Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#37
Sanctuary
By David A. McIntee
Happy David A. McIntee History Day, everybody! As ever we’re celebrating with a novel set in a historical period, reliably groaning with terminology most of us won’t know from Adam. (Ha ha, you ignoramus!) This is of course preceded by the customary You Won’t Believe How Much Research I’ve Done foreword, because there’s a terrifying possibility that we won’t notice otherwise. And the cherry on top: Sanctuary doesn’t contain any zombies, aliens or megalomaniacs from space. This is 100% historical. My god, he must have been over the ruddy moon.
Of course the tricky thing about historical stories, apart from potentially losing your sci-fi-addicted audience, is that they may not know this particular bit of history. And in this case, I don’t. I’ve seen (more or less) The Crusade, the First Doctor story set about 50 years before this one and in a different country. But I had no idea about the Roc, or exactly which religions were disagreeing with one another here. Some of the antagonists in Sanctuary are only religious when it suits them, which adds a satisfying moral greyness but also makes it more confusing to the layman.
Probably the nastiest of them is Guzman, a slithery creature who falls between evangelical monster, congratulating himself on giving his heretical uncle “the correct sort of help” (a.k.a. cleansing flames), and power-hungry despot keen to off his competition, Louis De Citreaux. Their power games bring the book to an early peak, a grisly yet satisfying attack on some Church troops made to look like the other side did it. When there’s action in Sanctuary, it is all like that: limbs lopped off, bowels spilling, blood geysers and crunchy splats. The New Adventures don’t have the same (supposed) constraints as the Missing ones, but even so, bloody hell, he lays it on a bit thick.
Given that it’s a historical story set entirely around a real event (presumably?), the author can’t interject much plot, so the action comes in handy to shake it up. Guzman and co. are trying to invade the Roc, a sanctuary for supposed heretics with a hidden entrance. There’s a spy on the inside feeding them info; Guy de Carnac, an ex-crusader with no particular allegiance, falls in with the heretics (after an unsurprisingly violent escape from Guzman), and the Doctor and Bernice soon show up as well, having suffered a random TARDIS malfunction that means they must stay out of the ship for a while. (Is that necessary? They’re rarely determined to get back in the ship until the story’s finished anyway, and the TARDIS seemingly malfunctions in every ruddy book. This particular malfunction is nearly identical to the one in Blood Heat. It’s probably just an excuse for McIntee to use the “jade pagoda”, a.k.a. the TARDIS’s disappointingly TARDIS-like escape pod from Iceberg.) Anyway, Bernice winds up with the heretics, the Doctor goes unwittingly undercover with Guzman et al. They reunite so easily later on, causing much irritation for the Doctor whose investigations weren’t finished yet, that it feels like we’ve just been marking time. As often happens, I’ve forgotten much of the middle of the book, from de Carnac’s ludicrously slicey-and-dicey escape to the Doctor’s rescue.
If I was ever worried that it was just me, I need only look at the blurb, which (understandably) pushes the limits of accuracy to sell the thing. Take the Doctor’s brutal line to Bernice: “‘The wench’s mind is addled,’ he said. ‘Arrest her before she spreads her ungodly heresy.’” That’s not the oh-my-god twist it appears to be, it’s just him making a scene so she can escape. As for the Doctor beginning “a murder investigation in a besieged castle”, you must be kidding – the first murder is on page 188, two thirds in! By then it’s a little late to shift the focus onto an ancient relic people will kill for (which, I presume, also has a real place in history), but what the hell, it’s that or everyone in the Roc just patiently waits for death.
Regarding the historical tragedy at the book’s core, surprisingly little time is spent debating whether it can be averted. We’ve heard that song and dance before, I suppose; the Doctor’s certainly over it, and it doesn’t seem much on the mind of Bernice. (Incidentally, if you’re ignorant of a particular bit of history, it’s surprisingly unhelpful to stroll around it with a Time Lord and an archaeologist, who if anything won’t need to explain it to one another!) A truce is pretty soon called between the two sides, although it seems an open secret that it won’t hold; the heretics are more or less resigned to their fate, almost as if they read to the end, and the other lot just sit and wait. It’s all strangely civilised, when it isn’t raining limbs, lacking the impending horror of The Massacre or the grand tragedy of The Aztecs. The characters are numerous, but rather colourless; I often thought about The Crusade, which I know best from its absolutely incredible William Russell-read audiobook, with its rich story and much more memorable rabble.
