Doctor, Doctor: Keith Topping's DOCTOR WHO: BYZANTIUM!

I feel more like I've read a really long homily on the trials and tribulations of the early Christians than like I've read a Doctor Who novel this time around, you guys. Indeed, I half-suspect that Byzantium! started out life as a religiously proselytizing historical novel, complete with portentous/pretentious chapter titles AND a Bible quote at the beginning of each chapter, and just got the TARDIS crew (in this case, the First Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Vicki) shoehorned in when it got no takers for its original market.

And no, I have no idea why the exclamation mark is there in the title.

But so, anyway, Byzantium. The city that will be called Constantinople during the rule of the Byzantine Empire, and Istanbul when the Turks take over, started out life as a strategically placed dump of a Greek town when the Romans muscled in, and is still kind of a dump (according to its inhabitants) by the time the TARDIS has one of its messier landings there near the start of our story (I say "near" because we get quite a lot of background detail before the TARDIS shows up, including a pretty graphically described crucifixion of another one of those pesky Christians that are starting to be such a nuisance ca. 64 A.D.). A dump we shall explore in exhausting and somewhat repetitive detail as our four heroes... all pretty much enact the same plot four times over after they get separated by the Team Separating Crisis du Jour.

But so, the Doctor winds up hiding among a small but ultimately very important and influential band of early Christians (as in they're friends at just one or two removes from some of the original Disciples as well as of Saul/Paul etc -- and are in the process, as the Doctor encounters them, of writing what will become the Gospel of Mark); Barbara winds up in the home of a high-ranking Jewish priest, more or less at whose bidding a horde of violent Zealots occasionally raise hell at public events in Byzantium and at whose orders any Christians (er, sorry, Followers of the Nazarene; call them Christians in Barbara's host's presence and he gets psychotically angry) get crucified; Vicki winds up sheltering with a kindly but strict Greek family who is all about teaching her to behave like a properly meek and obedient first century teenager, even if they have to beat it into her; and as for Ian...

Oh, Ian. Ian lies his way into the household of the Prefect of the city, where he is constantly and unsubtly hit on by every female who lays eyes on him (and "hit on" is really too soft a term; it's practically sexual assault), leading him to participate a little too gladly in round after round of "who can make the most misogynist joke" with the men of the house, over and over and over again. But eventually he sort of gets sucked into a slightly more interesting plot, involving a conspiracy against the Prefect and a popular general. Anyway, by about halfway through the story I was pretty much hating Ian, though I knew that it was author Keith Topping that was really horking me off because he portrayed all the women Ian encountered as single-minded, one-dimensional narcissists who would fail the Bechdel test so hard that they'd spill over and wipe out the passing scores of 20 other novels and thus seeming like they justified the treatment they got. Ugh.

The book is not without virtues, however. It manages a very good portrait of the First Doctor, crotchety, old, tired, fragile, impatient, compassionate in only the gruffest of ways, and ticking all of the boxes that made him unique among the Doctors: He has pretty much no sense of humor. He has gadgets with the word "Year" in their names. He has unexplainable and detailed foreknowledge of the ultimate fate of one of his companions. He takes none of his companions' crap. He is super-unimpressed with the efforts of the dudes writing the Bible and basically calls them hacks.* He changes into period appropriate clothing. No, for reals. Dude dons a toga before leaving the TARDIS, yo.

Another thing this novel did well is something I've really got to admire. I mock "Doctor Who jeopardy"** quite a lot on this blog, with good reason, and, again with good reason, tend to extend that mockery to situations that seem to threaten his Companions. Somehow in Byzantium!, though, I found myself empathizing with the burden of unknowing with which all four members of the TARDIS crew were struggling following their split-up. Barbara's worries that her friends were all dead were especially moving (though I can't say the same for Vicki's; she got pretty much the same treatment that all the bitchy Roman and Jewish ladies did, though instead of being depicted as vain and rapacious or violently controlling, Vicki was just whiny. So whiny. The major turning point in her story is when she gets to sit down with a nice old man and whine out loud to him instead of internally to us. Sigh.). And hey, while I'm on Barbara again, yay Barbara, the only one of the four who extricates herself from her (icky) situation and actually goes looking for the others! Even though by that point in the story almost every one of them has received some kind of intelligence as to where the others can be found!

