Tom Holt: Blonde Bombshell (2010)

Tom Holt's latest novel seems to follow in well trodden footsteps. An advanced alien civilization finds itself threatened by the Earth's broadcasts through space, as music (not a concept previously known to them) is addictive to the Ostar. They send an intelligent bomb  to destroy the Earth, only to loose contact; Blonde B ombshell concerns their second attempt,  to find out what the Earth's hidden technology which put paid to the first bomb could possibly be, and carry out the destruction mission. All gung ho, the second bomb arrives, and sends down a probe, putting a copy of its mind in a human body created for the purpose. While it realises that "Mark Two" would not be an acceptable name for human culture, it decides that "Mark Twain" would be - a slight variation on the choice of "Ford Prefect" as the name used by the alien guide researcher in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (albeit one which is likely to go out of date less quickly).

Holt's writing generally relys on characters who are fish out of water to provide much of the humour, and Blonde Bombshell is no exception. Here, there are both machines trying to pass as human and the Ostar relationship with people: they are shaped like dogs, and keep pets who are like humans, and the inversion is a natural source of jokes. But the jokes are all essentially the same, and this lack of variety palled for me quite quickly. In essence, the problem I had with Blonde Bombshell is that I didn't find it very funny. Some Tom Holt books do strike me this way, including Wish You Were Here. This one is not as bleak, being instead a tired repeat.

I like Holt's work, but not in this case: my rating - 4/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2010
Review number: 1410

Tom Holt: Only Human (1999)

Edition: Orbit, 1999
Review number: 694

After the rather downbeat Wish You Were Here, Tom Holt has returned to farcical humour for his next novel. It starts with a fairly standard idea in this sort of fiction, when Kevin, disregarded younger son of the Supreme Being (jealous of his successful older brother Jay), accesses his father's computer while he's out fishing. He manages to make some changes to the universe, but can't undo them - the manual is very thin, being designed for use by the omniscient and omnipotent.

What he has actually managed to do is to swap souls around - not one human to another, but non-human and human:- a machine and its operator, an accountant and a painting, a lemming and the British Prime Minister, and so on. Each finds it difficult to fit in to his/her new environment, but things turn more serious when a group of demons starts trying to exploit the situation for their own ends.

Familiar territory this may be, but it is something Holt does better than most; Only Human is consistently funny. Some of the jokes might be a bit Anglocentric for American readers, but it is a return to form.

Tom Holt: Who's Afraid of Beowulf? (1988)

Edition: MacMillan, 1988
Review number: 661

The second of Tom Holt's comic fantasy novels, Who's Afraid of Beowulf? is rather a tentative affair by comparison with most of them. It gets its comedy from the same idea as Expecting Someone Taller (and many other humourous fantasy novels), as it concerns a group of characters from mythology bewildered by the modern world.

In this case, the bewildered mythological characters are heroes from the Norse sagas, sealed for hundreds of years in a ship burial in a remote part of Caithness (Scotland) until needed again. They encounter such things as buses, TV cameras, and policemen, interpreting mast technology as like the magic they had known in the past. Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, though often amusing, never becomes really funny. This is partly because of the hackneyed plot. The best bits are the games played by the two elemental spirits also imprisoned in the mound.

Beowulf does not feature in the novel (he is mentioned once, in passing), and the title is more the sort of joke made by an undergraduate English student faced with learning Anglo-Saxon than anything to do with the novel itself.

Tom Holt: Wish You Were Here (1998)

Edition: Orbit, 1998
Review number: 262

At the time of writing, I believe this is the most recent Tom Holt novel to be published. For a comic fantasy novel, it is extremely bleak, being based on the fairy story idea of the wish which turns out to be rather a liability when granted. (Stories of this kind are extremely ancient, being found in Greek and Roman myth as well as Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.)

Lake Checopee, in Iowa, has a resident spirit, who grants those who drown in the lake their heart's desire, or at least their strongest desire at the moment when they pass through the lake's surface. There are two problems with this. First, she only has limited resources at her disposal (basically the labour of those who drowned in the past, plus a little magic). Second, her interpretation of the desire is often quite perverse.

