#9
Dancing The Code
By Paul Leonard
Oh cool, Paul Leonard’s back. His first Missing Adventure gave us a fully rounded alien civilisation; it was about the end of their world and, rather poetically, about death in general. Venusian Lullaby wasn’t perfect, but it made a hell of an impression. I’d be lying if I said I had any idea what to expect from him next.
I definitely wouldn’t have
guessed “Pertwee-era action movie”, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Then again, the author has said (over on
Terminus Reviews) that he isn’t really a Doctor
Who fan, but that he did watch
the Pertwee years. I can well believe it. (At least the bit about Pertwee. Writing more than one Doctor Who ought to make you a fan by default.) Dancing
The Code is authentic, even to the point of nostalgia for that particular era.
By now, the Doctor had got his TARDIS
working and was losing interest in threats to home and hearth. UNIT were old and increasingly distant friends,
showing little of the militaristic grit we saw in Season Seven; the Brigadier in
particular seemed permanently bemused, sadly living up to the Doctor’s
complaints about his intelligence. Jo
had been to outer space several months in a row, so naturally she was about to
leave the show forever.
There’s an opportunity for growth
here, and Leonard doesn’t miss it. Rather
like Venusian Lullaby, which looked at the emotional void left by Susan and how
it affected her friends and grandfather, Dancing
The Code adds substance to Jo’s impending departure. It also gives the “UNIT family” a last
hoorah, ditching that cuddly befuddlement and making them, or at least their
job, considerably more dangerous. The
Brigadier at one point observes that he knows the number for the morgue off by
heart.
Kebiria is a (made-up) nation torn
apart by civil war, and if that’s not bad enough there are aliens in their
midst. A British journalist sees a
horrific, bloated copy of a UNIT soldier as it dies, and summons Mike Yates and
co. to investigate. The aliens fit the
legend of Al Harwaz, mysterious beings
who will give you what you ask for, which obviously turns out doomier than expected. Meanwhile, the Doctor has mocked up a
prognosticating device that shows (with complete accuracy) the Brigadier
shooting him and Jo dead. He sees only
one way out of this: stay the heck away from Jo and the Brigadier. He zips off in the TARDIS until he’s needed,
and Jo goes to Kebiria.
She’s immediately arrested for no
particular reason. No problem for Jo, whose
escapology skills exist for just such an occasion. Her enthusiasm for tricking her captors and
bopping them over the head looks positively insane to Catriona, her fellow
captive (the journalist), but moments later when things have escalated and people
are dead, those antics look unbelievable and childlike. Companions rarely see such a brutal shift in
their perspective; it’s almost cruel.
Not for the first time, we have a
Doctor Who book that uses violence in
ways you’d never see on television.
Here, though, that escalation is part of the story. Jo is well used to marauding aliens, blobby
things with tentacles and ray guns. She’s
seen people die, but there was always something unreal about it. (Well, it’s Doctor Who!) In Dancing The Code Jo sees people
murdering people, the horrible consequences of war, and she begins to feel that
she could do more to help. That by no
means is a clear transition to The Green Death, where an interest in the
environment and a romantic development will push her away for good, but it adds
to that process. It’s a relief to provide
an actual reason for gratuitous violence in a family show, besides the obvious
lack of a watershed and novel-writing fandom’s itchy trigger finger.
And the violence isn’t celebrated
– there’s a theme of guilt about it. Jo
witnesses violence and horror, she feels complicit, even ignorant for having to
be woken up like this. By the end of the
book, when it’s possible she might be an alien copy, she’s quick to suggest
Mike Yates should put her out of her misery. Catriona
is the one who shoots a guard (or guards?) dead, and things only get worse for
her until – trapped in the alien ship and mutated almost beyond recognition –
she decides it is “time to pay”, and gives her life to save Jo. Benari, Prime Minister of Kebiria, has committed
atrocities not limited to the deaths of children, and used the aliens for his own ends, so he suffers a pretty brutal
execution. His executioner, Vincent,
enjoys it a little too much, so he dies too later on. Meanwhile the Brigadier is haunted by the
idea that he will kill his friends; in some wonderful character writing,
Leonard has him lock his gun away and bin the key, hoping it will at least
delay him long enough to come to his senses.
