Thursday 17 August 2017

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #49 – Human Nature by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#38
Human Nature
By Paul Cornell

I know it’s obvious, but my favourite thing about the Seasons Cycle – Paul Cornell’s four loosely themed Doctor Who books – is the way they end, each with more or less the same sentence.  Yes, as sentences go it’s sugary sweet, but I’m a sucker for an ending that makes me smile.  I still revisit the final page of Revelation because, well, look at it:

‘I don’t know if I can reach the vicarage, I’m so tired…’
   ‘Then sleep here,’ Saul murmured.  ‘I will keep you warm.’
   Trelaw curled up in a pew, pulled over a prayer mat for a pillow, and closed his eyes.
   ‘Goodnight, Saul.’
   ‘Goodnight.  All is quiet.  Sleep with pleasant dreams…’
   And, smiling, the reverend did so.
   Long ago in an English winter.

The seasons theme was a clever and low-key way of putting these trademarked characters in different lights, testing who they are and what they want.  It worked brilliantly two out of three times; even Cornell didn’t seem sure what he was going for in No Future.  (I’d guess an anniversary piss-up.)  Well, nuts to that.  Human Nature shears away No Future’s clumsy fan-bait and tries to do something meaningful again, and along with Revelation and Love And War it’s utterly accessible as well.  The whole novel seems to occupy the same reassuring, Christmassy space as its familiar final sentence.  No wonder people loved it.

A plot summary might be redundant, since it’s such a popular book that it warranted an equally popular New Who episode.  (To date the only Doctor Who novel to make the leap, which seems incredible.)  Ah well, since we’re here: the Doctor takes a very unusual holiday in 1914, from himself as much as from the universe, and becomes a human called John Smith.  He’s a school teacher, and a very different man who remembers another (fictional) life.  Bernice watches over him, quietly appreciating the rest after recent ordeals; the Doctor’s mind and essence are in a Pod, waiting.  The aliens who made this possible turn up, as they had ulterior motives all along.  They find the Doctor becoming a little too fond of human life.

It’s often the way of New Adventures that the Doctor and co. need to recover from some awful ordeal.  (Which tells you what sort of books we’re dealing with!)  This time, much of the focus is on Bernice losing Guy de Carnac, perhaps to his death.  Sanctuary wasn’t a novel I loved but the ending worked, as did the Doctor and Bernice’s weary yet civilised reaction to it.  (He could take her back to find out if Guy made it, but then she’d know, wouldn’t she?)  This is all good fodder for Cornell, and not for the first time: if you recall, Love And War followed a similar event with Ace being torn away from her new flame, only to put her through it all again with Jan.  Yes, stacking these two next to each other created two reasons for Ace to leave, but to virtually replicate that ending straight away was unfortunate, as it made Nightshade look like a dry run.  No such awkwardness here: Bernice sincerely needs the rest and Cornell lets her have it, even when aliens are rampaging and other things remind her of what she’s lost.  Bernice often pulls the narrative into diary entries, remembering Guy, but she is always moving forward, always her irreverent self until a poignant moment when she screams that no one else will die.  I love inter-novel continuity done right.  When the Doctor (such as he is) needs to remember an unpleasant event, Cornell has plenty of other authors’ work to draw from.  (So it’s hello again, Warlock.)  In the end, he is more comfortable with who he is.

It’s here we find one of the big divergences between the book and the adaptation.  (And okay, a word on the TV adaptation – which for simplicity’s sake I’ll call The Family Of Blood, and which I reviewed here.  I wish I didn’t need to compare the two, as it’s unfair on the book.  The book was first, the book is how it goes.  But I can’t help coming to this the wrong way round, and I won’t be the only one what with the recent History Collection reprint.  The TV episode was on my mind as I read the book.  I think it’s interesting to note what was kept in and what was changed so, as discreetly as possible, I will observe the differences.)  In The Family Of Blood, the plot is serendipitous: the Doctor encounters some aliens and desperately needs to hide from them, so he uses (as a last resort) the Chameleon Arch to become human.  This says something about his effect on other people – touching their lives, unable to be close to them, leaving destruction in his wake – and the New Who Doctor’s tendency to be a force of nature.

