Retrospective: Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum by John Seavey 7/8/04
"He wants the very core of me, the only part that remains the same. He wants my heart, Bernice. And he can't have it."If you wanted to sum up the entire works of Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum (The Left-Handed Hummingbird, Set Piece, SLEEPY, Return of the Living Dad, So Vile a Sin, The Room With No Doors, Vampire Science, Walking to Babylon, Seeing I, Unnatural History, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Blue Box, Fallen Gods), this quote from The Left-Handed Hummingbird would be perfect to do so. From the beginning, all of Orman and Blum's novels have been about the central mystery at the heart of the Doctor -- the enigma at the heart of the character that we are torn between wanting to see and wanting to keep private.
Originally, Orman wrote without a co-author at all, producing her first two works, The Left-Handed Hummingbird and Set Piece. Later, as she and Blum moved forward in their personal relationship, they moved ahead in their professional one as well; Blum is frequently mentioned in Orman's later works for Virgin as an influence and later as an uncredited collaborator. Now, of course, they frequently co-author novels and novellas, and even where Blum's schedule prevents it, he still has a hand in her work. (And, of course, Orman also stepped in when a variety of pressures prevented Ben Aaronovich from completing So Vile a Sin.) Yet, throughout these influences on style and plot, the theme has remained the same. The villain invariably wants to get inside the Doctor's mind... or even deeper, into his soul. The struggle for the Doctor is never to defeat his enemies, but to preserve his mysteries. Griffin, White, Ship, Huitzilin, Akalu, Alekto... it's a laundry list of people who aren't so much evil as ruthless in their desperation for understanding.
Sometimes, it actually seems as though the villains, rather than the heroes, represent the authors' point of view... are we, as fans, too interested into prying into the Doctor's secrets? Do we take the desire to know everything about our hero too far? Are there mysteries we should leave sacred? It's a subject that Orman and Blum have worked on throughout their career, with subtle variations (and, it must be said, to varying degrees of success.)
Stylistically, both are obvious disciples of Paul Cornell, with all the good and bad that entails. On the one hand, it's no question that Orman and Blum provide some of the most vivid, energetic prose that we've seen in Doctor Who. The opening chapter of Set Piece, for example, simply smashes into you with unbelievable force, setting a tempo that carries the reader easily through the exposition that follows. Orman and Blum can amp up the tension so high in a scene that the reader vibrates like a string.
On the other, like Cornell, they are occasionally fond of Mary-Sues, inside jokes, self-referential dialogue, manifestoes, veiled jabs at other authors, fanwank, and far too many namechecks. (Although, after Vampire Science, I'm not sure how much of a moral high ground I can take there. After all, most murders happen at home.) And, since I took Keith Topping to task for his Waro, I must mention that it seems obligatory for every Orman/Blum book to mention somewhere either the Caxtarids, the Lacaillans, the Ikkabans, or if possible all three.
Their Doctor, however, is absolutely amazing. Spot on, a perfect recreation of what was seen on screen. (This actually worked against them when it came to Paul McGann, sadly enough... an ineffectual Doctor who needed to be rescued by his companion became, in the books, exactly that. Not to mention, a Doctor who's seen by female fans as somewhat "dishy" becomes a sex object for at least one character in every one of their EDAs. Obviously, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are feeling left out somewhere...) But their Doctor is deeper than the one we see on our TVs. Orman and Blum look into his heart, and imagine what it must be like to live so dangerous a life... not just dangerous to oneself, but to others. The Doctor is, after all, essentially a peaceful person who wants the best for everyone. If his heart bleeds at the fall of a sparrow, how much torment must he be in, deep in his heart, to see so many die for so little reason? Many moments testify to this, but the one that stands out is at the end of So Vile a Sin, when the Doctor nearly breaks upon seeing the alternate version of himself that managed to save everyone, not just almost everyone. It's the knowledge that he could have done better that he almost couldn't handle.
The actual stories that go into Orman and Blum's novels prove to be almost secondary to the emotions of their characters... which isn't to say that they don't have plots, but that the plots tend to be simple affairs that serve to highlight the characters, rather than the other way around. This means that the novel can spend a long time without a driving event to move the plot forward (witness Seeing I, in which the Doctor spends close to half the novel in prison), but Orman and Blum usually remain confident that the emotional energy infused into these events can move the novel forward in the absence of a driving plot. Usually, it can.
By this time, I can't imagine what Doctor Who would be like without the next novel by Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum, or some combination of the two. They've been influential voices in the Doctor Who novels for so long that they've almost defined its tone and style, and I have no doubt that I'd enjoy their contributions to Doctor Who for the next forty years. The only question remaining is how long they'll continue to feel that they have something to say about the series.