Monday 2 April 2018

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #66 – Just War by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#46
Just War
By Lance Parkin

Doctor Who novels, meet Lance Parkin.  The soon to be ubiquitous writer arrives with the satisfying crump of a grenade in Just War; along with The Also People (and in a sane world, Sky Pirates!) it isn’t so much “Love it or hate it” among fans as “Love it or what’s wrong with you?”  Even trying to keep my objective hat on, it’s difficult to believe this is his first novel.

What’s so good about it?  Well as morbid as this sounds, setting it in the Second World War has the odd effect of whispering “This is going to be good” before you’ve even started.  Just War begins “Once upon a time, when the world was black and white”, and where could the stakes of good and evil be clearer?  That iconography is part of Doctor Who, thanks to certain shrieking pepper-despots who live to exterminate their inferiors.  One of their (best) stories is a resounding echo of the Blitz.  Also one of the earliest New Adventures, Terrance Dicks’s Exodus, melds the old “What if Hitler won the war?” gag into a thrilling Back To The Future II riff.  War is hell, but it makes good copy.  You just know where you are with this stuff.

But then, is any of it new?  Just War is set during the war for the express reason that the Germans will apparently win, and the Doctor and co. must find out how that happened.  Isn’t that a bit too close to Exodus?  I approached it with some trepidation over that, but in the end Parkin handles the subject differently.  There is no Nazi-ravaged (or worse, Nazi-but-not-that-bad) future to shock us into action.  In what is now the time honoured structure of Doctor-Benny-Roz-Chris books (and I am in no hurry to complain), they are already in the thick of it, carefully living through the past with the uncomfortable knowledge that soon it will all go wrong – or at least more wrong, it being WW2.  They don’t know how, where or exactly why.  The book takes its time circling back to there even being an alternate future we need to avoid, for the most part simply playing out its war story on several fronts.  I occasionally thought, well it’s all very good, but are we sure it needed the Doctor and co. at all?  Also, Nazis, evil: yup.  Did we really need another memo to confirm that?

One of the book’s strengths is that Parkin seems fully aware of the stories you’ve already heard, and he came prepared.  Hitler doesn’t feature at all.  Most of the action occurs in the small, oddly critical island of Guernsey.  When it comes to the Nazis they will obviously act like Nazis, but they’re also going to provide reasoned debate as to why they do what they do; quite a lot of words are spent on it.  And the heroes will do questionable or downright awful things.  Yes, this includes the Doctor – pretty much mandatory, isn’t it? – but for once there’s plenty of blame to share.  It’s altogether more thoughtful than just a mission to put history on its correct course.  The here and now matters, probably more so.

Bernice is living in Guernsey under an assumed name.  (This won’t hide her effervescent personality from the reader, and in any case it doesn’t last, so this probably isn’t a spoiler.)  The first chapter is a seasoned atmosphere-builder about life in that time, and it’s full of pregnant looks and things unsaid, as German soldiers act like they own the place and life tries awkwardly to go on around them.  I assumed the book would linger there, as does Bernice, but things quickly escalate: a retrieval attempt from the Doctor goes badly wrong, and Bernice kills a young Nazi.  She does this for good reasons, wanting to protect the identities of the women who have sheltered her, and she does it almost without thinking – it’s shockingly quick.  Soon she’s so appalled by what she’s done that when the time comes for the Nazis to retaliate, gunning down civilians at random to clarify the pecking order, she crumbles and surrenders.

Her interrogation goes almost exactly as you would expect, humiliation and torture in quick succession, but Parkin uses it to examine her character.  She is ordered to strip naked; she does so much easier than they would expect, even offering pithy commentary at her different social mores.  All the time she is afraid and her resolve wobbles.  Later, sleep-deprived and wounded, having told her real life story a bunch of times to no avail, she is so beaten down and delirious that she thinks “If this Doctor existed, he would have rescued [me] by now.  The bravado is a front, as readers know by now, but more importantly a survival instinct.  The layers of sneering cleverness are (of course) like the post-it note revisions plastered over her diary: false, but also intrinsically who she is.  I’ve wanted her to shed a few of those snarky layers for ages – perhaps not this literally! – and admit a little more frailty than she’d rather.  Just War gives her both barrels.  (I’m not surprised Big Finish felt confident enough to adapt it without any Doctor Who rights.  It’s quintessential Benny.)

