The Squire's Crystal
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Big Finish The Squire's Crystal |
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| Author | Jacqueline Rayner |  |
| ISBN | 1 903654 13 0 | |
| Published | 2001 |
| Synopsis: Finding the last resting place of the Crystal Sorceress is an archaeological dream on a par with discovering the Holy Grail. So it's hardly likely that someone will just offer the solution to Professor Bernice Summerfield on a plate. But sometimes the unlikely actually happens. And one thing that's very, very unlikely is that Benny will suddenly find herself to be a member of the opposite gender! |
Taping her bits up!!!! by Joe Ford 11/12/01
Please, please, PLEASE let Jac Rayner write every Benny book! I have never read a piece of fiction that has made me laugh so much in my entire life! I wasn't sure what made me giggle more, Benny's 'girlfriend' troubles, her reactions to have 'man bits' or her horror at what Avril had been up to in her body while she had been away!
Dontcha just love Benny? I can't tell you how against a companion spin off I was when I first heard she would get her own series of novels and CD's and to my shame refused to buy any of the merchandise. But once I ran out of Who stuff to buy I thought 'go on, give it a go' and to my surprise albeit amazement I was enthralled. Oh No it Isn't! was a classic, Beyond the Sun was charming, Walking to Babylon was beautifully drawn...and the CD's were exquisite! Intelligent, resourceful, embarassing and just so damn NORMAL. Bernice is such a perfect heroine simply because she is so human!
This is Benny at her peak...and she's in a man's body! Let's face it it could have been dreadful, a soul searching piece philosophising about men and womens roles. Sod that! Rayner concentrates and what you would really be going through in Benny's situation...having to play it tough, experiencing your first stiffy, having to pee standing up...okay so it's all pretty gross but good god it's so damn funny you've just gotta love it! And it just gets funnier when Benny in Dom's body, Dom in old security gaurd Bills body and Avril in Benny's body all chase each other trying to get the bodies right!! You get the idea...scrap the realism and just get wooshed along with the mad happenings in this screwed up comedy!
And to top of all this frothy goodness is the scene where Benny gets her body back, the body she was disgusted at at the begining of the book and declares to be the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. Perfect.
The Squire's Gonads by Robert Smith? 29/1/02
First off, let me say that I can't believe I had to harvest a kidney in order to afford this novel when it's shorter than the novelisation of Fury from the Deep. I'm not sure which is worse: paying an exorbitant price for this slim volume, or paying the same price last time for a book written by Steve Cole. Okay, file that one away in the "Questions that answer themselves, really" drawer, but it worries me that Big Finish are shortening their novels with each passing one, yet there's no corresponding drop in price.
I was hoping for good things this time around, based on my love of EarthWorld, which was a great mix of the comic and the serious, providing us with the perfect followup to the Earth arc. And The Marian Conspiracy is a surprisingly disciplined work. Could we finally have an editor-turned-writer who is actually good?
The Squire's Crystal isn't terrible, it just isn't that great either. What's worse is that it's not nearly as funny as it wants to be, and without that there's not a whole lot left. It tries to give us some deep and serious stuff towards the end, but it's a lot less successful than EarthWorld's attempt. EarthWorld gave us an out and out comedy at the beginning, but also managed to examine Anji and the effects of her debut story in realistic and touching detail. The Squire's Crystal is trying to get by with a lot of jokes involving gonads and then doing something unnecessarily cruel to Benny at the end, seemingly just so it can have its cake and eat it too.
Now don't get me wrong, I like gonad jokes as much as the next man. I've even been known to laugh at the occasional toilet-humour joke in a Peter Anghelides novel, so my standards aren't exactly high. But I'm not sure they can sustain an entire novel. I'd be happy to go with the flow, but The Squire's Crystal wants to be an examination of what makes men and women tick while simultaneously making lots of jokes about peeing standing up and then hurting Benny in perhaps the most painful way imaginable (and no, not in the gonads, although that's in there too). My own gonads almost broke off in the whiplash (which was more enjoyable than you might at first think).
It's a bit of a shame that all the Big Finish Benny novels seem to be running the same archaeology-based plot. There's some hidden secret from the mists of history conveniently close to the Braxiatel Collection and only a talented archaeologist who happens to stumble upon it by accident and gets caught in a web of intrigue can sort everything out (with a little help from Brax at the end). Okay, true, the Virgin BenNAs had their house style too (Benny gets in touch with hitherto unmentioned close old friend, who leads her away from drunken revelry and very little teaching on Dellah into exciting adventures before being killed and thus never mentioned again), but not in every single book and they produced Dead Romance. I can't see Big Finish producing anything much more than they're doing with their 186 page light entertainment runarounds. Come back JN-T, all is forgiven...
The attempts to examine the differences between men and women seems a bit superficial to me. I realise that's an odd complaint to make about a comedy, but these parts of the novel aren't played for laughs (or if they are, they've failed hideously). Okay, sure it's a complex issue that's challenged the world's finest thinkers since time began, but reducing it down to "Women like make-up and going to the mall and are a bit insecure about their breasts, men like to pee standing up and trying to have a lot of sex and even a man hung like a particularly well-hung dromedary is still going to crumble entirely if you insult the size of his member, no, really, he would, I'm sure of it, oh stop analysing it, don't you realise it's supposed to be a comedy" isn't doing anyone any favours, as far as I can see.