In Human Nature, the Doctor is much more deliberate.  He wants to be human for a while.  The aliens in question (the Aubertides) are selling that technology and, in something of a lapse of judgement, the Doctor takes them up on it, but he’d go through with this whether or not they turned out to be bad guys.  (I wonder if the first version of the story, which apparently needed Kate Orman to kick it, left out the bad guys.)  After so many dark times, it’s a way to step aside from himself and see what really makes him the Doctor.  Is he a dark, manipulating force – a bully – or a good guy?  He will remember it all afterwards, because “‘What would be the point otherwise?’”  Much is revealed by Smith and how he acts, most of it good.  But then, befitting the New Adventures Doctor, this is still a form of game-playing, with John Smith as the chess piece.  He may be a part of the Doctor but he’s still being used; despite his very private tears in the TARDIS at the end, or possibly even evidenced by them, it’s worth wondering how much the Doctor has really learned from all this.

Smith himself is very different in the two versions.  In The Family Of Blood he’s a prim, sort-of-nice gentleman who’s more than happy to uphold all school traditions, such as flogging.  He resents the idea that he is the Doctor and his moment of heroism – becoming the Time Lord again – is entirely coerced by Joan Redfern, off-screen.  In Human Nature he’s so like the Doctor that I had to remind myself it isn’t supposed to be a secret.  He comes out with malapropisms, performs magic tricks, keeps his accent.  He’s an altogether sweet man, and when faced with the school tradition of punishment he circumvents it by offering a soft pink slipper instead of a shoe.  He likes to sneak into other teachers’ lessons and challenge – no, he interferes with their teaching methods.  He challenges the schoolboys’ sense of morality during a heated lecture about Boudicca, and though he at one point feeds ammunition to a boy’s Vickers gun, he is soon utterly horrified by it and seeks a more Doctorly way out.  He accepts that the Doctor is real when he’s heard enough, and wants to learn from him.  Then he chooses his fate, whether or not the Doctor really decided it for him, because it will save Joan’s life.  The Doctor and Smith both love deeply but in different ways.  Smith will save Joan, the Doctor would only worry about the world.

Smith is an intriguing spin on the Doctor, essentially the same man but always missing something.  Sometimes literally, like his “perplexed search for a non-existent hat”, or the bit where he “glared at a pair of juggling balls he’d pulled from the case, threw them up in the air, tangled his arms and missed catching them.”  At one point he sees a dangerous event unfold, squirms and says “‘I feel like I should do something.’”  Control and the will to act are missing ingredients; he loves Joan, so he’d rather spend time with her than fight the alien menace.  That’s another thing changed in The Family Of Blood, where 90 minutes is all you’re getting, so the romance is more or less curtailed by the aliens’ arrival, and the tragedy is that it never really got off the ground.  The novel has no such constraint, so it lets them get on with it, lets him have his own priorities for a while, even lets them get engaged.  On a fundamental level, this carves out a bigger difference between Smith and Doctor.

Of course I can’t blame The Family Of Blood for hurrying things up, or even for making John Smith such a comparatively weaselly proposition: I consider the Tenth Doctor the most human Time Lord even without his magic fob watch, and (TV) Smith’s utter refusal to believe in the Doctor, and his fear of disappearing, fit the then-Doctor’s zest for life.  Just look at Tennant’s finale; that was in him all along.  In book form, this whole thing began as a rest for the Doctor – Smith – and he means to enjoy it.  The character has more shades, the romance has more time.

That’s one area where the book trounces the adaptation: Joan.  We know this isn’t going to work out for the same reason the Doctor isn’t going to drop dead of a heart attack or get a permanent job in a shop somewhere, but Joan is an altogether brighter person on the page.  On TV, not so much: she’s prim and austere, she needs more thawing than we’ve time for, and the presence of Martha puts up a wall of contemporary racism which makes it a bit too easy to want this to fail.  In print, an off-colour joke leads Bernice to call her a “wrinkly racist,” and of course she dislikes her on principle because she doesn’t want her designated driver to strand her in 1914, but in time Bernice accepts that the two might be happy together, and she’s right.  Joan is ebullient, passionate and giddy to have found John, and they’re very sweet together.  It’s all the more harrowing not just that this cannot ever work, but that the Doctor – post-Smith – would simply bugger off in the TARDIS without telling her Smith was no more.  Again I wondered if he had learned so very much.  Bernice rightly puts her foot down and makes him tell her.  His matter-of-factness, somewhat patronising, does make you momentarily miss Smith.  Alas, all that’s just something he can’t have, or you wouldn’t have Doctor Who.

