When BBC Books sent me the latest Torchwood novels, First Born leapt out at me because it was by James Goss, author of the recent excellent Doctor Who book Dead of Winter. Since this is a Miracle Day prequel, the novel opens with Gwen and Rhys on the run after the events of Children of Earth.
Following the birth of Anwen, they end up in the North Wales village of
Rawbone, staying in a Torchwood “safe house” (i.e. a decrepit caravan).
It soon becomes clear that there was a reason for the Torchwood
presence in the village, as Rawbone is peculiar for a number of reasons:
firstly, because no children have been born there for over a decade,
and the children that are there are frankly very weird. There’s also the
fact that Gwen is soon having to fight off the lustful local men
(despite not having quite got back into shape following her pregnancy),
while Rhys is also attracting more than his fair share of admiring
looks. All this nonsense seems quite harmless at first, until Gwen is
physically attacked… And unlike the beginning of Miracle Day, Gwen and Rhys don’t have a huge arsenal of weapons with which to protect Arwen…
First Born is an appropriate follow-up to Children of Earth, as it’s also a very much child-centric story (well, I guess this was inevitable following the birth of Arwen). I’m not sure that James Goss is completely comfortable with describing the havoc that a newborn baby visits upon its parents, but he does a good enough job. Well, botched-up parenting is very much a central theme in this book. First Born, is of course, a Torchwood homage to John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, and its equally famous film adaptation, The Village of the Damned. However, there are some differences: First Born‘s children grow very slowly, unlike the accelerated growth exhibited by their Midwich neighbours, and despite showing the same skill at telepathy, they are far less aggressive than John Wyndham’s creations (well, at least most of the time).
James Goss adopts the same tactic of having each chapter narrated by one of the protagonists in the first person, and this mostly works very well, although I don’t think his characterisation of Gwen and Rhys was quite as good as that of the TARDIS regulars in Dead of Winter. True to form though, Captain Jack Harkness does make a morally ambivalent flashback appearance. I didn’t think the story was as good as Dead of Winter either, but that’s probably due to its nature as a Torchwood narrative, since Gwen’s adventures have always deliberately been a bit more banal and less fantastical than the Doctor’s. You’ll be reassured to learn that the villains of the piece are just as incompetent and morally mixed up as they ever have been in Torchwood, with some rather topical government cuts leading to an escalation of the crisis… This is a torturous coming of age novel, Torchwood style, and it’s okay for all that.
First Born is an appropriate follow-up to Children of Earth, as it’s also a very much child-centric story (well, I guess this was inevitable following the birth of Arwen). I’m not sure that James Goss is completely comfortable with describing the havoc that a newborn baby visits upon its parents, but he does a good enough job. Well, botched-up parenting is very much a central theme in this book. First Born, is of course, a Torchwood homage to John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, and its equally famous film adaptation, The Village of the Damned. However, there are some differences: First Born‘s children grow very slowly, unlike the accelerated growth exhibited by their Midwich neighbours, and despite showing the same skill at telepathy, they are far less aggressive than John Wyndham’s creations (well, at least most of the time).
James Goss adopts the same tactic of having each chapter narrated by one of the protagonists in the first person, and this mostly works very well, although I don’t think his characterisation of Gwen and Rhys was quite as good as that of the TARDIS regulars in Dead of Winter. True to form though, Captain Jack Harkness does make a morally ambivalent flashback appearance. I didn’t think the story was as good as Dead of Winter either, but that’s probably due to its nature as a Torchwood narrative, since Gwen’s adventures have always deliberately been a bit more banal and less fantastical than the Doctor’s. You’ll be reassured to learn that the villains of the piece are just as incompetent and morally mixed up as they ever have been in Torchwood, with some rather topical government cuts leading to an escalation of the crisis… This is a torturous coming of age novel, Torchwood style, and it’s okay for all that.