#52
Christmas On A Rational Planet
By Lawrence Miles
The name’s Larry. Mad Larry. Although maybe not to his face.
Lawrence Miles would go on to be one of those infamous Doctor Who names, known for twisting old canon as well as generating his own. His books are memorably geeky and odd, running the gamut from spirited fannish mystery (Alien Bodies) to grim fannish treatise on his ideas and how interesting they are (Interference). People call him Mad Larry and his first book, Christmas On A Rational Planet, makes a pretty good case for that.
All the same, it’s not (and he’s not) that weird in context. I’ve read New Adventures more obsessed with surrealism, to the point where you can barely read the bloody things; some that take similar or greater gambles with canon; and a few with a cockier authorial voice. Heck, if we’re dubbing him Mad Larry then why not Mad Marc, Strange Ben, Disturbed Daniel, Weird Simon or Positively Unusual Dave? The New Adventures often tend towards weirdness – “too broad and too deep” used to be the sales pitch. I think what we have here, for better or worse, is Another Trippy First Time Novel. Unsurprisingly it’s marmite.
It makes a considerable first impression. Roz is running from a gynoid – shapeshifting thing, don’t worry about it – in a desert somehow out of sync with the universe. So far, so trippy. But Miles effortlessly chops between this encounter and the one directly before it, where Roz (avec Doctor and Chris) encounter the same creature in the same desert, only not quite? These bits are in italics and there’s no real confusion about where or when we are. It’s deft stuff, helped along by a confident, pithy climb inside Roz’s head. “‘Useful,’ the Doctor had said, five minutes before the world had opened up and dragged her down into its shadow. Just that, as he’d pressed the sphere into her hands. ‘Useful.’”
Roz gets far and away the best character writing in the novel. Miles just seems more invested in her. Stranded alone in a backward America, circa 1799, she spends her time tolerating racism and working as a fortune teller. “‘Abracadabra, shalom-shalom … I see into the mists of time and stuff, blah blah blah.’” / “‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’ he heard himself say. ‘No,’ she said, emotionlessly. ‘But that isn’t going to stop me biting your face off.’” Of course she hates it, so she finds a creative but very dubious plan of escape: she meets Abraham Lincoln’s father, if she shoots him she will alter history – and the Doctor will come. This sort of works and the Doctor is understandably furious, but she blames it semi-convincingly on the cruelty and racism she is living with. “‘I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the not knowing. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act here, and neither do they. They can’t even decide whether I’m human or not.’” I think Miles knows this is still a bit of a stretch, but then later on Roz is confronted with a duplicate of herself from before she met the Doctor. The point is to illustrate how far she’s come – and not with a subtle touch – but if she’s willing to kill a man just to get out of here, is she “better” than her ask-questions-later self? If not, does the comparison serve us very much?
Hey, I didn’t say it was all good character writing – only that she gets the best of it. To tackle everyone else we’ll need to examine the plot, an area Christmas On A Rational Planet isn’t entirely comfortable with.
Reality is on the blink. Roz loses the amaranth, a tool that reshapes the world, when she lands in 1799. The TARDIS (which is linked to it) consequently isn’t quite itself and refuses to let the Doctor in (stranding him, too, in 1799). The rest of the town of Woodwicke follows suit, i.e. goes a bit wibbly. Soon there are monsters – I hope “gynoids” is enough of a descriptor for you – and the local Renewal Society, made up of Rationalists who hate anything superstitious, find themselves on a mindless crusade to round up the local black populace. They’re led by Matheson Catcher, a disturbed young man hearing voices, whose home has morphed into an “UnTARDIS”. Meanwhile in the police box, Chris finds an Interface that gives the ship a voice (while it also falls apart), and he shares the experience with Duquesne, a survivor of the French Revolution working for the mysterious Shadow Directory, against Chris and any other world-altering “caillou” like him. So the Doctor and Roz.
There’s a lot of information here, but I’d hesitate to describe it as a plot. There is one, certainly: an ancient psychic force (from before the dawn of time etc.) has awakened and the amaranth is a handy tool for getting its way. But that sentence doesn’t fill nearly 300 pages, so in practical terms, Roz and the Doctor try to survive a mad crusade while Chris wanders around the TARDIS and Duquesne loses her marbles. And that’s… still not really enough for a book, or for me anyway. The Doctor has the usual stand-off with a baddie (or two), but otherwise he gets interrogated, lightly tortured and generally just has an awful time. Chris has some arguably interesting experiences, but his moment of catharsis pointedly isn’t his own, and he otherwise comes off nearer the dumb, horny end of his spectrum. (It’s not a big spectrum.) The madness in Woodwicke isn’t very interesting – no one knows what they’re doing, and since reality is borked, what are the stakes? We all love seeing inside the TARDIS, but that always seems to be code for “gee, I wonder what LSD is like?” Inevitably there are hallucinations sprinkled on top. There’s a lot of chopping between these short, weird sections, and it’s difficult to stick with it when there isn’t much of a through line.
There are themes, particularly the Psi Powers arc, although Christmas doesn’t do nearly as much for that as SLEEPY did. This one essentially underlines that there are psychic forces out there, but it leaves the Doctor and co. still at square one investigating it. In a broader sense we have Reason vs Cacophany, and how one can ironically lead to another. And there is a lot of symmetry, as seen in that nifty time-shifting prologue, or scenes of two people separately being frightened by Catcher, or separate journeys through the UnTARDIS and the TARDIS, or the disembodied Carnival Queen of Cacophony and the disembodied TARDIS interface, or Roz’s double. But I’m not sure how much of that is a deliberate effort to hold up mirrors and how much is just some groovy, trippy repetition. Call it a mental lapse, but I don’t know what all these echoes are supposed to tell me anyway. I don’t like halls of mirrors very much.