Despite the above, Human Nature isn’t a gloomy treatise on what the Doctor is.  All that stuff is sprinkled into the (rather concise) story with wit.  Despite the oncoming misery of war, which a few characters become sadly aware of and which adds to the theme of joining a fight when you’re needed (but y’know, it’s okay to conscientiously object), it’s actually a light and enjoyable read.  Everyone seems to be as witty as Bernice Summerfield – and that’s a dangerous line, which has blurred some Terry Pratchett novels for me so that everyone in them is such a comedian they might as well be one wizard talking to himself.  Human Nature keeps a note of sadness and horror befitting Doctor Who even when it’s fun.  The Aubertides can be cutting and witty, but they still commit horrible murders, and acts that seem normal to them but are outwardly revolting.  Conversely, even when war hangs over them all and we learn specific awful things about their future, it turns out nothing is completely pre-ordained for these characters and there’s always a bit of hope.  This is definitely one of the things I love about Cornell’s better books: they push Doctor Who to dramatic and unhappy places, but they never settle for that or wallow in it.  Like Bernice, they move forward.

And oh, Bernice.  Now, hand on my heart, I do think she’s a little too unflappable in this, although that “No one else dies!” moment does redress it a bit, as does her gradual weakening to the idea of Smith and Joan.  I’m still waiting for the effervescent front to fall away completely just once, but this will do for now.  She’s wonderful, heroic, acid-witty, and if you’re worried that the setup keeps her and the Doctor apart, forget it: she’s Smith’s “niece” and they meet for lunch every day.  I don’t think they’ve ever spent this much time together, and he’s not even him!  So obviously I love this.  From the Doctor’s consideration at the end of Sanctuary, to his utter reliance on her here, we seem to be building proper bridges between them at last.  (Let’s face it, if you can’t count on her creator for that, who can you count on?)

The rest of the cast are pleasantly colourful: bullyish headmaster Rocastle becomes a hero, lunk-headed school captain Hutchinson doesn’t, a polyamorous teacher named Alexander begins as a bit of a wag and ends up having some of the most emotional scenes in the book, and Tim, the-boy-who-steals-the-Doctor’s-brain, gets to live out some Doctorly traits as he discovers his own personality.  This makes more sense than it did on TV, where Thomas Sangster nicked the fob watch because “the time wasn’t right”, except there was no real reason for it and people just kept dying until he returned it.  Here the Doctor intends to experience his holiday, so he can wait.  Tim’s journey, “regenerating” after a cruel prank kills him and also becoming precognitive, leads him to realise he’s like the Doctor in a different way; when the war comes, he joins the Red Cross.  It’s another interesting spin on who the Doctor is.

One area that I do feel The Family Of Blood improved on, or at least came up with another interesting spin on, is the Aubertides.  A family of shape-changers from an otherwise peaceful species, they have dreams of conquest which a Time Lord system will grant them.  And this is perfectly fine for what it is, but on television – where the march of minutes meant they had to trim away everything non-essential – they’re a lot simpler.  There’s only four of them (to the novel’s six), and they mirror a family unit with more creepy exactness.  They also have no specific plan to rule the universe, just a desire to live.  Even in the novel it’s said that they do not live long, but it’s not the sole basis for what they do.  There’s something very beautiful about making that their mission.  They want the Doctor because he lives so long and they don’t, and John Smith – the let’s face it, wimpy version – in a roundabout way wants the same thing.  It’s a wonderfully succinct bit of theme, and it adds a sadness to an otherwise horrifying bunch of bad guys.  But hey, The Family Of Blood also has that dappy bit about the Doctor being like fire, ice, lollipops and jam sandwiches, so y’know, swings and roundabouts.

The books haven’t done anything very interesting for a while now, and things have been getting grim.  It’s a relief to take stock, just as the Doctor does, with a relatively bite-sized plot (with fannish touches like a heat-shield!) and a story that says something.  Once again we’re at a turning point, excitedly looking ahead.  Certainly I am; this is the most (relatively) famous book for a while now, and I’m looking forward to lifting the weight of expectation next time.  I’m still not certain how I rate Human Nature because my head’s buzzing with another version of it and with its own reputation, but it’s obviously something special, and it deserves to be so thought about afterwards.

9/10

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