Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #76 – The Sands Of Time by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#22
The Sands Of Time
By Justin Richards

Well this didn’t go how I expected.

Not that I had any preconceived notions about the plot.  It’s a Pyramids Of Mars sequel, so Sutekh’s probably in it and there are definitely some mummies.  Otherwise I’m happy to be surprised.  It’s more that it’s a popular book, again obviously, because if you’re only going to get one Missing Adventure you’ll probably go for the sequel to a popular story.  It’s written by Justin Richards who’s a trusted hand at Doctor Who, and I’ve wanted to read it since I was little.  Reviews for it have been enthusiastic.

And it’s... quite dull.  Like, I’d better pair my socks, hold on while I check Facebook, is there anything good on the telly, please let there be something I can do instead of read this dull.  It’s a perfectly average length for a Missing Adventure, yet reading it took weeks.  And I’m not (just) being a jerk about the story Justin Richards is telling – although I have issues with that too.  The major problem with The Sands Of Time is structural, and it scuppers the book right away.

Shortly after arriving in the British Museum, circa late Victorian, the Doctor and Tegan lose Nyssa.  They immediately bump into someone who appears to know them already, who invites them to a mummy unwrapping.  (Those were a thing, and are what inspired Richards to write the book.)  Everyone present seems to be acquainted with the Doctor and Tegan, as it turns out they’ve been on an adventure already.  Then they unwrap the mummy – and as you can probably guess, it isn’t Boris Karloff.

Like The Left-Handed Hummingbird, The Sands Of Time is largely an ouroboros loop: it’s already happened to everyone else here, so the characters need to play catch-up.  This is stylistically challenging for Richards, and a bit of a puzzler for the reader, but in narrative terms – your mileage may vary – it’s anathema.  We know from the outset that the Doctor and Tegan will survive X, Y and Z just to get to this point, as well as roughly what X, Y and Z are.  We know what’s going to happen to the mummy in order for there to be a mummy to unwrap.  (I.e., “Lie down”, followed by “nothing”.)  Yes, we always know no major character is going to get killed off between televised episodes, but there’s a certain disbelief you need for episodic television to work, and Sands throws cold water on it.  An early “shock” involves the abduction of one character and the subsequent reveal of the mummy, who is pronounced dead in one chapter (cue much wailing from Tegan and “Really?” from the reader) and then pronounced still alive immediately afterwards.  At the same time, it’s frantic and inert.

Richards starts his story almost as late as possible, which many will tell you is the best way to do it; the trouble is, he then back-fills his way to that point.  How did said person end up as a mummy?  Here you go.  How did the mummy end up in Kenilworth House?  Like this.  Did the Doctor and Tegan really run all the errands we’re told they did, such as eating lunch and laying out clothes?  They did indeed.  About 200 pages go by without seriously progressing anything.  The tension here is pretty much how Arnold Rimmer describes himself: dead as a can of spam.  Richards chucks in time-travelling asides between chapters, which he admits (in his introduction) are not really necessary but add a sense of scope.  I’d argue they take a narrative already on life support and regularly pause it so you can go to the loo.

As for the adventure itself, Richards seems more concerned with making sure the pieces fit together than with crafting interesting pieces in the first place.  The expedition is a forgettable mummy-fest; he wrote a much creepier expedition-gone-wrong in Theatre Of War, complete with murderous automatons.  When the familiar bandaged service robots show up, it all feels a bit rote.

The wider problem here is our rogues’ gallery.  The mummies were never as interesting or scary as Sutekh, so there’s not much you can do with them.  We get a couple of reanimated corpses, leading to a familial murder blatantly nicked from Pyramids, but their ring-leader Rassul is as dry and desiccated as the mummies; he’s far too talkative to give you the creeps like Marcus Scarman did.  Then we have the Big Bad, Nephthys, who is apparently even worse than Sutekh.  We’re literally told this a few times: “Her brother told me that all life would perish under his rule.  That where he trod he left only dust and darkness.  Nephthys is worse.”  But you know what they say about telling vs. showing.  Nephthys has scarcely any measurable presence in the story until the very end, and all the half-hearted insistence in the world that she’s a double-mega-ultra Sutekh can’t substitute actually seeing that on the page.  I wasn’t convinced for a sentence.