(Of course the Brigadier is innocent, so no comeuppance is needed.)
As for the aliens, the improbably-named
Xarax, they’re surprisingly innocent. More
like “tools” than living things, they can imitate anything and follow
instructions, only they can’t work out pernickety things like which humans they
should kill and which they shouldn’t.
Humans, this book seems to say, are the real problem here.
Where is the Doctor in all
this? Well, even apart from his mysterious
TARDIS jaunt (which could be a novel in itself), he’s a little on the side-lines. He’s still very Pertwee in this, with a love
of gadgets, technobabble and vehicles; the Brigadier has to endure the
passenger seat not just on the road with him, but in a loop-de-looping jet-plane! The Doctor argues for a non-military solution
to the Xarax, and naturally fails because humans are the worst. He’s integral to the plot, stumbling on the
solution in the closing chapters (as always), and yet he doesn’t seem to be in
it very much. This serendipitously fits with
what Jo is going through. (In The Green
Death her interests are already diverging from the Doctor’s, as if they’ve been
spending time apart.) It’s a
well-written Doctor, though I’m not 100% sure about his plan to avoid his and
Jo’s deaths by simply avoiding the future.
Part of me thinks he’d be morally and intellectually outraged by that;
another part thinks “get away in the TARDIS” is about as Pertwee as it gets.
Despite all the above, Dancing The Code isn’t exactly a
character study. The focus is on action,
especially towards the end as Kebiria is torn apart by Xarax and doubles of Jo
and the Doctor kill almost comical numbers of UNIT soldiers at home. It’s hardly a chore to read, with Leonard
commanding a decent pace and keeping the chapters nice and short. (I know I complain about short sections, but that’s different. These chapter breaks give a lovely sense of
progress, rather than a frequent disorientating change of scenery.) A lot of the novel rests on the Xarax,
however, and in a surprising twist Leonard doesn’t develop them in great
detail.
Apart from their general
insectoid nuttiness, they’re more like the Sou(ou)shi than the Venusians, i.e. a
strangely blank force that feeds on your worst impulses. Also like the Sou(ou)shi, they’re hard to
picture*, interchangeable and just a bit dull.
(*Yes, there’s a “helicopter” one on the front cover, looking so much
like a giant scorpion and with such nearly-invisible propellers that I kept
wondering why people kept mistaking them for helicopters. But they’re not wholly representative, if I
understood correctly; the rest seem mostly to be blobby, and have lots of mandibles?) They also raised a couple of questions which I
didn’t spot the answers to: I never got how they are able to copy people they’ve
never met (such as the long-suffering Sergeant Osgood); I never figured out
what “dancing the code” was actually in aid of; and I wasn’t sure what happened
to Jo at the end. One minute she seemed
pretty sure she was a copy of herself, bleeding what appears to be Xarax
material and not human blood, but presumably she isn’t? Apart from the nitpicks (which I’m sure are
just me missing a bit – do let me know!), there is something a little too
familiar and Pertwee era-ish about alien copies taking over; once it’s apparent
that’s where the plot is going, my enthusiasm sunk a bit.
The writing is reassuringly
thoughtful, though it becomes mostly a catalogue of action as it goes
along. There’s a neat use of inner
monologues, bursting into the prose Stephen-King-style at first just for
Catriona, and eventually for others including Jo. It ends on a bravely incomplete yet
satisfying note, with the Doctor suggesting they leave the Kebirians to sort
out their own mess, and Jo saying “We’ve
got to do something.” Jo is growing
up; not coincidentally, this puts a fork in the road between her and the
Doctor.
Reading this back, I’ve talked
myself around a bit. I didn’t really love
Dancing The Code as I read it; there
was much to enjoy about it, but the plot isn’t deep or original. It’s mostly there to prop up some interesting
themes, and the end result looks at the Pertwee era in ways both typical and
strangely offbeat. It’s honestly a struggle
to remember some of the story beats now it’s over, but despite everything it
leaves a meaningful impression. That’s fast
becoming Paul Leonard’s trademark.
7/10
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