I’ve read rapturous reviews of Christmas On A Rational Planet which lap all this up, and power to them (and you, if that applies). But I think there’s fuel here to suggest this isn’t a work of genius. Like how Miles’s supporting characters have one or two attributes each, but no underlying personality – and how he hammers each attribute until it whimpers. Erskine Morris lets off an expletive seemingly every other sentence, usually ironically Biblical. (“Hellfire and buggery!” isn’t hilarious the hundredth time.) Daniel Tremayne really wants to get away from here and yearns for more out of life. Duquesne gets an unpleasant feeling in her spine when she’s near something world-changing. And Matheson Catcher, oh, Matheson ruddy Catcher. Every character that meets him feels the need to observe that he is, in some way, clockwork. Again and again this point is made – we get it. But then later when the voices of the Watchmakers start to get to him, he begins thinking and speaking in caps. It starts looking like a crude way to make his dialogue stand out – like another character whose name escaped me, who stresses the occasional word to the point where you don’t pay attention to what she’s saying – and when Catcher starts audibly capitalising random letters, it all starts looking a bit desperate. He certainly never elevates to a character that is intimidating or interesting, despite the enthusiastic caps.
Miles is on a bit of a keyboard walkabout, particularly when the book’s psychic force starts talking for itself, and it uses a tilde and a space instead of speech-marks. (!) All this is creative in a blunt sense, but it’s trying a bit too hard for little reward. So he adds his own, with characters repeatedly congratulating themselves on idioms and expressions. “He was pleased with the way he put that.” / “You can’t chart a river without visiting its source... thank you, Marielle, a very nice metaphor.” If you do say so yourself.
Somehow, despite the wealth of words, Christmas On A Rational Planet is often lost for them. The gynoids are just… things. (“Each of the creatures looked completely different to the last, different in ways Chris couldn’t quite get his head around.” Or Miles, it seems.) The Watchmakers are mentioned frequently, and with a dash of portentous world-building they become possible predecessors to the Time Lords, but god knows how present they are in this story or what they’re doing or what they look like. Places like the UnTARDIS shift in and out of the gobbledegook dimension. (“He was at one with the room. He was in every corner, stretched along every surface. Its angles were his angles ... Then one of the corners blistered again ... The wall burst open, vomiting madness into the cellar.” Uh huh. Oh right. You betcha.) Paragraph breaks often begin or end with some perplexingly vague-yet-immense explosion of everything, nothing, etc., which just becomes the done thing after a while. The whole book hums with excitement at getting all of this down, which is cool, but I was often bored by the lack of definition. I also began to suspect that every time I put it down some little sod was stuffing it with extra pages, as it was occasionally like reading a treadmill.
Despite all that, and rather fitting the book’s schizophrenic theme, it is occasionally very good. Miles can turn a phrase beautifully when he fancies it: “Furniture disagreed with him.” / “The clock in the church tower struck nine, listlessly, perhaps aware that no one cares about the time this close to Christmas.” / “[Tourette was] a man who finds it difficult to come to terms with a piece of machinery as complex as an oar.” / “Most of the rain seemed to be missing him somehow, as if the droplets knew that he wouldn’t grow no matter how much they watered him.” Fill your boots, there’s loads. One of my favourite bits – where yes, Miles is playing games with prose in his enthusiastic puppy way – sees the TARDIS Interface musing about Chris and Duquesne in the text, and then Chris noticing one of the roundels blinking at him. That’s as close as a book gets to wading in and telling their characters stuff, and I love that sort of interplay. Plus there is good character writing, although it is bobbing up and down in the word soup. Behold, the best argument for not revealing the Doctor’s real name, so shut up already Moffat: “I usually just say my name’s ‘Smith’, if anyone asks, but I’ve been thinking about finding another pseudonym. It’s getting dangerously close to becoming my real name.” (Miles also said “It’s smaller on the outside” before he did.)
If you like a few continuity shots fired, you’ll do well. Obviously telly Who is represented, but if it’s fan-films you’re after (PROBE), or comics (Abslom Daak, referred to here as fictional), or other Virgin books (SLEEPY, The Scales Of Injustice – which came out the same month), you’re equally in luck. Some of the TARDIS interior stuff is beguiling, particularly the image of the food machine trundling through the corridors in search of customers, and the library that leads to other worlds. More noteworthy I suppose is an eyebrow-raising reference to the Seventh Doctor’s death in the TV Movie. Combined with some portentous talk of Eighth Man Bound, a Time Lord “game” where the player tries to see his future regenerations – and no one has ever gone further than seven – it pushes closer to a conclusion for the New Adventures Doctor, which is ballsy for a first-time writer – and is the kind of thing Miles would repeat later in his career. (There’s also a reference to Lungbarrow, in case you didn’t get the hint.) I’m still not sure how highly I rate this sort of thing, as referencing Who to a captive audience of Doctor Who fans is fruit so low-hanging you might need to crouch, but it can clearly be done well.
I’d love to say I’m torn about this, but my mind’s pretty well made up. This one was work, and that doesn’t happen when you like the book. It’s not as if I don’t like a bit of creative language and world-building; I want to hug Sky Pirates! just thinking about it, The Also People could be my happy place, SLEEPY (which this is a sequel to) practically knocked me on my arse, and I still boggle about the visuals in Parasite and Lucifer Rising. But the underpinnings are just too wobbly here for me to believe this is a work of genius. There are great ideas (always a rather loaded compliment) but they’re not tied to a strong narrative. The best thing about it is knowing he’d do better later on, which is more than you can say for some of Virgin’s other surrealists.
5/10
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