The Glamour Chase - Gary Russell **SPOILERS**

So, last Friday night, being a bit bored and in a book and Doctor Who mood, I finally pulled the Doctor Who novel my brother gave me two Christmas' ago off my bookshelves. I finished it the next morning. In my defence, it's not exactly an epic - 18 chapters and 243 pages with fairly well spaced print.




The Glamour Chase - Gary Russell

The first couple of chapters had me a little confused. They were completely different entities in a way. The prologue was very much a fairytale.

That reminds me, I should mention that it is a Eleventh Doctor story with Amy and Rory, set before The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood (they keep referring to Rio, and Amy and Rory aren't married yet). In fact from the Rio references I can only infer that it is pretty much directly before the Silurian episodes. I'm drifting. My point was going to be that the prologue definitely fits with Steven Moffat's stated use of a fairytale quality for series 5 & 6.

Back to the story...

The prologue is a previous version of the Doctor (although that is revealed later) doing what he does and promising a little girl that he'll come a say hello one day if she sets of this beacon when she's older and exploring the universe. Chapter 1 has an alien ship crashing on Earth near an ancient village. Chapter 2 is a quaint English scene razed to ashes by another alien race. My reaction was 'well that's a bit grim'. At that point I felt a bit jarred. Each section had been so very different and didn't seem to have anything to do with each other. Without spoilering too much, by halfway through the book I think I'd started figuring out where each bit fit.

The main thing that struck me about the rest of the book was Rory. It's a really lovely Rory character piece. Amy wanders about with the cute farm hand, gets captured, screams a bit, gets replaced by an imposter etc. The Doctor waffles, insults Rory, notices something is odd, insults Rory, and eventually figures stuff out. Rory, however is incredibly compassionate and perceptive. The key to the mystery is a man suffering from what Rory very quickly realises is PTSD. Rory's compassion and need to help, need to heal this man is just lovely and warm. And his medical knowledge (even though he's a nurse, not a psychologist) is instrumental in helping ort through Oliver Mark's issues in order to tease out the very vital knowledge he has. And it Rory's care that lets Oliver trust the Doctor, because he trusts Rory.

It;s not just this. It is Rory who discoveres the benelovent alien race and allows the Doctor to figure out who they are. Rory notices the odd comments from Amy that the Doctor also notes when he figures out that it is a fake Amy, though the Doctor does figure it out first. And when the Doctor is trapped in a fantasy world at the end, it is Rory who notices the details and figures out how to get them out.

I found that Rory was pretty much the heart of the story.

I don't think the alien stuff was quite so strong. The Weave was reasonably well explained as a race. A people made of protien fibres that look like wool who can take on any appearance and in fact keep their captives alive and in hibernation because they need a live template. But they also don't use a person without said person's consent. A rather nice race really. The Tahnn are a bit pathetic really. The enemy of The Weave, they get destroyed before they even get close to really being a threat.

And Then there is The Glamour.

An energy source that is used as some form of entertainment by The Weave - I think? It seems to have the ability to recreate the fantasies of the user. Far too powerful to be used by a human mind, so of course when it is released it hones in on a human mind, managing to trap the Doctor in the fake reality. For some reason it is attracted to peopl who desperately want to escape their reality? I didn't really understand that bit.

Although it did provide a hilarious moment at the climax when theDoctor wanted to wake up one of the hibernating humans who in fact was not aware of what was going on in order to scare her into drawing The Glamour back into the ship. In act, she was a proper English lady who was not ruffled at all, much to the Doctor's shock. In fact it was a rather unpleasant character who freaked out and drew it in.

So, yeah, my conclusion - a fun read and wonderful Rory character piece, though some of the Sci Fi elements were a bit dodgy.