Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #46 – Time Of Your Life by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#8
Time Of Your Life
By Steve Lyons

Hooray!  One of the writers I’ve been going on about since I read their first book has returned!  The prodigal Conundrum-er himself, Steve Lyons, who somehow wrote a book within a book that poked holes in the fourth wall and was actually fun to read, is here to rescue me from my the-books-aren’t-all-that-great-at-the-moment doldrums!  Steve, it’s been too long!

Uh, Steve?  Steve, old buddy?  You seem to still be walking past and yep, he left me here.  Time Of Your Life is, heavy sigh, not that great.  And that is, heavier sigh, putting it nicely.

I didn’t make a great many notes reading this one, so let’s just wing it: we find the Sixth Doctor alone on Torrok, a dusty and miserable world in the totalitarian grip of television.  He’s a hermit, deliberately ignoring the subtle orders of his people and refusing to do anything that might lead him to the future he saw in The Trial Of A Timelord, aka his malevolent future self, The Valeyard.  His memories are hazy, but he knows he’ll meet a chirpy computer programmer called Mel, and that’s the first step on that path, so everyone he meets gets the third degree about that.  You’re not called Mel, are you?  (Heck, forget the Valeyard, knowing you’re going to meet Mel is enough to maroon you in a yurt.)  His earnest attempt to avoid his own future is rather affecting, albeit brief, and it’s the kind of unseen extra dimension the Missing Adventures ought to specialise in.  It works especially well when you know what an ignoble end he’s got to look forward to regardless, and there’s a dollop of irony in the fact that this world, with its sinister regime begging to be toppled and its quirkily-named gangs of murderous youths, feels very much like an adventure for his next incarnation.

But adventure has a way of finding him, and soon the Doctor is dodging murderous robots with Angela, a slightly troubled young woman who’s only just seen the world outside her living room.  Giving up the ghost, almost as if he’s tired of the author glaring at him to get on with it, the Doctor takes Angela to investigate the Network, a space station where all the troublesome telly comes from.  He leaves Angela on her own for a bit in an adjacent spaceship, quietly trying to keep her out of the firing line (but spoiler alert, dropping her in it), and then he’s strolling around the Network, bumping into actors and whatnot.

And it’s around here, much less than 100 pages in, that Time Of Your Life pretty much lost me.  Now past the (familiar) promise of an oppressed world the Doctor can turn upside down, we’re off on a series of events, most of them so randomly interconnected they’d make Douglas Adams blush.  You’ve got robots from an obvious Doctor Who stand-in (Timeriders) politely running amok; computers not working in various ways; a stressed actor being replaced by a hologram and promptly murdering his partner’s lover; a loathed TV personality feeling out of his depth; various TV shows, including the virtual-reality-ish Death Hunt 3000, running quite well or disastrously, not that you’d spot the difference; the titular Time Of Your Life show which is probably very important but, in all honesty, I never differentiated from Death Hunt 3000; a kind of bigger-on-the-inside technology that is perhaps some sort of echo of the Miniscope in Carnival Of Monsters, I don’t know, but it’s the thing that’s got the Time Lords riled; various larger-than-life characters, some of which are obvious stand-ins for people Doctor Who fans would recognise instantly; and an enormous number of names yomping around that can only dream of being actual, fully-fledged characters.  Oh, and there’s some sort of intelligent computer programme out to kill everybody (probably should have mentioned that earlier), and killer cyborgs, and a psychic gun.  And somewhere in that lot is the Doctor.  Presumably.

Reading New Adventures and Missing Adventures next to each other, it’s tempting to draw parallels and see patterns (that aren’t there, yes, thank you, inner Paul McGann), such as the handling of alien life in St. Anthony’s Fire followed by the same thing in Venusian Lullaby.  A less flattering parallel occurs here, as Time Of Your Life commits the same really annoying error of judgement as Infinite Requiem: nothing but short sequences, one after another, never building to anything.  I think they’re my new pet hate.  Forget pretentious prologues – at least those are over in a couple of pages.  With this kind of caffeinated stoppy-starty channel-hopping, you’re never able to get a feel for anything.

