#14
Managra
By Stephen Marley
“It was at this point Sarah jumped forward and kicked the head into the orchestra pit. ‘You’re not my dad!’ she screamed.”
Love it, hate it or can’t make
head nor tail of it – Managra is probably
the most interesting Missing Adventure yet.
Among other things.
The most popular thing about it
is the world Stephen Marley creates, so we’ll start there. Some time after Original Sin (and I am loving
the continuity of New and Missing Adventures in the wake of that), Earth found
itself in chaos and needed remodelling. “Reprises” led the way: recreations of
historical figures, cloned from fragments of the originals (including, in one
unhappy case, a toenail), as well as recreations of fictional characters based
on actors (e.g. the Four Musketeers led by Michael York), not to mention
imaginary creatures like vampires and haunted trees, with whole regions and
continents mish-mashed together with favourite bits, and a few bits of obvious
future-tech like mechanical horses – although the “rules” suggest they should
stick broadly between the fourteenth and nineteenth century. Oh, and behind the
scenes there’s a shape-shifting bad guy somehow entwined with an ancient horror
from Gallifrey, and he hates Shakespeare.
Sarah likens all this to a theme
park, and she’s not wrong. I was
reminded mostly of a Red Dwarf
episode, Meltdown, about a forgotten theme world full of waxwork historical
figures. Left to their own devices they
went to war, and the result was a rather obvious and unenjoyable Gulf War
satire. Managra follows suit, at least as far as the historical figures
descending into chaos. Absent the excuse
of being on an otherwise uninhabited planet, Managra never feels like it actually is set on Earth, and save for a few crowd scenes in bars and a
theatre, there aren’t a lot of bona fide people about. As such, despite all the imagination and
colour, and the occasional nudge back to Original Sin, the stakes are decidedly
wiffly. But how much does that matter?
Stephen Marley only wrote one Who book that I know of, and we should
all feel very sad about that. He’s an
absolute whirlwind at this, finding interesting idioms all the time and
indulging just as much in posh verbiage as he does in hilarious dialogue. I didn’t know a significant percentage of the
words he used, but context usually took care of it; elsewhere he pokes fun at
his own juggling of ye olde and modern wordplay, as the reprises never seem
sure which to use. The sheer bonkers conflagration
of Europa is something to behold, though some of his best ideas are arguably underused:
there aren’t that many fantasy
creatures or fictional characters on the rampage (perhaps there isn’t room in
the cast list), and the villain of the piece has a quill that writes on thin
air, in blood, and whatever he writes will come true – which criminally only
seems to come into play in the last act.
Then again, some ideas pleasantly double up, like how multiple reprises
exist and occasionally meet: Byron is split into Mad, Bad and Dangerous for
ease of recognition, and they don’t get on.
(I might be the only one who chuckled at “Dangerous Byron”, which sounds
quite a bit like Brian Conley’s hapless stuntman character.)
While the imagination left me a
little bit in awe, there is a lot of it, besides which the pile of higgledy-piggledy
historical references does become a mountain; I felt woefully unprepared. I just don’t know that much about Shakespeare,
the Vatican or the half-dozen sinister figures vying to be the next Pope, and
while each of Marley’s characters held my interest, even the duplicates, they
are all of a kind. Save for the Doctor
and Sarah, everyone is a snarky, duplicitous sod to some degree. Coupled with the peculiar absence of Earth’s
hoi polloi, it’s hard to care what happens to them. As with Terry Pratchett, you begin to suspect
it’s just the author’s sense of humour trickling through the book. Certainly it’s present in the prose. And it’s enjoyable – see Pratchett – but makes
it difficult to really invest in the story.
Honestly, there isn’t a lot of
story anyway. Sort of. The Doctor and Sarah arrive, realise they’re
in a planet-wide madhouse and try to get off it, losing the TARDIS (of course)
and then falling in with the reprises.
