Torchwood: Skypoint...

[fajrdrako]

Torchwood: Skypoint by Phil Ford is another good Torchwood novel. Are they getting better all the time, or am I just imagining that?

The plot: there's a fancy new high-rise apartment building in Cardiff called Skypoint, where people are mysteriously disappearing. A sinister Latvian gangster owns the place and lives in the penthouse. Investigating, the Torchwood team moves in and finds themselves doing battle with the building itself - a mass of booby traps and an alien presence.

If I had any problem with the plot, it was that I guessed the mechanism of the alien perpetrator as soon as we met the little girl and her plaything - but that didn't ruin the fun in the least. It just kept me wondering when the characters would figure it out.

Specific points:

1. Jack was delightfully heroic. There's a sequence of scenes where he is climbing on the outside of the building with Gwen, that I just loved.
   
   
2. Torchwood does not contain a lot of references as to its internal timeline, but this book had several that had me puzzled - and skeptical. I know fans have worked out timelines, and I've read them with approval - I must go back to compare and consider. This is set somewhere after "Something Borrowed" but before "Exit Wounds" - Gwen and Rhys are married, Owen is in the story as walking dead. Yet Gwen refers to her first meeting with Jack as "little more than a year ago" on page 10. Could it be so recent? Given that Jack was absent several months between "End of Days" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang", that doesn't leave a lot of months for all the action of both series 1 and 2. I'd prefer to think of it as more like two years.
   
   
3. There's an interesting paragraph on page 14 about Torchwood pay:

   [Gwen] had never been entirely sure who it was that signed the Torchwood pay cheques - the money just appeared in he bank account on the first of every month - but, whoever they were, the wages bore no comparison to the dangers involved in their earning. As a general rule, if you wanted to make a fortune it seemed you have do come up with another way of ending the world, not saving it.

   I would think it was Jack who arranges their pay - I see no evidence of someone else doing it, though I suppose there could be a Torchwood Foundation keeping the money coming. But if so - surely Jack would be the administrator? I don't believe that Jack is answerable to anyone.¹
   
   
4. Jack's smiles, from Toshiko's point of view, page 41:

   Jack gave the guy another smile. Not the high-beam dazzle-and-run smile; this one was lower intensity, the kind that drew you in and suckered you. Jack had a million smiles. One time, somewhere, Jack had been some sort of con man. She guessed that was how he came by the Smiles.

   What I really love about this is that we know Toshiko knows Jack was a con man, because we heard him tell her so in "Captain Jack Harkness". I don't think the others know, and this maintains that continuity.
   
   
5. From Owen's point of view, page 54: "One thing about being dead, you never ran out of breath."
   
   
6. The first hint, as far as I know, that Ianto is university-educated - actually, the whole description of Ianto and how he came to be in Jack's Torchwood is interesting. From page 69:

   Ianto Jones took his coffee black, and seriously.
   
   When Torchwood One had been destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf, Ianto had been one of the few survivors, and he had returned to Wales looking for a job with the Cardiff operation. Jack had never had much time for Torchwood One, he didn't like the way they did things and thought their disastrous handling of the Dalek-Cybermen situation had proved him right. So he was never going to have much interest in Ianto Jones, despite the cut of his suit, never mind how cute he might have been. But Ianto was determined, and he campaigned hard, though to Jack it felt as if he'd got himself a stalker. And Ianto was ready to do anything to get himself a place in the Hub. He was an intelligent man with Honours in English Literature and History - but he'd just make the coffee and run the hoover around if that was what it took to get back into Torchwood.
   
   ...Ianto Jones, saving the world with a dark roast.

   Not being very conversant with the British educational system, I wonder if an Honours in Engish Literature might mean something at less than a university level of education? Could it? Or is this an indication that Ianto has at least a B.A.?
   
   
7. The bit of the quote I left out above - from Ianto's point of view:

   The philosopher Sir James Mackingtosh had said that the powers of a man's mind were proportionate to the quantity of coffee he drank, and Voltaire had knocked back fifty cups of it a day, so Ianto reckoned there had to be something in it.

   I love the way Ianto's mind works - and this is exactly how I best see and understand Ianto. Knowledgeable, interested in the theory and philosophy behind things, a thinker rather than a man of action, yet wanting to become a man of action.
   
