Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Glass Prison

★★★☆☆ – Good!

The Glass Prison is a Jacqueline Rayner novel, through and through. It has a light touch (despite its heavy subject matter), it’s eminently funny, and it’s decidedly more about its characters than its concepts. Make no mistake – despite an eponymous location that smacks of “high concept” as much as a “glass prison”, the ramifications of this odd setting aren’t explored so much as used as a source of emotional turmoil for the characters: Characters which, thanks to Rayner’s effortlessly human style,* are always immediately relatable; never impenetrable.

Exploring Bernice Summerfield’s pregnancy and labor, you would expect this novel to be a profoundly angst-inducing affair – and it does seem like something Rayner aims for! But she isn’t an author who writes spiraling psychological narratives: She writes fast-paced, (non-derogatorily) digestible, intuitive stories. When Bernice Summerfield worries whether her baby is truly hers or not (it’s some science fiction mumbo and/or jumbo), you never wonder on which side she’ll come down in the end – though that meshes with the tone of the rest of the book.

As nestled in my heart, Jacqueline Rayner is a comfort author. You get a good story, you’re never bored, and you aren’t too challenged. It’s the ultimate refinement of the “popcorn literature” that you expect a licensed novel to be. That’s not to say that she can’t write in a higher register – but I wouldn’t imagine that’s the mission statement here. Rayner writes quintessential Bernice Summerfield – she has a pitch-perfect grasp on her sarcastic, messy character, while assiduously maintaining the reader’s emotional connection to her. Of course, by virtue of her being one of the few female writers who consistently get work in the Doctor Who extended universe, you suffer no risk of running into chauvinism in her writing, and as a bonus, this particular novel centers on a cast of nigh-exclusively female characters – a breath of fresh air.

An odd feature of this novel is the passive nature of its plot – Summerfield and her gang are profoundly reactive. You would think a prison break would be an obvious feature of a novel named The Glass Prison, but… it barely is! They seem perfectly content doggin’ it in there.

If you, like me, are interested in immersing yourself in Bernice Summerfield as a franchise, this novel is a key inflection point. It chronicles the birth of her son, who goes on to be an important character in his own right, it’s another step in Bernice’s perennial will-they-again-won’t-they-again relationship with her (ex-!!!)husband Jason Kane, and it features a new angle on Rayner’s own pet alien species, the fact-obsessed, tentacle-faced, and deeply tickling (as in amusing, not with their tentacles, I— oh, forget it) Grel. It may also offer you some consolation as to why Bernice Surprise Summerfield’s son has a name as exasperatingly prosaic as “Peter”.

The audiobook version adds the value of Lisa Bowerman’s brilliant performance – who knew she commanded such a range of voices?

* Have you listened to Doctor Who and the Pirates?