A Look at Kate Orman’s Return of the Living Dad
By Rob Langenderfer
Kate Orman has crafted a masterpiece with her fourth New Adventure novel Return of the Living Dad. It is a very entertaining book that grabs the reader’s interest tightly and keeps it all the way through the story. In addition to the Doctor, Benny, Roz, and Chris, who are all in excellent form, there are a couple of very good guest characters, including Isaac Summerfield and Joel. For once, a plot with Chris and Roz is actually quite interesting, going beyond their forever-cynical and forever-cheerful exteriors and bringing some depth to the characters as the latent attraction that Chris has felt for Roz comes forth. Admittedly, I am overstating what I saw as their previous problems of personality traits that were always present and grated on one’s nerves, but hardly any author was able to do anything with them to really make me want to read about them. This has finally changed with this book, and I now actually have a reason to read Simon Bucher-Jones’s Death of Art, the next New Adventure in the series. Benny is written very well in this novel as she attempts to bring her father and the Doctor together. Even Jason is less irritating than usual. The Doctor is written very well as some of the plot threads that continue through many of the New Adventures are brought into this story. The death of the 7th Doctor is also foreshadowed in this tale. Joel is a really fun and interesting character and is consciously representative of all of us crazy Doctor Who fans out there. As Dave Owen noted of this book in his review of it in Doctor Who Magazine, this book is very much a book about fandom. I would go one step further and say that, in many respects, this is the book that Happy Endings should have been (a somewhat ironic comment, I know, considering that at the book’s end, the author notes that she developed the plot of the book with Paul Cornell as a sort of Human Nature in reverse). Happy Endings was not a bad book, but it didn’t have much real drama in it, and it had so many continuity references that it was difficult for even someone like me, who has read nearly all of the New Adventures, to remember who all of the characters were. Return of the Living Dad has continuity references that work well within the plot, and they are references that people who have read the books will recall with relative ease.
The plot of the book overall is very good. It has some wonderfully humorous moments, but it does not allow them to overwhelm the plot and weaken the drama as has occurred in other novels and episodes of the TV series. The point where Benny recalls how at first she thought that Star Trek: The Next Generation was a documentary is a case in point! The book has some moments of very tense drama, and the audience really feels that the Doctor is in danger of dying after he is recovered following his experiences with Albinex. It brought me back to the tense fear that I felt when I was reading No Future and Mortimus had sealed the Doctor in some sort of ice after he had been stabbed by Ace. Many times the reader gets so used to the Doctor’s charms that it’s easy to believe he’s invulnerable even though he’s died many times before. It shows that an author has real skill when he or she can make the the readers honestly believe that the Doctor is in true danger, and Ms. Orman has done just that in this book. The idea of Isaac starting up a group to help the aliens left behind on Earth is an interesting one although it is a pity that this book couldn’t have been more directly tied in with Gary Russell’s The Scales of Injustice since both of them deal with different groups cleaning up UNIT’s messes. It seemed somehow naive of the Doctor to fall for Woodworth as much as he seemed to in the early part of the book, their relationship almost seeming to have romantic overtones, when she turns out being a paranoid alien-hater. I’m not exactly sure what could have been done to make it convincing, however. It did hold the reader’s interest though. The Doctor guessing that Isaac was ultimately behind his kidnapping was certainly very much of a shock, and at least the Doctor seemed to imply that it was just like a lucky moment of inspiration for him. It certainly was a shock for the reader! However it was developed quite well, and it seems that it worked out for the best. Overall, this book stands as Kate Orman’s best work so far. It balances comedy and drama very well just as the TV series generally did, for the most part. It is one of the best New Adventures written so far, and it is the best New Adventureof all the books that I’ve read so far which have come out in 1996. After reading this book, I can hardly wait to get to So Vile A Sin.