Torchwood: Risk Assessment
Oct. 13th, 2009 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmSo James Goss is back with another tie-in novel. Goss is, in case you forgot (but you didn't) the author who brought us "Ianto turns into a woman, er... sort of" in the form of Almost Perfect.
Unlike a lot of people, I more or less liked Almost Perfect although I wanted it to be smarter and more complex about the gender stuff (this is Torchwood, we can handle it) and found his "hey, I understand fan culture" to be a bit heavy-handed.
But, what's great about Risk Assessment is that Goss takes the things that makes his style unique amongst the Torchwood novelists and refines and contains it. It's still funny and clever, but it's no longer distracting. His gender stuff is also less fucked this time, or at least better disguised in the form of Victorian Torchwood Agent Agnes Havisham.
I also think he did a great job with Jack and Ianto's relationship. It's affectionate and familiar, but it's not a distraction. Jack is almost inappropriate and excessively tactile and Ianto is understated. It's, god help me, sweet but still feels in character and you can believe that these guys actually do couple-like things that don't involve Weevils or Blowfish.
Anyway. This book is interesting because it's the first time in text we see Jack really scared (something that continues with less charm and more unsettlingness, to the point that I'm having a hard time reading it because it's so evocative of the mood of Children of Earth (and I liked CoE) in Trevor Baxendale's The Undertaker's Gift).
Goss pulls this off well. We get a sense of how Ianto and Gwen navigate and read Jack, and it's a mix of love and familiarity, but also of wariness that reminds us that Torchwood is a dark place and the relationships Jack has aren't generally healthy from anyone's perspective.
There's also a lot of references to day-to-day life things that aren't really addressed (Jack and Ianto are fighting at some point (well, avoiding each other in the aftermath of a spat on an unknown subject), but it's not clear about what), and are frustrating on one level, but are also nice openings for fanfic writers, and I appreciate them being there. (The trend of Jack and Ianto being prickly with each other amidst the affection -- Jack's hands are constantly straying into Ianto's hair in Risk Assessment -- seems to continue in The Undertaker's Gift, btw, and it helps to set up the way Jack and Ianto are in CoE. If you combine this series of books with the radio plays that led into CoE, you really do get the sense that these guys had a couple of months or so of all hell breaking loose where they really were able to express their affection for each other pretty explicitly, because they were scared and then were freaked out prickly bastards to each other about it because of said fear and workload.)
Goss also gives us the universal textual Whoniverse joke, that is aliens with long, unpronounceable names and an excess of x's in their spelling. Thank you. We actually love that. I don't know why. But we do.
Ianto is well-drawn in the sense that yes, he is often startlingly competent, but he's also a kid and he didn't start his Torchwood life as a field operative. We get a lot of his struggling with the places he has internal certitude and the places he doesn't. Sometimes he doesn't back down, sometimes he can't wait to get out of the line of metaphorical fire.
One particularly great scene has Agnes talking to Ianto about his relationship with Jack. It's obvious she doesn't approve (she snarkily refers to Ianto as Jack's catamite earlier in the book, and that's a bit eyebrow raising, but hey, awesome vocab at least, so yeah -- although Jack assumes Ianto doesn't know the meaning of the word... I'm quite sure that's not true), but here she makes the point that people Jack loves come to bad ends, young. And she implies it's not because Jack keeps falling for Torchwood operatives, but because anyone Jack gets involved with is just waiting to be collateral damage and would, for whatever reason, do anything for Jack.
Ianto says he understands, and the scene is marvelously written. Here's the guy that's been ready to die for a long time and is trying to hang onto the peace of that fatalism when he finally has something to live for, and it's awkward. So um, you know *love*. Poor brave, loyal, AWESOME Ianto.
And here's the thing, all of Jack's long-term things do come to bad ends. We meet a few over the course of the other TW novels that are ex'es that he presumably left so they wouldn't meet the sort of ends people who get involved with Jack generally meet, but they all have tragic ends too. They're lonely and miserable and Jack's bad luck ultimately catches up with them. It's like a disease they catch from Jack and one Jack caught from the Doctor.
Anyway, righto, back to Risk Assessment: Good aliens, snappy dialogue, steampunk plot elements, Gwen in Space, nuancy character stuff. Even if Almost Perfect bugged you, this is very much worth a look.
Unlike a lot of people, I more or less liked Almost Perfect although I wanted it to be smarter and more complex about the gender stuff (this is Torchwood, we can handle it) and found his "hey, I understand fan culture" to be a bit heavy-handed.
But, what's great about Risk Assessment is that Goss takes the things that makes his style unique amongst the Torchwood novelists and refines and contains it. It's still funny and clever, but it's no longer distracting. His gender stuff is also less fucked this time, or at least better disguised in the form of Victorian Torchwood Agent Agnes Havisham.
I also think he did a great job with Jack and Ianto's relationship. It's affectionate and familiar, but it's not a distraction. Jack is almost inappropriate and excessively tactile and Ianto is understated. It's, god help me, sweet but still feels in character and you can believe that these guys actually do couple-like things that don't involve Weevils or Blowfish.
Anyway. This book is interesting because it's the first time in text we see Jack really scared (something that continues with less charm and more unsettlingness, to the point that I'm having a hard time reading it because it's so evocative of the mood of Children of Earth (and I liked CoE) in Trevor Baxendale's The Undertaker's Gift).
Goss pulls this off well. We get a sense of how Ianto and Gwen navigate and read Jack, and it's a mix of love and familiarity, but also of wariness that reminds us that Torchwood is a dark place and the relationships Jack has aren't generally healthy from anyone's perspective.