The fulfilment of the wish generally involves some series of encounters with bears, Indians, Vikings (exploring from Vinland via the Great Lakes in a complicated sort of way), and so on. The idea behind the spirit's actions is to improve the personalities of the wishers in some way, and is generally both confusing and unpleasant, as they are brought to realise that their shallow dreams do not equate with happiness.

The four characters tracked through the book have fairly typical hearts' desires: ambition (the reporter wanting the scoop of her career), social success (the woman wanting sex appeal), escapism (the desire for adventure) and - a typical Holt touch - mundane and immediate (to find the car keys that the search for led to the fall into the lake).

Wish You Were Here is quite depressing to read, as the dreams are relentlessly ground down. In contrast to Holt's other novels, I did not find it very amusing; it is more as though he is trying to say "This is what life is really like."

Tom Holt: Grailblazers (1994)

Edition: Orbit, 1994
Review number: 254

By the time he wrote Grailblazers, Tom Holt's style was well established. Indeed, nearly all of his novels since Expecting Someone Taller have followed its successful format: a comic re-evaluation of themes and characters from a well known medieval legend set in the twentieth century, comedy being provided by the attempts of the characters to fit into a culture alien to them (and allowing Holt to satirise the more ridiculous aspects of the modern world). This makes all these novels a little too similar to each other, as is also the case with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but you can certainly say that if a reader enjoys one they will enjoy them all: the standard is much more even than the Discworld novels.

In the case of Grailblazers, the medieval myth is that of the quest for the Holy Grail. In the fifteen hundred years since the quest of the Order of the Grail began, those knights who remain have become resigned to their lack of success, and are holding down normal twentieth century jobs (insurance salesman, pizza deliverer and so on). The major skills of the medieval knight have got rather out of date: who needs chivalry today? Then, when their leader retires to set up an estate agency, a new broom is appointed by Merlin to take over.

Boamund is an anachronism. He drank drugged milk, and has spent the last fifteen hundred years asleep in a cave (where his armour rusted so solid that he had to be released from it with an oxyacetylene torch). He immediately brings new enthusiasm to the knights' quest, to their dismay (especially as they all remember him as a priggish prefect at the school of chivalry).

Tom Holt: Expecting Someone Taller (1987)

Edition: Orbit, 1991
Review number: 238

The first of Holt's comic fantasy novels, Expecting Someone Taller is based around the ideas of Wagner's Ring operas. The main character, Malcolm Fisher, is basically a failure, someone that has spent his whole life being compared unfavourably with his elder sister. Then, one night, he accidentally runs over a badger on a country road in Devon; going to see if he can do anything, he is rather surprised to hear the badger speak. It turns out to be the giant Ingolf, who took the Ring (which basically controls the universe) and Tarnhelm (which allows the wearer to transform their appearance into any form they like) from Siegfried's funeral pyre. With the Tarnhelm, he turned himself into a badger to hide from the Elder Gods, particularly Wotan, who want to get their hands on the Ring.

The rest of the book is about Malcolm's attempts to understand the power of the Ring and to use it to improve the world, and the attempts of the gods to trick or force him to give it up to them. The comedy Holt generates centres mainly around the relationship of these primeval gods to the twentieth century and its institutions. This is a reasonably rich vein for comedy, used by other writers as well, but it doesn't disguise the soft centre of this novel.

Malcolm is basically a nice guy, who tends to fall in love with any pretty woman who takes an interest in him. What he does with the Ring - putting an end to disasters and wars - is not of such interest as his love life. The Ring is connected to the unconscious of the owner, and disasters reflect anger and such emotions, and this leaves Holt with not a great deal of leeway when it comes to using it as the basis of an interesting plot. (Mind you, in Wagner's Ring operas, the Ring is at least as passive, hardly used at all except as some vague kind of powerful talisman. Its plot purpose is to be the focus of desire, not to actually do anything.)

Expecting Someone Taller is funny and fun, but it is not as good a novel as some of Holt's later stories in the same line.