   
8. Captain Jack, commenting on the people who disappeared without a trace, on page 71: "So what happened? They didn't get beamed up by Mr Scott." I love it when fannish characters make fannish references.
   
   
9. Another nice bit of Ianto characterization, this time from Owen's point of view, on page 74:

   Owen... took a mug from the box of kitchen things that Ianto had put together for them. The mugs were stylish, tall and slim with silver rims. Very Ianto.

   
   
10. On page 75 Owen talks about his parents fighting all the time when he was young. Is this the first time I've come across a reference to his father?
    
    
11. The dismal Torchwood record on page 75: "Toshiko... had gone back through the Torchwood records once. No one had ever left the organization for another job, or to start a family, or to go live in a cottage by the sea. Personnel files all closed with the same word: DECEASED." Well, not Jack's. I like to think that there's someone who has retired from Torchwood and lived on, elsewhere - retconned, maybe, but alive and well.
    
    
12. I love Toshiko's courage in this book, even though she does some reasonably stupid things out of temperament - mostly because of her love/anger feelings for Owen. There's a sequence in which her fear of confined spaces is described - fear because of her memories of the UNIT cell; but she does brave things in an enclosed space anyway.
    
    Actually, her feelings towards Owen make much more sense to me here than they ever did in the aired show, where that relationship was my least favourite thing about series 2. (Yes, really.) Owen and Tosh are both very well characterized.
    
    
13. From page 118: Who is Frankie Howerd?
    
    
14. From page 123, Owen's point of view: "Gwen knew more dirty jokes than the Blues' locker room had ever heard."
    
    
15. There's a nice Jack/Gwen sequence on page 206, where she has been affected by a psychotic drug and almost killed. Recovering:

    'I'm OK,' she said at last.
    Jack continued to hold her tight.
    'I said I'm all right, Jack.'
    'I know,' he said. 'But you know me - any excuse.'
    'I'm a married woman woman now, Captain Harkness,' she said playfully, and escaped his arms.

    
    
16. From page 221-222, Jack's deaths:

    One day, when he'd had time on his hands, Jack had tried to work out how many times he had dies. He actually sat down in his office with a block of paper and a couple of pens and wrote a neat 1 in the margin and alongside it he wrote Dalek....
    He was sure he had already forgotten some of them - unlike his lovers; he remembered all of them (every sex and species) - the one thing he never forgot, however, was how it felt to come back to life.

    
    
17. Jack, standing on the ledge of a high building, page 225:

    [Jack] pushed the Webley back into its holster and slipped the air force greatcoat off and handed it to Gwen.
    'Keep this for me, will you? Batman looks great with that flapping cloak of his, but I don't think he ever gets this close to the edge.'

    
    
18. And while on the ledge, page 232, Jack's point of view:

    Distantly, he heard the sounds of cars in the city below. Night owls heading home, and shift workers making for the plant. He had travelled to a lot of worlds in his time, but that one seemed stranger than most, and so much more than just sixty metres away. A world of mortgage repayments, office jobs, pension plans and family. Not his world, and never would be.

    Reminds me of the Doctor. And like so many of the descriptions of the Torchwood characters in this book, it is how I interpreted the characters in my own head, and the way I want them to be.
    
    
19. There isn't much interaction between Ianto and Jack in this book, though Ianto does get some good scenes on a stuck elevator. (No, not the kind of stuck elevator where he's trapped in the dark alone with Jack and they have to pass the time somehow. Too bad.) More of Jack's scenes are with Gwen, so there's more emphasis on the Jack/Gwen relationship - not a problem in my opinion, but I'd have liked more of Ianto thinking about Jack or vice versa. Even if Ianto were just thinking, "What would Jack do now?" or "I wonder what Jack's doing?"
    
    
20. Good use is made, plotwise, of Owen's undead state.
    
    This was the last of the Torchwood novels. I finished it and I am suffering withdrawal already. I want more, more, more! When is the next novel coming out? Soon, I hope.
    
    ~ ~ ~
    
    ¹ Except the Doctor, of course. And we know he doesn't fund Torchwood!