Probably the most rounded person here is de Carnac, largely because of his romance with Bernice. McIntee writes a Bernice love story without the book falling down around his ears, and this builds to an evocative and thrilling finale: they can’t be together, we know this, so a wounded Guy spends his last scene chopping de Citreaux’s men to bits to give Bernice time to escape. The Doctor offers her the chance to check the area later on for any sign he escaped, or otherwise his remains, but she’d rather live on in hope, clinging to the possibility he escaped. It’s not as affecting as the First Doctor clutching Cameca’s brooch in a last, desperate bid to remember her, and then piloting the TARDIS alone and in silence, but it’s a damn good try. (Said brooch is in all of McIntee’s books so far, doubtless not a coincidence.)
Of course the trouble with the romance is that it’s with Guy de Carnac, who – high point of the cast or not – is still a fantasy archetype. McIntee apparently envisaged him as Gabriel Byrne, but a medieval Liam Neeson may have been more appropriate, or Aragorn on steroids, or Lancelot from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. He has a troubled past, and inevitably flashbacks, but of dimensions he has few. Bernice’s keenness to add him to the TARDIS roster left me frowning, not so much at what she was thinking as what McIntee was. Then again, we’ve lost Ace; things aren’t going to blow themselves up, are they?
Ah yes, Ace. Do you miss her? I get the impression McIntee does, referring to her quite often and even giving the Doctor the facetious line, “‘Come back Ace, all is forgiven.’” I’ve made my feelings pretty clear on this in past reviews – I like Ace, but we’re done there – and anything standing in the way of Doctor-Bernice chumship gets on my nerves. Sure enough, McIntee writes Bernice with all the snark you’d want, and the Doctor in perhaps a more resigned and grave mood than usual, even contemplating history-stabilising murder on occasion, though still with the odd reassuringly McCoyish moment. (He makes a man appear dead and gets his cell unlocked so he can escape; later, there’s an amusingly slapstick recreation of a murder scene.) But they don’t bond much. The Doctor seems oddly aloof to Bernice’s wit, and though he recognises her heartbreak at the end, and even makes that rather touching offer to stick around and look for de Carnac, his hearts aren’t in it as they would be with you-know-who. He also says the TARDIS seems “‘a little empty these days’”, which annoys me for obvious reasons. (It’s not empty. SHE’S RIGHT THERE.)
In many of the reviews I’ve seen, Sanctuary is spoken of as a character-builder for Bernice. Certainly we spend time with her, and spend time in general, mercifully dispensing with the hideously frantic pacing of the last few books. (Mind you, there isn’t much plot to fill the vacuum. Here, have some historical words I’ve found…) Although she gets an experience comparable to Ace’s in Nightshade, where she had her ill-fated romance with Robin – so it’s an experience much more convincing than the one in Nightshade, then – it doesn’t tell us a great deal about her that we don’t already know. McIntee gleefully recalls Bernice’s past, including some vivid flashbacks and surprisingly blatant Dalek mentions. (I’m never sure what they can get away with!) It’s difficult to separate the author’s interest in back-story from a distinctly growing Gary Russellness, however. There are references-a-go-go, with the Doctor and Bernice improbably recalling the last two McIntee books in particular (!), as well as other books (The Crystal Bucephalus), barely related TV stories (The King’s Demons), and even a smattering of very conspicuous Star Trek nods, such as M-class planets and hyposprays. He’s clearly a writer in love with details and ephemera, or he wouldn’t dare you to go and look up “colon” and “machicolation”, but he’s too keen to sprinkle them everywhere, and often lets his flowery, adjective-obsessed sentences outstay their welcome. (Though never, thank god, to a Barry Letts extent.) Even the action is a mixed blessing, as I often lost count of the soldiers gleefully piling into the Guy de Carnac murder blender.
Sanctuary has a fairly straightforward job to do with its they’re-all-doomed history lesson, but I never felt like the points were very clearly made; meanwhile the action helps resuscitate an ultimately thin story. But it’s often evocative, and it gives its two regulars plenty of natty moments. Once again David A McIntee shows a lot of flair sometimes, but there’s still that nagging empty sensation that left me picking away at the book for weeks rather than haring through it. I’d still welcome more pure historicals, though with some degree of laziness I might hope for a period of history I recognise.
6/10
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