We get all of that without taking the most obvious route, all but destroying her.  Bernice hates herself for Gerhard’s death, but it was what she had to do.  She is broken by her torturers, but is also more than able to get away under her own steam; we don’t even dwell on how she does it, her confident pre-summary being more than sufficient.  She traps her “nurse” in a morgue drawer, uncertain of whether there’s enough air inside, because guilt over a murder isn’t the end of this fight and she has every right to retaliate.  Bernice isn’t perfect and she doesn’t always do nice things.  As noted in The Also People, it’s a commonality with the Doctor that is becoming more apparent.

Their relationship (in general, but pointedly here) also doesn’t take the obvious route.  The Doctor ostensibly betrays her by letting Wolff torture her, leaving her to get away on her own.  The obvious thing would be to put another brick in the wall of “I shouldn’t trust you and I’ll be going soon”, ala Ace, but Bernice has always seen the Doctor a bit more clearly.  When he apologises it is enough for her (although she won’t tell him right away!), and soon after her ordeal she writes a very sweet note asking him to come and rescue her, leaving it safely stowed for the future, Doc Brown style.  (Who had The House At Allen Road?  New Adventures Bingo!)  The thing is, he tried – but the TARDIS overshot.  When the inevitable telling off arrives, because she did wind up tortured by Nazis after all, theres nothing he could realistically have done better.  (And even if he wanted to, the note confirms that she made it to Allen Road on her own; he’d be messing with time if he got her out of Guernsey prematurely.  Come to think of it, maybe thats why he missed?)  All of which is probably why, once he isn’t looking, Bernice quietly lets him off the hook.

Parkin has plenty of time for the other regulars, most notably Roz.  She has a practical wit that marks her out from Benny, noting that a pretty ’40s roadster is “Great.  But trust me, it’ll never get off the ground.”  The dreaded romance-that-surely-will-not-work-out lands on her, as she begins a gentle love affair with a young British soldier.  Again, the author knows you’re all expecting him to get blown up or torn away, so Roz goes into this clarifying that she won’t be here long.  Their scenes are genuinely intimate and the attraction has legs.  Her prickly exterior soon feels as necessary and callused as Bernice’s frivolity, and just as much not the only thing about her.

For one thing, her ingrained racism is an odd theme the books are commendably sticking with, and it had to come to the fore in this.  Bernice acknowledges it offhand: “Perhaps she was turning into a racist.  Or alienist.  Whatever Roz was.  There is a knowingly awkward reference to Roz being “pure”, unlike the cosmetic-surgery addicts of her time.  She is as proud of her direct lineage – however badly she feels she has let down her family – as certain other characters wearing different uniforms.  When it comes to violence and killing, she hasn’t the remorse of Bernice, or even (you’d hope) an Adjudicator.  Corruption and violence were everyday in Original Sin, which is why she and Chris left the Overcity, so why is she so ready to put a man’s eye out?  (The man is a particularly cruel Nazi and if anyone had it coming... but even he has an inner moment of regret at torturing Bernice, admitting only to himself that she doesn’t deserve it.)  Roz is one of the good guys, but she’s very far from perfect.  Although to add even more complexity, in what is rapidly looking like moral ping-pong, Roz doesn’t know that people in the twentieth century can’t regrow eyes…

