Torchwood: Risk Assessment...

[fajrdrako]

What do you do with a Torchwood novel that comes out after Children of Earth? When you've done the grim, dark side of the story, destroyed the setting, and sent your hero offworld in existential despair, what's left?

Comedy.

It's one of the new Torchwood novels: Risk Assessment by James Goss. He's the one who wrote Almost Perfect, the story in which Ianto was turned into a girl.

It is, if I day say so, cute. Delightfully cute. It's set after the deaths of Owen and Tosh, but before Children of Earth, when the Hub still existed. Alien coffins are coming through the Rift and alien invasion of Earth seems immanent, when along comes Miss Agnes Havisham, an agent sent through time by Queen Victoria herself, to handle Torchwood in crisis. She has the power to pull the plug on Captain Jack if she wants to - and it's clear she isn't impressed with his slipshod ways.

It all turns out quite steampunk.

Some passages I liked:

1. Description of a commercial storage place in Swindon: "People kept a lot of things here - from furniture they'd never need through to books they'd never read. Old carpets came and went. Exercise bikes piled up like abandoned dreams." [Page 8]
   
   
2. Miss Havisham to Jack: "Are you trying to tell me, Captain Harkness, that the entire staff of Torchwood now consists of a woman in trousers and a tea boy?" [Page 18]
   
   
3. Gwen's point of view: "...There was something of the perpetually grinning naughty 8-year-old about Jack." [Page 21]
   
   
4. Phone conversation between Gwen and Jack:
   
   'How's your girlfriend?' asked Gwen.
   'Agnes is fine,' said Jack brightly.
   'She there with you?'
   'Of course not!' beamed Jack. 'I'm as far away from her as possible.'
   'Hmm,' said Gwen. 'Up on a roof, then.'
   A pause. 'Might be,' admitted Jack. 'It's raining a bit, but the view is still quite something.'
   'How lovely for you,' enthused Gwen. 'So long as you're not looking through my bathroom window.'
   'Wouldn't dream of it! Peeping's Ianto's hobby. I stick to Morris dancing and shoplifting.'
   [page 37]
   
   
   
5. A bystander watches Jack and Agnes: 'The woman appeared to be Jane Austen or something. Only she couldn't remember any Jane Austen character carrying a gun. Not even in Sense and Sensibility.' [page 105]
   
   
6. Jack, back in the nineteenth century, admits to Agnes that he doesn't know how to skate:
   
   'Honesty, Harkness. When I was a child, one was skating on the Thames before mounting one's first pony.'
   'I never mounted a pony.'
   'We must be thankful for small mercies,' said Agnes. [page 105]
   
   
   
7. '"I am not amused," said Jack.' [Page 236]

I might prefer my Torchwood stories to have more substance, but while waiting for that, this one was fun.