But so, this book is a bit of a hot mess, and I can certainly see why a lot of people have hated on it. It's not a gripping read, for all that it's weirdly full of sex and violence (yes, there are sex scenes in a Doctor Who story! Umm?), the TARDIS crew are all stuck in iterations of the "outsider has to try to gain the acceptance of a mistrustful and insular tribe" plot, and Ian's whole story will turn many stomachs and could make people come to hate Ian. But it's a great portrait of the First Doctor, contains some pretty good writing, and handles one of Doctor Who fiction's greatest difficulties -- overcoming Doctor Who jeopardy -- very well. It's no Roundheads, but as I knew going into this project, very few of these will be.

Shrug.

As for what this has done for my Arbitrary and Mercurial Doctor Rankings, well, it actually made me like the First Doctor a bit less, for all that it was slightly amusing watching him chew out the scribes compiling the Bible. He displays no sense of humor in this story (at least all the other Bastard Doctors who rank highly on my list are funny when they insult people), makes zero effort to find his lost companions when they're separated (yes, yes, concussion, he's suffering from a concussion, but ZERO EFFORT PEOPLE. If [REDACTED] hadn't fortuitously turned out to know pretty much everyone in Byzantium and put two and two together and said "hey, you know this chick?" the First Doctor might still be in a Byzantine cave to this day, arguing with the distant descendants of those poor scribes over their translations of St. Mark's terrible grammar and handwriting and the other three would have died by the turn of the second century) and, well it doesn't help that I'm not a huge fan of these companions of his, either. Especially not after Ian's Roman Romp.

So the A&MDR after Byzantium! is as follows:

Ninth

Twelfth

Sixth

Third

Eleventh

Fourth

Second

War

Eighth

Seventh

Fifth

First

Tenth

A final note: I've been dared to rank the Companions as I've done the Doctors, but damn, there are so, so many of them (especially if you throw in the Big Finish Companions, which I would have to because I love me some Big Finish), some I haven't seen enough of to even remember if I've liked them or not. I will say, though, that for right now I do indeed have a least favorite Companion to balance out my for-sure favorite Companion (Evelyn Smythe), and until he somehow redeems himself, Ian, you're it. I hate you even more than Peri and Mel, right now. Dude, you suck.

*And no, I couldn't help thinking about River Tam grabbing Shepherd Book's Bible and "fixing" it for him, here. Was she fixing what the Doctor broke? Probably not, but it's an amusing thought, no?

**Simply put, the absurdity of any cliffhanger or other moment of danger in which the Doctor's life appears threatened, which absurdity is the result of the viewer/reader/listener knowing full well that the Doctor has had/will have/is in the midst of 13 lives (and counting) and so the question of his survival is not ever a question at all, especially not in NuWho, when we know exactly when a regeneration is coming, and even know what the next Doctor is going to look like months in advance.

Guy Gavriel Kay's LORD OF EMPERORS

I must admit to having reserved a certain amount of judgment on just how much I liked Sailing to Sarantium, the first book of Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic diptych, until I saw how the story ended in this second volume, Lord of Emperors, because the first book didn't quite feel like it could stand on its own. The two really should just be published in an omnibus edition and be done with it, to make sure that nobody who was left a little meh at the end of the first book would miss out on the absolute joy to be had in the second.

As I observed before, the story told here is to a vast degree a slightly fantastical retelling of the reign of Justinian and Theodora of Byzantium, with some nifty artisanal viewpoint characters to give it life and color and emotional oomph.

But here in the second volume, the story at last decides to diverge from that most glorious of Byzantine periods, even as it brings more similarities to that story to the fore; thus a semi-barbarian queen, Gisel, who had a scene in the first book is more fully fleshed-out and revealed to be a fantasy (and younger and prettier and unattached) version of Amalasuntha of the Ostragoths, whose mistreatment at the hands of usurpers gave Justinian an excuse to reunite the Western and Eastern Roman empires.