Chris, meanwhile, throws himself into the adventure, and he’s the only one thinking of it in those terms.  (As Roz notes hilariously: “Cwej, of course, thinks that the ‘costumes’ are wonderful.”)  He merrily breaks a Nazi’s neck because, apart from getting rid of him, it’ll impress a girl.  All this provides interesting context to Roz and Bernice, but I’m beginning to worry that Chris won’t develop at all.  Yes, he’s enjoyable, but how many times can we hit the “Loveable handsome idiot” note?  Parkin isn’t terrible for doing the same thing as everyone else here, but somebody has to take the damn plunge some day.  At any rate, the Doctor is the only one here that doesn’t directly murder anybody.  Wolff is correct when he expresses concern about the so-called heroic people of the future, the ones on the “right” side of all this.  (Speaking of which, this being war an utter atrocity happens in the book, and it’s the Allies that did it.)  Ultimately the divisions of good and evil are what they are – the Doctor is unequivocal about who is in the right, successfully talking a Nazi into suicide by ticking off the failures of fascism – but Parkin doesn’t make it easy.

There is a careful, practiced quality to the book, which makes it very readable and often surprising.  I had to admire the skill at dropping in something of relatively no import, like the Doctor’s disappointment at having his pockets emptied of dog biscuits – on the face of it, simply adding to his funny little ways – only to turn it into something plot-relevant later on.  And without wishing to spoil the thing completely, the history-altering problem at the heart of Just War is not the devious chess game of doom you’re expecting, nor the unimaginable alien superweapon it’s built up as, but a significantly improved war machine created by a wrong thing said in front of the right person.  The Doctor is someone who could change history with a well-chosen phrase, and it’s absolutely fair game to show the worst case scenario of that.  Despite that power he is not the terrible, dark Doctor he’s built up as: sometimes he makes mistakes, hence Bernice’s harrowing run-in with Wolff.  Isn’t that more interesting than just harping on about how nasty people are?  (It’s here, in particular the book’s torture scenes, that I think of the novels that get this so wrong.  It’s easy to pile on the violence and the misery and say “Look at this, isn’t it awful.”  It’s interesting to pick all that apart and show the other side.)

Indeed, Parkin has time for light, whimsical touches.  I loved the bit(s) about dog biscuits, and the observation that the Doctor doesn’t leave footprints in the sand, plus his seemingly magical reflection.  I dislike mythologizing the Doctor (looking at you, New Who) but gently blurring the line between a sci-fi genius and a figure of unknowable oddity is all to the good, done well.  He also pulls a few loveably silly faces – which Roz amusingly thinks of when the Doctor is mistaken for a criminal mastermind – and disguises himself as a nun at one point, and gets away with it.  (I don’t want to say anyone is wrong for thinking the Doctor stays in the habit for the rest of the book, what with Parkin never explicitly removing it, but I think context makes it fairly clear he isn’t making with the Sister Act the whole time.  It would certainly put the Russian Roulette scene in a new light.)  There are several fourth-wall-prodding references to the Brigadier’s favourite anecdote, and the Doctor’s nom de plume literally being “Doctor Who” in a different language, which he has used on screen.  It’s a heavy story about war and the things people to do survive and win it, but it’s not a grim or depressing book.  Bernice gets tortured, sure.  But she gets away, recovers and sees her friends again.  It’s a succinct book, not morbidly dwelling on anything.

Perfect?  Well, even after all that a part of me finds it tiresome to again point the finger of moral terribleness at the Doctor, however thoughtfully Parkin does it.  And the book collects quite a few typos towards the end, with occasionally missing bits, a speech mark replaced with a semi-colon and in one whoops-hilarious moment, calling Chris “Christ”.  I could understand this stuff in the early days of the range, but they’ve been at it years now and this sort of thing is preventable.  But let’s face it, the buck doesn’t entirely stop with the author, and it makes as much sense to penalise the novel for that as for a dodgy front cover.  Eye on the prize, then: Just War is a straight-out-of-the-gate winner, doing a host of familiar things in new and interesting ways.  The prose is lovely, the plot is extremely neat and most of the characters are more interesting for the experience.  Pass the rubber stamp we reserve for special occasions.

9/10

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