(NB: During one of my regular book chats with my housemate – where she says things like “Oh please god tell me you’re reading something else” and “Wait, you’ve read how many?!” – she pointed out that this is just how television is sometimes edited.  If you’re feeling very kind, this is pretty much how the show looked in the mid-’80s under Eric Saward, with huge supporting casts dying horribly in quick cuts.  So maybe Time Of Your Life is a very specific, What If Colin And Eric Never Left homage?  Hmm.  I want it to be doing a thing on that level, and yet Infinite Requiem did relentless quick-cutting beforehand, and that wasn’t the first book to do it.  So more likely this is just a misunderstanding about how to write Doctor Who when it isn’t on the telly.  Alas.)

The characters are the main casualties in Lyons’s Attack Of The Paragraph Breaks.  There’s an entire band of Timeriders fans coming and going in this, and every single time they appeared their names were new to me.  Oh, Roderick said something?  Well who’s he when he’s at home?  Not that the “A” characters have a lot more going for them.  Raymond Day is the rather pitiable focus for some of it: a past-it soap actor with the aforementioned spousal difficulties, he spends much of his time fretting about a body under his bed.  He’s full of himself and the body thing is mildly amusing, but so what?  Miriam Walker is a wince-inducingly obvious Mary Whitehouse proxy, dividing her time between trying to get all of television cancelled and hitting people with an umbrella.  Giselle is the Michael-Grade-paraphrasing TV controller, who is ostensibly the “real” controller’s assistant in a wheeze that never really goes anywhere, and she poses some sort of villainy from her control centre.  Anjor is a Death Hunt 3000 champion, so adept at killing people that it only takes seconds, and he has zero interest in his winnings.  And so on.  I could list characters all day and I still wouldn’t know what most of them were for.  There’s Grant Markham, I suppose: a likeably anonymous tech guy who is scooped into a TV show (I think) involving a giant monster fighting a robot (well, it’s something for the front cover), and he ends up wheedling his way into the TARDIS.  He’s very good at computer stuff, and at one point he is literally tasked with making the tea.  He’s definitely more inoffensive than Mel, but the Doctor could just as easily have left him behind.

There is a good-ish idea buried under all the muchness, about a kind of technological life that only wants to grow but ends up taking lives in the process.  Ben Aaronivitch already had a go at this in Transit, a visceral yet flawed book that didn’t care if you could tune into its imagination.  It also, saints be praised, built a bit of tension along the way: the wait for and horrifying execution of that subway disaster is still stuck in my head.  There’s nothing like that in Time Of Your Life, where the violence is as random as it is endless.

Okay, but Steve Lyons is parodying television violence, right?  I mean, it seems obvious – but that’s too obvious for a Doctor whose most popular story is the one satirising video nasties, isn’t it?  Then again, having Mary Whitehouse marching around the set screeching about what is acceptable for young viewers, before unleashing her inner Steven Segal during a melee (?!?) must add… something to set it apart?  I don’t know.  There’s a puncturing air of silliness about all of it, though some of that is possibly just me looking for more of it after Conundrum, but it’s set to such a confused pace that it never lands on anything genuinely funny or meaningful.  It’s rushed and it’s a mess.

The malfunctioning space station is too random and silly to worry you, the stuff about putting the Doctor in Death Hunt 3000 (and Time Of Your Life?) is an obvious idea that occurs surprisingly late, and the actual plot about the “datavore” feels like it’s butting in from another book, but it’s at least rather interesting when the book finally gives it some attention.  Then when all that gets wrapped up we carry on killing people en masse in the epilogue, with some characters pausing (unwisely) to remark that these deaths are even more pointless.  Is this the reason for all those superfluous characters?  Cannon fodder?  It he making a point?  Either way, it’s disappointing and absolutely bloody wearying to just keep offing people when the major threat is over.

I felt much like this reading Infinite Requiem, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s just me.  (Or if I’m still residually annoyed from the last one.)  It’s been a long time (24 books!) since I awarded more than 7/10 to something – go on, guess which book it was – and it’s entirely possible I’m getting harder to impress.  I ought to cut the author some slack since I know I can like his work, and there are lots of interesting things to chew on here: the Doctor’s unease about his future, the artificial life thing, the (ahem) TV satire.  It’s hard to tell if the book’s irritating rhythm is all that’s throwing it off.  Somehow, I doubt it.  We occasionally return to the Doctor’s future fear, for example, with as much pomp and circumstance as bunging it in an advert break.  It’s not a theme, it’s a bit.

It seems foolish to hate Time Of Your Life since there’s a chance I just missed the bit that made it work.  But it was yet another chore to get through, however I or that dang-blasted pace chop it up.  Into innumerable bloody bits, deliberately or otherwise.

4/10