Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Squire’s Crystal

★★★☆☆ – Alright!

Oh, It’s a Comedy…!

And of course it is – it’s a Jacqueline Rayner book! Why did I expect any different?

If you, like me, have done your time skulking around the wiki; if you’ve read anything about this book, you probably know one thing about it. The one thing this book is famous for (to the degree that this book is famous, which it isn’t particularly). If you don’t, your proficiency in spoiler avoidance is of impressive caliber, but in case you think you do, let’s say it on three: One… Two… Three! It’s the book in which Bernice Summerfield gets nonconsensually pregnant with a wolfman baby while a villain is possessing her body.

Let’s dig into that a bit. Bernice Summerfield, of course, has had an active fiction line since 1992 – thirty-three years, at the time of writing. With the last Virgin New Adventures book being published in 1999, twenty-five of those years have been spent in the care of Big Finish. Despite this, I get the impression – and I cannot say how true it is, as I haven’t read enough of them to be sure – that Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield novels are considerably fluffier fare than the New Adventures, in both senses: less dark, and perhaps of less substance.

Benny’s Virgin outings live in the collective cultural consciousness to this day – you hear extolment not only of heavy Doctor Who hitters such as Love and War and Just War (no love in that one), but even occasionally of her Doctor-less adventures like Down. Meanwhile, her Big Finish novels are not only not extolled, but… hardly ever mentioned, in my limited experience. With the Virgin novels both better remembered and known for their emphasis on continuity, then, it’s odd to think that most of Bernice Summerfield today – her personality; her continuity – is built on that Big Finish output that’s hardly ever discussed. Paul Cornell’s Bernice “I like a drink” Summerfield is who she was; Big Finish’s Bernice “I need a drink…” Summerfield is not altogether different – but certainly noticeably so.

A Comedy with Non-Comedy Consequences

With two decades of hindsight, this novel feels mind-boggingly odd. The reason? It’s a genre work where the genre trappings have consequences far removed from its genre.

In this book, the villain sleeps with a wolfman while in Bernice’s body and (as is only revealed in a later book) gets her pregnant with the baby of this man for whom she has absolutely no affinity. This is played for laughs, which in all fairness – despite being a writing choice that one could imagine would be avoided today – works just fine in the context of the novel… but then they ran with it. “She’s running sex-crazedly and decadently amok with your body!” works as an amusing circumstance – “You’re saddled with the baby of a man you do not love, conceived against your will while you were practically unconscious” does not. It’s an emotionally immaterial setup to a heavy story arc – a scene borne of comedy, its result deferred tragedy. The sort of genre-subversive whiplash that’s worthy of, say, The Boys, but it seems to have come about accidentally. Of course, when the fallout is eventually handled in The Glass Prison, it still doesn’t feel all that heavy – that is, after all, also a Jacqueline Rayner novel – but it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to read a synopsis of (or even stop and think about in the shower) without it coming off as profoundly terrifying.

Coming from later releases, this serves to somewhat weaken the house of cards that is Bernice Summerfield’s continuity. When you hear about her past it sounds enticing and rich – so when it’s revealed to rest on a joke, that richness is made a tad poorer. It might serve the series better to experience it in order – going from “haha” to “oh” is decidedly a stronger experience than from “whoa” to “pfft” – but with the two decades of content released after this novel, that’s not necessarily the natural approach. Bernice Summerfield has, in a way, hurt its own structural integrity as a series by being as long-lived and successful as it is.

The Scent of Butter

On its own merits, The Squire’s Crystal is classic Rayner: It’s popcorn literature. It never makes any particularly daring story decisions, and all psychological exploration of the premise – the classic “gender swap” being famously ripe for a panoply of angles – is deftly dodged in service of being an effective, digestible vessel for comedy and a high pace. No palpable angst results from the body swap (Benny is portrayed as experiencing angst, but I can’t in good conscience say the book is written in an angsty tone), and gender roles are only explored from the perspective of genre tropes (“now that I’m a man I can’t use my feminine wiles!”). In a particularly funny moment, the book displays that it’s written by a cis woman a smidge too prominently: It’s apparently vexing that Benny’s new male body’s bits constantly “bounce around”. While wearing tight leather pants. In case you’re not familiar, I’ll tell you here and now: Such is not the penile experience.

This review undeniably sounds like damning with faint praise (mixed in with a helping of regular damning), but if I’m to be honest, as a trans woman currently battling a particularly lengthy bout of debilitating dysphoria, I was dearly hoping not to have to confront the intricacies of sex and gender today. There’s a time and place for popcorn literature, and mine – listening to an audiobook while moving – was certainly it. I suppose one could’ve wished for a few twists and turns to help the book skirt around being quite so “by the numbers”, but alas.

For once, we have a story that’s infinitely stranger in context than on its own.