Preparations for that great event, or rather, its fantasy equivalent, serve as the backdrop for this second volume of the diptych, for our hero of the first volume, Crispin the Rhodian mosaicist, brought tidings from Gisel to Valerius II (aka Justinian) and so can be said to have touched off Valerius' Great Excuse. Thus while Crispin busily works on decorating the great dome of the Sanctuary to Jad (aka the Hagia Sophia), plots unfold all over the place. But wait, there is more.

Lord of Emperors brings two new and important, and deeply interesting, characters into the mix, characters who do more, really, to drive the novel's plot than even Crispin or Valerius or Gisel. The first is a Bassanid (Sassanid) doctor, Rustem, unexpectedly come to prominence in his own country and then sent by his king to (cough) learn things in Sarantium; the second is Cleander, the hotheaded teenaged son of Sarantium's Master of the Senate, who makes all the messes that Rustem winds up having to clean up. Messes which wind up involving all of the characters, high and low, from the first novel, and keep things entertaining, but still wind up just being distractions to the MAJOR PLOT of the mighty that is the most dramatic, but also troublesome, element of the two novels.

I say troublesome because, just as the novels' story diverges dramatically from actual history and seems poised to be exploring some really tantalizing "what ifs" that I'm trying desperately not to spoil for you except to say that yes, they involve the novel's Belisarius counterpart, Leontes, quite intimately, which is part of what makes these what ifs so very tantalizing to contemplate, it then briskly winds down. The effect is kind of like if, say, Harry Turtledove had written his alternate U.S. Civil War stories but then just stopped right after the South won. Frustrating.

But forgiveable, here, only because everything else is so beautiful. Rustem is a lovely addition to the cast of characters and his story is as moving as Crispin's, as Valerius', as Alixiana's, as those of the chariot racing superstars and faction dancers and cooks (and cook's assistants) we already had met. Cleander spends a lot of the novel as the jerk you want to slap, but he's perhaps the one who undergoes the most character development; you don't exactly wind up cheering for him, but in the end you wind up pretty glad he's there.

As I've come to expect from Kay, there are some heartbreakingly emotional moments, some lovely prose, and, yes, some overemphasis of some things (like repeatedly pointing out how subtle everyone is). I really, really hope there's another volume of this some day, though. I want to know what happens now, since history doesn't tell me.

One other thing of note: beautifully, Kay also manages to leave us the idea that our man Crispin is the novel counterpart to the unknown artisan who made the wonderful Justinian and Theodora mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna:

Which is a lovely grace note to a work of art that really didn't need any more, but that's why they're grace notes. I mean, look at those things. If these books don't tell their creator's story, they tell a story that might have been his. And they tell it beautifully.

*The historical detective work of looking for the historical figures who might have inspired the regal characters in these books is deeply unnecessary for enjoying them, but it's lots of fun if you're a certain kind of person.

Guy Gavriel Kay's SAILING TO SARANTIUM

There is a lot of attention to and respect for craft in Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay's fiction, and not just as a source of metaphor, though the tapestries of Fionavar and, here, the mosaics of the pseudo-Byzantine Sarantine empire, certainly serve as highly effective over-arching ones for the story structures he's created.

There were, though, no weavers in Fionavar. The tapestry was woven by a god, though not one of the gods who romped and fought and occasionally fornicated in the land -- they had personalities and desires and whims. The Weaver of Fionavar was much more impersonal, not a character.

But in Sailing to Sarantium, while yes, the overall story can be seen as a mosaic created by a divine mosaicist, there is also a real and earthly artisan who is a master of that art, and his story is the main one of this first novel in the Sarantine diptych.

Said artisan is one Crispin, who begins the novel far from the fabled city of Sarantium. Crispin is a Rhodian -- a citizen of this world's western Roman empire after it was sacked by this world's Visigoth analogues* -- and a mosaicist of considerable skill and dedication, if not yet reputation. The reputation is all his partner's, and it is his partner who is invite-commanded by the emperor to come to Sarantium and work on the novel's Hagia Sophia analogue. The partner,though, is old, and tired, and Crispin is merely middle-aged and embittered, so they decide it is he who will go "Sailing to Sarantium" in the novel's idiom for finally getting a shot at the big time, though because the imperial courier dawdled with the message it's too late in the year for safe sailing and so Crispin must travel overland.