They, in turn, are trying to wrest power away from the cadre of villains
surrounding the job of Pope – including Cardinal Richelieu, a reprise who has
murdered all his other duplicates – and they in turn are killing each other off
to get the top job, while Persona / Managra, a villain / evil entity is attempting
to use an old, bitterly unpopular playwright’s work to wreak havoc. I know that sounds like a lot, but in
practical terms it means the Doctor and Sarah trouping around with a bunch of
famous names, only to get split up, meet up again at the Globe Theatre and fight
the baddies. The plotting isn’t half as
complex as the setting, yet it’s still hard to follow, thanks to the number of
slippery villain characters, double-crosses and all the outright weirdness
going on.
To think, I haven’t even
mentioned Miles Dashing: a naïve adventurer and friend to Byron, on a mission
to pursue the Doctor (I think?) and avenge his family (who hated him anyway,
not that he noticed), with the aid of his manservant Crocker, who feigns
ignorance because it’s the only way to get work as a manservant. The two of them are rich and hilarious enough
for their own story, which unless I’m much mistaken is what they appear to be
in. There’s just so much stuff here.
And at the bottom of the pile, we
have the Doctor and Sarah. I’ve heard
them described as out of character in Managra,
and I sort of agree. While Sarah gets generous
helpings of back-story re her dead parents, which is always a bit odd in the
middle of an ongoing series because it hasn’t come up much before or since, she’s
also at her most irritable, sniping at the Doctor like mad. She’s taken away and hypnotised for much of
the novel, privately obsessing over her parents and considering the Doctor’s
role as her surrogate uncle (while being given a new name, Shara, for some
reason), but she’s so out of the story that it feels like random window-dressing;
she probably should have capped it all by speaking to the Doctor afterwards, or
having some kind of moment to reflect. There’s
also a… shall we say, preoccupation with her body, as she is dressed for a visit
to an interstellar seaside (where of course she hasn’t arrived) so must parade
around in a bikini for what seems like ages.
Meeting someone like Byron only makes it more of a thing. When she finally puts some clothes on she
rebuffs the legendary figure with: “From
now on, you’ll just have to dream about my body.” Getting kind of awkward by this point. At least it isn’t Peri?
The Doctor is harder to pin
down. He is technically like himself, the
usual descriptors vastly improved by Marley’s thoughtful aphorisms: “...a brown fedora planted on the coppery
bramble of his hair”; “His energetic
tone boomed in the cavernous space as he hurled his personality in all
directions”; “...exposing his
habitual tomfoolery for what it was, the froth on the surface of the ocean.” But there’s a spark missing; he’s doing all
his usual Fourth Doctor stuff by rote. Sarah
even calls him on this, and the answer is supposedly that he is haunted by
Managra (a Gallifreyan thingummy, because of course it bloody is), as well as a
tragic encounter that, unless I’ve missed it, Marley has made up. But I think it’s more fundamental: Managra is exploding in all directions
with bohemians and weirdos, and the usually bizarre and most incongruous of
Doctors just isn’t that unusual in that context. There’s a muted feeling of “Oh right, him”
when we return to the Doctor, which sort of extends to Sarah and the
TARDIS. All three lead the heroic
ending, or one bit of it, by which time Europa has more or less sorted out its
own troubles, regardless of Managra. I
suspect this could have been quite a happy sci-fi/fantasy novel without Doctor Who, which may explain why it’s
Marley’s only one.
It’s probably just the context of
Doctor Who that makes this sort of book
sound like it was beamed in from Mars.
Sky Pirates! was much the same, revelling in its ideas with a confidence
and a deliberateness you just aren’t expecting from a tie-in novel.
Managra isn’t quite as good;
for all its wit and wonder, the story is a bit of a vague slog, and the
supposed main ingredients feel like (albeit in places, very well crafted) afterthoughts. It’s still a delight to read from page to
page, with no sentence or turn of phrase taken for granted. But it seemed so caught up in its own world
that it didn’t entirely grab me, too.
7/10
Shara is an anagram ;)
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