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Who Needs Cleopatra by Steve Redwood
28/11/2005 . Source: Donna Jones 
pub: Reverb/Osiris Press Ltd. 233 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-905315-03-1. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.readreverb.com
If you had the power to travel in time, when would you go? Would you find out how exactly Rasputin didn't die? Would you find out who the wife of Cain was? Would you actually find out what the Mona Lisa was smiling about? Well maybe you'd do all these things and more, N and Bertie already have!
N, the creator of the egg timer shaped time machine or TM as he likes to refer to it, needed money to build his fantastic machine. Money that came from Bertie's Dad. Unfortunately, N wants to explore one particular period of time and that really doesn't fit in with the popularity or general consensus of the Time Travelling watching audience. They want violence, betrayal and healthy doses of sexual interludes. Virtually the same as what we watch now!
So, with the forced upon sidekick of Bertie, they wander time to seek answers to the most notorious, enigmatic and quite possibly ridiculous events in history. Thankfully, when Bertie invariably falls severely ill or even dies he has the rejuvenation process to come back to...Oh Joy for N!
The narrator for the entire novel is N. Strangely enough, he is retelling the life and times of Bertie and N's escapades in time for the comely, if a little violent likes of the three witches in Macbeth. The supposed Time Police have caught him without his security staff and want to quiz him about what he and Bertie saw and find out if the latter really is a god.
I thought that the research that was put forward was really quite insightful, yet it did scream out to you that this bit is fact and then whatever Bertie and N manage to do will be fiction. Nothing wrong with that, Redwood intends on satirising history here. The problem that I found was the fact that most obstacles in the time travelling experience were swept under the carpet. Most people speak with the same intonation as now, thanks to a translator. Obviously, the translator makes the speech symptomatic of the twenty-first century!
Inevitably, though, the book falls into a metronomic formula of reading out N's journals depicting each experience and then finding them desperately trying to escape or more likely trying to pee! The formulaic writing doesn't really stop there, each infamous jaunt into history invariably amounts to one thing: Bertie screws it up and somehow N has to figure out a solution. Strangely, the solutions often involve him consoling Bertie's wife and generally finding a soft bosom to comfort himself on.
Despite what was actually going on and revealing the ending to those of you who want to read this book, overall it felt like so many other books of this overused plot direction. I have read quite a few books that use this idea and generally do the same thing with it. I was hoping that 'Who Needs Cleopatra?' would find its feet and take the idea off at a fast burn run.
The characters were all pretty much terrible displays of all that is dislikable about the human race. If anything it can be easier to spend a whole book disliking a character than putting a vested interest into them. N is a womanising inventor who, well...I won't leak that one out! Bertie is an infatuated simpleton who seems to be spoiling for a knife in the gut most of the time and the women are either made out to be complete moody bitches or wimpy bimbos with agendas all their own.
For a bit of satire it's not wholly bad, but without characters that appeal, even if it's on a purely dislikeable status it doesn't have endearing features to rave about.
The thing that actually kept me reading was the unexplainable dislike of many of the male characters genitalia. If they are not limp and shrivelled they are huge and being used to swot rocks with. Weird? I thought so! If you do read this book and you're a male SF fan, please take the precaution of securing your manhood well away from these pages, the fixation on negatively representing penises will probably give you a complex!
Donna Jones
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