So far this sounds about as fantastic as a Lars Brownworth podcast**, and I will just spill the non-fantastical beans here and say that, well, a Clark Ashton Smith story this is not. There is very little magic here, and not much in the way of mythical creatures either -- about as much as you'd see in, say, four or five chapters of A Song of Ice and Fire. But like those books, you're not going to be reading this for the dragons and centaurs and necromancers. You'll read it for the characters and the intricate and crazy court politics and for Crispin's story, the story of an artisan, the kind of guy we can never know any real story about (hence, I posit, the decision to make of this tale a fantasy instead of just a historical novel set in Byzantium. At least in part.) because artisans' names and biographical details did not make the history books until, overall, the Renaissance.

And also because, so far in my experience at least, when Kay writes fantasy, he's interested in exploring one of the more interesting possibilities that the fantasy genre offers: that of examining a world in which religion and its attendant rituals are not matters of mere faith/belief, as they are in our world, but matters of fact. Gods exist and prove their existence by directly interacting with humans (sometimes quite intimately). Ignoring them, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, does not make them go away. And neglecting to propitiate them has real and tangible consequences that can't be argued about (or at least not much). We saw this in spades in Fionavar; here it's all a bit more subtle. There are pagans still in the Sarantine world, and we get at least one spectacular encounter with the reality of their pantheon and program during Crispin's journey to the great city from the sticks, but there is also a monotheism where, at least in this first novel, no proof is offered. It's all more like ours. It's all about belief.

Which lets Kay explore at one remove the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity that was just really developing in Byzantiume during Justinian's reign. The official religion of the Sarantine empire has sort-of-pagan trappings in that its single deity, Jad, is a sun god, but, just as Christianity was through its history, there's monotheism and there's monotheism. Pagan tugs at believers' heartstrings have some venerating a pantheon of martyrs almost as deeply as the god, and many arguing over whether the deity's incarnated earthly son was or was not as divine as the god itself.

All of this may turn off some readers, but those who have the patience for it are amply rewarded. The theological nitpicking deeply informs some of Crispin's very real and intense experiences, and his plans and visions for his coming triumph, the decoration of the pseudo-Hagia Sophia, which is to be more than a little bit of an assertion of doctrine given form in stone and mortar and prismatically lovely glass tesserae.

As I said, Kay loves exploring craft, and takes it as seriously as fodder for stories as he does his own practice. The care of Crispin for not merely design but construction and composition mirrors Kay's own attention to his craft. The result is as splendid as the dome of Hagia Sophia must have been in Justinian's day.

All this and some crazy action, too. Chariot races! Chariot crashes! Fighting! Sometimes in a bathhouse! And intrigue. So much intrigue. Crispin's arrival upsets many, many applecarts.

A caveat, though; as others have complained, Sailing to Sarantium ends feeling incomplete. Very little is resolved; most is saved for the second volume Lord of Emperors (which I'm already reading, of course). If you're going to read this, then, do yourself a favor and make sure you have the second book ready at hand.

Go, Blues!

*And let's just get this all out of the way and say that, fantasy trappings aside, this novel is basically set in Byzantium in the reign of Justinian and Theodora. All the events of that period are mirrored here, from the Nika riots and Theodora's famous quote about how imperial purple is a good color in which to be buried to the near-eternal conflict between the Blue and Green factions that are really only nominally about the two major colors striving for supremacy in the chariot racing marvel of the Hippodrome (as in the real Byzantium, the two factions also correspond to sides in a religious schism), to the need, after said riots, to rebuild the city and especially its primary religious edifice. It's all so on the nose, but as Byzantium is woefully under-represented in fiction, I happily allow it.

**If you've not listened to the marvelous Twelve Byzantine Rulers, go! Listen! It's glorious! I promise!

Dorothy Dunnett's THE SPRING OF THE RAM

The Spring of the Ram, volume two of the great Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò series of Renaissance mercantile thrillers, raises the stakes for my man Claes (now usually called Nicholas) in every possible way: he travels further, has a bigger impact on world events, acquires a ridiculous new frienemy (because Claes needed more enemies, didn't he?), and gets to learn what he really got himself into when he married Marian de Charetty the owner of the company that once employed him as an apprentice dyer.