There's also a lot of references to day-to-day life things that aren't really addressed (Jack and Ianto are fighting at some point (well, avoiding each other in the aftermath of a spat on an unknown subject), but it's not clear about what), and are frustrating on one level, but are also nice openings for fanfic writers, and I appreciate them being there. (The trend of Jack and Ianto being prickly with each other amidst the affection -- Jack's hands are constantly straying into Ianto's hair in Risk Assessment -- seems to continue in The Undertaker's Gift, btw, and it helps to set up the way Jack and Ianto are in CoE. If you combine this series of books with the radio plays that led into CoE, you really do get the sense that these guys had a couple of months or so of all hell breaking loose where they really were able to express their affection for each other pretty explicitly, because they were scared and then were freaked out prickly bastards to each other about it because of said fear and workload.)
Goss also gives us the universal textual Whoniverse joke, that is aliens with long, unpronounceable names and an excess of x's in their spelling. Thank you. We actually love that. I don't know why. But we do.
Ianto is well-drawn in the sense that yes, he is often startlingly competent, but he's also a kid and he didn't start his Torchwood life as a field operative. We get a lot of his struggling with the places he has internal certitude and the places he doesn't. Sometimes he doesn't back down, sometimes he can't wait to get out of the line of metaphorical fire.
One particularly great scene has Agnes talking to Ianto about his relationship with Jack. It's obvious she doesn't approve (she snarkily refers to Ianto as Jack's catamite earlier in the book, and that's a bit eyebrow raising, but hey, awesome vocab at least, so yeah -- although Jack assumes Ianto doesn't know the meaning of the word... I'm quite sure that's not true), but here she makes the point that people Jack loves come to bad ends, young. And she implies it's not because Jack keeps falling for Torchwood operatives, but because anyone Jack gets involved with is just waiting to be collateral damage and would, for whatever reason, do anything for Jack.
Ianto says he understands, and the scene is marvelously written. Here's the guy that's been ready to die for a long time and is trying to hang onto the peace of that fatalism when he finally has something to live for, and it's awkward. So um, you know *love*. Poor brave, loyal, AWESOME Ianto.
And here's the thing, all of Jack's long-term things do come to bad ends. We meet a few over the course of the other TW novels that are ex'es that he presumably left so they wouldn't meet the sort of ends people who get involved with Jack generally meet, but they all have tragic ends too. They're lonely and miserable and Jack's bad luck ultimately catches up with them. It's like a disease they catch from Jack and one Jack caught from the Doctor.
Anyway, righto, back to Risk Assessment: Good aliens, snappy dialogue, steampunk plot elements, Gwen in Space, nuancy character stuff. Even if Almost Perfect bugged you, this is very much worth a look.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 03:27 am (UTC)Man, this is totally my Bullet Proof Kink. I have no idea why, but Heroes Who Cannot Love Lest Others Be Killed just smites me every time.
I've never read a TW tie in novel before, but now clearly, I have to get this book.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 03:30 am (UTC)Also, dude, I learned the word catamite from a paperback collection of Batman short stories; ain’t no way Ianto wouldn’t know it.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 04:08 am (UTC)YAY
I may have to read the TW novels now that there is No More Show. *withdrawal*
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 03:05 pm (UTC)I know it's unreasonable to expect tie-in novels to be held to the same standard as non-franchise linked works, but seriously? If we treat them like actual books, more will get written which are like actual books.
I'm glad someone reads my long endless reviews of these things.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 05:57 pm (UTC)This was a great review. Ianto is, more often than not, a huge part of what I dislike about most of the TW novels. I don't know why, but I don't think the authors pay enough attention to him. He's always... wrong, in some way. Sometimes that doesn't make a difference, since he's - again, more often than not - not anywhere near important to the plot(s). But he's my favorite, so I kind of can't help searching for him while reading the novels.
I think the first book I really, really, really liked so far was The House that Jack Built (that I decided to buy following yours and crue's twitter sort-of-review). I'll see if I still have time to order RA. Thanks for that. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 12:34 am (UTC)Thanks for this review. I'm planning to check it out, and possibly the others in the series. (I love books, but had to do so much reading as I finished up school that I got out of the habit of reading for fun!)
The snippet above reminds me of something that was said on the Galley '09 "late night" panel (I THINK it was you) about fanfiction authors writing in the cracks - filling in things not explicit in the shows. (Sorry if I have mistakenly remembered this - it was my first convention and I was a little dazed.) I thought that was a lovely observation and it influenced my direction of my final college paper.
Speaking of Gallifrey, next year's panels look interesting. Too bad about Mr. Davison, but that's only a small part of the fun!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 03:46 am (UTC)I take it you'll be back at Gally? I'm so psyched for it. My favorite con EVER.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 09:18 am (UTC)When I first read Almost Perfect I found it a bit too quirky and it actually took me a second reading to get used the chapter titles and scenes and to start enjoying them. This time it seemed to flow more in the story and while still very much James Goss' style it was toned down to not pull away from what was happening. And I feel like he had a fuller understanding of the characters and world too.
And the Ianto and Agnes scene was very well done and I think Goss showed his growth in the Torchwood world when he wrote the quieter scenes between characters.
The long sections in italic font did bother me a bit just because it's a bit of a pain to read in long doses but they did offer fun past meetings of Jack and Agnes.
I was also a bit disappointed with Ianto and Gwen when they started siding more with Agnes than Jack. But the inclusion of Rhys and the lighter moments during all of the action mostly made up for it.
It was also nice to see a Torchwood novel mostly focused on the Torchwood gang and not wasting chapters on civilians that just end up dead or pointless like what happens in some of the other novels (Bay of the Dead comes to mind).
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 01:56 pm (UTC)