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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Time Lord Nature, June 8, 2003
(Note: This book is available as a free e-book on the BBC's Cult website.)When I first read HUMAN NATURE back in 1995 or 1996, I thought it was quite good. Not perfect, but quite good. Since the mid-90s, the book's reputation has done nothing but skyrocket. Finally declared as the greatest New Adventure in various polls and reviews, I fully expect to see it posited as the supreme work of English fiction by sometime in the next century. Rereading it today (well, last week to be specific), I found that my opinion hadn't changed all that much. It's still a really good book with some outstanding sequences and genuine emotion. But it also contains some fairly blatant missteps. It's a shame that Paul Cornell didn't quite make his villains as interesting as his heroes, given that both factions are given huge amounts of screen time. The storyline is very simple, very traditional in all but one major area. The Doctor decides to take a vacation. Weary with the weights and responsibilities of being the Intergalactic Man Of Mystery, he decides to create an artificial persona for himself (the hints of where his false memories come from are great fun), and places his consciousness into the human body of Dr. John Smith (his own body, after undergoing a gobbledygook process to temporarily rid it of its Gallifreyan heritage). While his own thoughts, experiences, and Time Lord know-how are placed into a container, a group of alien baddies arrives on Earth intending to steal the Doctor's essence for their own nefarious schemes. Everyone who discusses this book eventually gets around to criticizing the alien Aubertides. I will not be breaking from convention. They really are pathetic adversaries. Actually, it would be more accurate to describe them as depressingly ordinary. While the Smith/Doctor storyline captivates and enthralls the reader, one is instantly jolted back to banality every time we're forced to continue with the Adventures Of The Irritating Aliens. And the biggest problem of all is that they're present and nauseating for so much of the book. Had they just appeared from time to time to remind us of the main Doctor Who practices, they wouldn't have been quite so annoying. (Unfortunately, Cornell would not learn from this lesson. Cavis and Gandar of SHADOWS OF AVALON somehow manage to be much, much worse.) Cornell also cheats a bit with his plotting. Fortunately, he's a strong enough writer to be able to keep the story moving fast enough, so that most of the stretches aren't quite as damning as they would be had they come from the pen of a lesser. Even so, there are some absolutely insane coincidences, people acting stupid just to move the plot along, and places where the action stops completely dead for some silly and preaching moralizing. I apologize for having spent so much time taking about the portions of HUMAN NATURE I found to be irritating, because overall, even with its flaws, this is still a damned good book. The progression of Dr. John Smith back into the Doctor figure is extraordinarily well done. His relationship with a rather mundane Earth woman is nicely understated. I loved the fact that while I (and Benny) found her to be slightly haughty and grating, I could still understand completely how Smith started falling for her. What Cornell does with the Doctor here is absolutely fantastic. Seeing Smith slowly but surely regaining his essential characteristics is mind-blowing. The way that Cornell places the crucial Doctor qualities into another secondary character is subtly cool. The final thirty pages are gorgeous. In other places, the book also scores a bull's-eye. I read this one straight after SANCTUARY, and the difference in writing couldn't have been any more obvious. While the previous tome had dense prose that I found difficult and distracting, the pages in HUMAN NATURE just flew by. The words and phrases can seem as light as a feather, but can be utterly devastating when need be. It's like an expensive, rare, and pleasant wine. A few sips are absolute heaven, and after a good long session, you find yourself knocked on your butt. As I said, I liked HUMAN NATURE despite its fairly obvious flaws. On the other hand, I think somewhere out there is a version of this book written entirely as extracts from the dairies of Benny and Dr. John Smith, keeping the character stuff even more at the forefront, and banishing the Aubertides to well-deserved obscurity. That version may very well be the greatest Doctor Who story of all time. But that's not the version we have here, which isn't even the best of Paul Cornell. Yet it's still quite good and definitely worth reading.
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