At the end of Claes' first novel, Niccolò Rising, it was decided that he needed to broaden his horizons a bit more, by way of getting him away from Simon de St. Pol, murderous Scottish pretty boy and and Claes' unwilling stepfather.* And since Claes has manifested as a Business Genius, how better to get him away from Simon's sphere of influence than sending him on a trading voyage to the fabulous Levant?

Having secured the friendship and patronage of no less a figure than Cosimo de Medici, Claes is eastbound in a galley bought on credit to serve as Florence's consul in the empire of Trebizond -- the last remnant of the Byzantine empire, now surrounded on all sides by Ottomans and Turcomen and perpetually asking for rescue from their cranky and wrong-headed brothers in Christ, the Roman Catholic Church and its adherents. While some blustering friar types are perpetually trying to bestir the crowned heads of Europe to stop fighting each other and go save the Holy Land, Claes and the Medici see an opportunity to profit from the real situation: Trebizond is too decadent and ritual-bound to have ever bothered raising much of an army, but Trebizond has pearls and silk and dyestuffs coming through it from Asia all the time and can pay other people to be that army. Other people like Team Claes.

This all would be enough for most writers, but Dunnett has to make things more ridiculous and exciting. Enter Pagano Doria, who looks at first simply to be Claes' Genoese counterpart but has a lot more going on than that. Before we can say Lolita -- and, really, before Claes has even left his wife behind in Bruges -- Pagano has seduced Claes' younger stepdaughter Catherine and convinced her to come away with him to be his wife, even though she's only twelve years old. Talk about unruly tweens! Of course he has designs beyond her cute pre-pubescent person; she's heir to half the Charetty Company, and thus stands to make her husband very rich some day. And that's just the beginning of Pagano's perfidy.

Racing to Trebizond, Claes and Pagano duke it out, Renaissance style, with Pagano scoring most of the points. Uh oh. We all know by now what happens, eventually, to people who get on Claes' bad side, don't we?

The fun continues in Trebizond, where the rivals continue to mess with each other against the exotic backdrop of Hellenic Christendom's last imperial gasp -- and they're really just in time for the very last gasp. Dunnett doesn't go so far as to make the Fall of Trebizond Claes' fault, but the plot she weaves here proposes some interesting possibilities, and once again highlights the importance of mercantile adventurers like Claes and Pagano to world affairs. Kings and Queens are more glamorous and bitchy, but it's the guys who move the merchandise that really make things happen while the royals are off hawking or parading around in the silks and pearls the "sea princes" bring back from their travels -- and sometimes, it's the secrets those merchants keep that really make the difference. Here Claes' deal struck with Venice in the first novel -- to keep secret the discovery of a rich alum deposit in the Papal States and thus protect a monopoly -- may have hastened, if not in a way caused, the Fall of Trebizond. Had the Pope known about the alum in his own backyard, he could have mined and sold it and financed a Crusade. Instead, Europe kept on squabbling, and the last Byzantine emperor took the payoff the Ottomans offered and let them have his city. The conspiracy of alum silence needn't have been true for history to have happened the way it did, but it's a fantastically clever and subtle way to weave Claes' story into real world events -- and to load yet more guilt onto his conscience, make him seem possibly more of a monster.

For monster Claes is -- devastatingly intelligent, personable, patient, humble, and an epic holder, it would seem, of grudges. The members of Team Claes -- Loppe the freed African slave who is is household manager, Julius the Charetty Company lawyer/notary who basically helped raise Claes, Tobie the physician, and Father Godscalc the burly priest -- are neither trusting nor trusted but loyal all the same, because they know Claes can make them all rich, and because Claes keeps life very, very interesting.

On to the next novel, despite this one's actually quite icky (and sad) ending.

*As in, Claes is the son of Simon's first wife, but was probably begotten by a servant. And there are other ugly familial entanglements afoot between them, but I'm trying not to be too spoilery. I'll just say that it looks like one way or another that unnamed servant is the new St. Pol ancestor.