non sono finite qui, questo non è altro che l’inizio…

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

First time I read this book, many years ago, I hated it and felt cheated. This time round I actually enjoyed it and saw how it fitted into the overarching theme of the Benny books. Still not sure about the depiction of Chris' employers or how their human helpers changed. And could a brain washed Chris do the things he did here, so very out of character?

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic, funny, casual, brings a lot of new information about the Doctor Who universe in one of the most interesting way possible, has some pretty funny easter eggs (Quintesson spiral ships, anyone?) and a perfect tie in to This Town Will Never Let Us Go, it's predecessor.

I can't wait to see more of Cwej as well, dude is dealing with so much crap from the Time Lords 🫡

[Zfasdfl · Rating 5 out of 5]

good

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

So here I am at the prehistoric roots of Faction Paradox. This book is from 1999. It comes from the Virgin New Adventures line, at a point where they had lost the license to write "Doctor Who" books, but before Lawrence Miles leaped off into his own idiosyncratic "Faction Paradox" line. So it's... quasi-almost-canonical but not semi-heterocanonical?

But still idiosyncratic, of course.

London, 1970 -- the Autumn of Love, as it were, with Charles Manson ranting in prison about the End of Days. Druggie-hipster-wisekid Christine Summerfield (note last name) is arrested in London for being stoned out of her gourd. The police soon decide they have more important fish to fry, with a serial-murderer suspect being dragged in. Christine ducks out the back... and immediately runs into an *actual* murderer, who *possibly* grows wings and flies away.

That's the least strange occurence of her week.

(The previous suspect is named Chris Cwej, by the way. Note this name too. Regular readers of the New Adventures line will recognize him. I recognized him from the _Book of the War_; he's one of the few characters to cross over directly from "official" books to the "what the hell is Miles up to" books.)

_Dead Romance_ is a mad dash through concentric apocalypses. It's very dark, and it works very well. If you were wondering -- you probably weren't, if you read these books in publication order, but I was wondering -- whether Miles's jazzy snarky narration in _This Town..._ was a fluke: it isn't. He can pull this off repeatably. Or at least he could a decade ago. This is a first-person retrospective story, rather than the three-strand omniscient narration of _This Town..._ -- but it's got the same compulsively readable energy.

The drive comes from those apocalypses -- casually mentioned by Christine Summerfield, writing notes to herself in the rubble of civilization. (*Some* civilization.) The book, in fact, has what I have called the "incompetent narrator", the next step beyond the unreliable narrator. (Though Christine is *also* unreliable; she warns us of this straight off.) I'm not saying Miles is a Gene Wolfe, but he tackles Wolfe's trick: a story told hopelessly out of order, by a character who can't be bothered to build up tension or conceal upcoming twists -- but which artlessly manages to reveal what you need to know, when you need to know it, for maximum narrative momentum. It's a hell of a trick, is what I'm saying. Miles pulls it off.

He also pulls off his trademark sense of fantastical-cum-existential horror. Monsters are not giant tentacled scaly things; they're ruptures of reality, redefinitions of the known into the monstrous. Oh, you may get a night-black wing blotting out the stars, but it's also a core leak in the universe's operating system. An army marches in, but they have no interest in exterminating humanity, only in changing the conditions of its existence.

I said _This Town..._ was not fanfic, in this sense: it is entirely appreciatable by a reader who does not know or care about Doctor Who *and who will still not know or care about Doctor Who after enjoying the book.* (This is not the only definition of fanfic, but it's the one I'm using right now.)

Can I say the same of _Dead Romance_? Yes, I think so -- mostly. (Even though this book appears in a sequence that started out *as* Doctor Who novels.)

The shadow of the Doctor lies more heavily on _Dead Romance_, and I suspect it will be *stronger* for Who fans. The Doctor does not appear directly. He's a story told to Christine by Cwej; a distorted story, the evil scientist who kidnaps people in his time machine and twists their minds. The idea that Cwej's memory *itself* has been twisted is quite explicit. And yet one of the book's strengths is the portrait of Cwej, a programmed agent of the Time Lords -- hating the Doctor, but nonetheless indelibly shaped by the Doctor. A monster, trying to imitate a hero that he can't even remember accurately.

(Assuming, of course, that the Doctor *is* still a hero. You want to believe that this book is in-continuity enough for that. And yet -- it's all *about* how far an "official" continuity can get from canon. I doubt that Cwej -- not originally Miles's character -- was introduced as a monster. The utter destruction of the Earth is another tipoff.)

There is no happy ending. I truly don't know where Miles intended to take this storyline; by the time it reaches _The Book of the War_ it's changed (again) beyond recognition. I am assured that no single trope of _Dead Romance_ is really consistent with any other Who or post-Who storyline. And yet -- so what. This book must have knocked 1999-era Who fans on their asses. It still works. Good for the author.

[Mole Mann]

Haven't read Dead Romance yet and really need to. There's three short stories in it that don't have their own GR page, so I'm going to review them here.

Toy Story by Lawrence Miles
'What about the pilots?' asked the woman-Ship. Head still cocked, eyes still locked shut.
Lolita programmed herself to look irritated, and flicked a strand of hair away from her face. 'What have the pilots got to do with anything?'
'I think they'd be interested, sister.'
'I think they'd be irrelevant,' snapped Lolita. 'And don't call me "sister". I do have a name, unlike some people I could mention.'
A rather spellbinding short story about two somewhat familiar sisters meeting, which has some rather intriguing implications for Gallifreyan lore and introduces one of the more memorable villains of the Faction Paradox series.

Grass
Nonetheless, the first thing Lucia does when faced with this monstrosity is “protect” herself by putting her arms up in front of her face. And they call this the Age of Reason.
A very witty and intriguing story from Miles, which essentially serves as a small puzzle piece in the larger puzzle of the Faction's lore (though it wasn't written originally for FP).

[A Vertx · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll leave a more comprehensive review when I get around to re-reading this (so stay tuned for this review to be edited dramatically at some point in the future), but this novel is a ton of fun, as we're plopped into the head of our unreliable narrator, who has absolutely no idea what is going on around her at any given moment. She is artfully out of the loop, and in an altered state of consciousness quite a few times due to heavy drug use, which leads to a story that we, the readers, must piece together slowly as we are fed the asynchronous information as Christine Summerfield writes in her diary on a forgotten world, as she recounts the tale of how she met Christopher Rodonanté Cwej......

[Tom Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've read this book twice (perhaps three times) before - and i've now started again. three points:

1) *fantastic* book. wonderfully written, incredibly creative.

2) i am unaware of any of the related books. it has always been a stand-alone for me.

3) previous readings have been prior to my introduction to lovecraft(ian) items. we'll see if anything that i didn't notice from previous readings creeps out from the shadows and surprises...

-- update 4/22/13: pausing the reread as bought 2 new books.

[MissMo]

WOW. This book was great. I really loved how the author made us think the book itself was going to be based on the boy built from dead parts, but it had so many twists and turns that we dont know what is happening or going to happen to the guy. Cant wait to read the next book!!

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff - astoundingly weird horror/sci-fi. Seems to be the basis for a scad of other novels, some of which I'm after reading.