The heroes are pitched about the same: scarcely a personality between them.  Richards deliberately put a “linking” character in there, Atkins, who could be a consistent presence in the slightly fractured narrative.  Which is all well and good, except Atkins is a cardboard cut-out of a butler with hardly any interests or traits.  He asks a lot of questions and has a painfully chaste longing for Miss Warne, another staff-member at Kenilworth.  Atkins is supposed to learn and grow through the course of the story, but he does this like Data, in a Next Generation episode written by Data.  “Probably, Tegan thought, [Atkins] was a bit bored and lost.  But of course he did not show it, any more than he showed any real emotion.”  /  “[Atkins] had read and heard of the value of expressing one’s emotions.”  (Eventually he asks Miss Warne to have dinner!)  His primary function is to be a bit bewildered, but only enough to ask unceasing and perfunctory questions; he’s far too butlery to actually react.

Despite the rather alarming nature of the plot, for her anyway, Tegan falls into a similar trap.  I often laughed at the sheer amount of what-does-this-do and what-does-that-mean bumf Tegan spouts in this.  There’s a whole blob of exposition, nearly 200 pages in, where the Doctor has to explain to her why you can’t arbitrarily change history.  Yes, this may be news to Tegan, but is any Who-fan reading it going to be surprised?  It’s hardly fresh ground for Doctor Who.  (To be fair, it was fresher ground back when this book was published, before New Who did these sorts of conversations to death.  But even within the book, if the reader doesn’t get it by now then you’re a bit late explaining it.)  The Fifth Doctor is about as vanilla as he gets, despite a few amusing moments where he puts his foot in it with Tegan or Nyssa.  Without a compelling intelligence to face off against, since it’s literally asleep for most of the book, he spends all his time tying up loose ends.  There’s no memorable battle of wills.

The whole book feels like Richards has got his structure – which you may or may not hate from the outset – and he’s got the outline of the adventures that fill it, but he hasn’t fleshed any of it out.  There are small, random efforts, like Nyssa suddenly pining for her father (that’s a big enough issue to mine for a whole book, let alone a random paragraph in a story which barely features her), and the sad family that is forced to hand down the responsibility of waiting for the Doctor to show up.  There’s also a tragic romance which would amount to a lot more if, well, it amounted to anything; when we arrive at the plagiaristic Scarman vs. Scarman murder, it’s as surface-level horrible as any murder.

I wonder, from reading around on this book, if the Monsters Collection used an earlier draft.  There are certainly more errors than there should be, like: “The Doctor shook his heard suddenly”, “A Mummy from Eygpt”, “She was finding it difficult to breath without coughing.”  There are a few questionable word choices or possible typos, either way crying out for a red pen: “He caught the smallest glimpse of Nyssa’s flailing trailing leg,” “She spent little time in considering how much this was like travelling with the Doctor, and more dragging dragging her feet.”  And the prose is often functional bordering on tedious, like the number of times Richards manages to get “fog”, “foggy” and “cobbles” into a couple of pages before surprising our heads off with this being… Victorian London?!  (Gasp!)  Richards has written significantly better than this elsewhere, and I feel like a tidier version of this must exist.  But then, at what point would you ditch the red pen?  I’d question the whole flip-flopping time travel bit, bulk up the villain role, either trim the supporting cast or add some more flavour, and send Atkins on an intensive How To Be Interesting course.  (Heck, give him some Jeeves & Wooster tapes.)

Richards wrote it on the road, in chunks.  He’s nostalgic about that, but I wish he hadn’t confirmed it: all of a sudden it’s perfectly obvious this is a narrative he periodically picked up and dropped, because that’s the level of excitement it engenders.  It must take some guts to rock up with a sequel to Pyramids Of Mars – and a pitch that equates to showing you a painted wall, then promising to explain in detail how the paint dried.

4/10