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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