All that said, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had in The Squire's Crystal. Adrian Wall's infatuation with Benny is hilarious and one of the few jokes that not only works, it actually survives being a running gag. When he surreptitiously produced a wedding ring in the middle of the big showdown, I was on the floor laughing. Benny trying to work out Poppy's name was quite well done. And of the three hundred gonad jokes, a good three or four are rather amusing. The unconscious fish made me laugh as well, although I'm not entirely sure they were supposed to.
The destruction of Benny's diaries just seemed a bit pointless to me, especially given the pain it causes her. It's an unnecessarily cruel action, both for the tone of the rest of this novel and for the situation. I still don't buy the reason Avril gave for destroying them - and I'm not sure if it's consistent with Walking to Babylon, where in Benny's memoirs she states that only six diaries were destroyed or left behind over the years; I guess you can make it work, but it's still unpleasant, IMO.
The Squire's Crystal is an entertaining enough runaround when that's what it's trying to be. When it's trying to be a deep examination of the differences between men and women, it's a lot less successful. And when it tries to add depth to Benny, it feels awfully contrived and unnecessarily cruel. A bit of a hodge-podge, all up.
A Review by Finn Clark 20/2/02
This book is silly. It's funny, no question, but the situations it's based on are often comedy of embarrassment, which doesn't really push my buttons. I don't much like Fawlty Towers either. That said, I thought The Squire's Crystal was a smoothly written, enjoyable book.
As with Earthworld, Jac Rayner's bad guys don't tend to be evil. They're stupid, thoughtless, weak and stupid, but not wicked. This tends to make the story's conflicts less scary and thrilling, but on the other hand it makes the characters more real. The jury's still out on whether this is a good thing or not; given its rarity in the literary Whoniverse, I think I'm inclined to welcome it. And of course here Jac's produced a story that manages to drive itself along very nicely without sniggering black-clad Beards of Evil and plots to destroy the universe.
My only niggle is that it's a bit dim of everyone not to suspect a body-swap when Benny-as-a-bloke is forgetting everything she supposedly knows and behaving grossly out of (assumed) character after being found in possession of a body-swapping crystal. The bloke's girlfriend is particularly slow on the uptake, considering she's the one who did the historical research on it!
All in all, this is a pretty good book. To use Hollywood terms, it takes a high concept and runs with it. Entertaining.
A Review by John Seavey 6/3/03
Unfortunately, the good folks at Big Finish neglected to include a warning label on The Squire's Crystal, and I'm quite worried that someone might get hurt as a result. Hence, I'm including the following as a public service: Simply print it out, and affix it to your copy. Lives may be saved as a result.
"Warning: The plot of The Squire's Crystal is not a load-bearing narrative. Please do not attempt to put any pressure on the logic in the novel, as it can and will snap. Under no circumstances attempt to engage your brain while reading this book. Simply enjoy the funny dialogue and humorous situations, and return the book to its proper position when finished."
In other words, this book is total fluff. It's endearing, enjoyable, ever so slightly smutty fluff, and if you are in the mood for fluff, I cannot recommend a book more highly... but do not under any circumstances come to this book for its plot.
So, I've now read three Big Finish Benny novels, and I've now had three instances of Benny being duped by a good-looking guy. I don't wish to suggest that she's utterly desperate for a shag, here, but explanations are starting to get a bit thin on the ground. The "messages from Fred" come thick and fast in the section where she gets suckered by Dominic -- from "Nah, he couldn't be trying to dupe me, because it'd be so implausible if that were to happen right away again after the last two times" to "Oh, bugger, he did sucker me, how gullible must I be to let it happen again so soon after the last two times!" Yes, that's the author's conscience speaking out.
This is also the third consecutive book where someone's made use of the Fifth Axis... OK, yes, we get the picture, they're around. Aren't there going to be any other villains to deal with anywhere?
Other minor plot quibbles (How did Avril's lair escape Brax's notice? Why doesn't Benny start telling people who she is once she gets back to the Collection? When does Benny get the chance to do all the research that she claims to have done to uncover all the answers she dishes out at the end?) do get dealt with, eventually, sort of... but again, do not attempt to apply pressure to the logic of this novel. Especially not to the discovery of Avril's lair, which is the worst coincidence EVER. (Just as Dominic visits the Collection to tell them that Avril's lair is somewhere on the asteroid, it so happens that there's a cave-in, revealing said lair. *sigh*)
So, with no plot to sustain us, where does that leave The Squire's Crystal? With a lot of funny scenes and great Benny characterization. Most of the novel is told from a third-person limited perspective, with us seeing the action through Benny's eyes... or, as events unfold, through the eyes of the male body Benny inhabits. Many have made mention of the all-too-frequent jokes about male anatomy in this book... however, they're funny jokes about the male anatomy. (My favorite line was when Benny suddenly shrieked out, "Aah! It moved on its own!" right in front of the girlfriend of the man she was impersonating.) There's also some very funny bits when Avril attempts to pretend to be Benny using Benny's diaries as a guideline, not understanding that Benny uses her diaries not as a means of recording her feelings, but as a coping mechanism for concealing them. :)
The whole thing, despite a few deaths and a "stinger" ending, is a laugh riot from start to finish, a Big Finish equivalent to The Joy Device or Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It's fluff... but every once in a while, fluff is nice to relax into.