Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #86 – Damaged Goods by Russell T Davies

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#55

Damaged Goods

By Russell T Davies

I’ve said this before, but as Gary Russell said to the continuity reference, what’s one more?  The New Adventures have (or at least, to me they had) a certain stigma.  They’re New.  They’re grown up.  There’s a significant chance they’re not for you, faint hearted young Who fan, so move on.  (Which I did.)

And that’s bollocks.  The majority of them are just Doctor Who books, some good and some bad, with more inclination towards swearwords and sex than you’d expect in Doctor Who.  (It’s still not that much.)  Whirling through these books, I occasionally wonder what all the fuss was about – where all the big, scary adultness went.

Well, it’s here, isn’t it?  Damaged Goods practically earns the New Adventures reputation all in one go.  It isn’t the first NA to push these buttons (messrs Aaronovitch and Cartmel have prior claim) but boy, is it the most.  If you want to be literal about it, this book has the largest number of sexual references and perhaps the greatest quantity of violence I’ve seen in a Who book.  It is bonzo-dog-doo-dah dark, and by the end it’s bleak enough that Andrew Cartmel might put it down for a moment and stare brokenly out of a window.  (Fair’s fair: I think Cartmel trumps this one for drugs references in Warlock.  And, uh, dog-related deaths in Warchild.)

It’s difficult to look at it unspoiled, as we’re all sitting on the other side of Russell T Davies’s time making actual watch-it-on-the-telly Doctor Who, so we’ve all got a pretty good idea what he likes about it.  A fair amount of that material is seeded here.  We have a poor estate in London, a family of Tylers, a devastating Christmas, more focus on the human lives going on while the Doctor machinates, and a great deal of guilt for the devastation he leaves in his wake.  As a bonus, reading Damaged Goods makes you realise just how much he toned it down for TV.  Damn, Russell!

Okay, let’s hunker down: the book begins with a flashback, which is also a flash-forward.  Little Bev Tyler follows her mum out into a cold Christmas night on an unhappy errand, when she catches sight of a strange little man in a battered hat.  Years later she meets him, and he has no idea who Bev is.  (Davies delighted in telling Toby Hadoke that New Earth invented timey-wimey before Steven Moffat did, and he manages it even earlier here.  But Steven arguably snuck in before him with Continuity Errors.  Then again, they both nicked it from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.)  I loved the immediacy of this, Bev picking the Doctor up right away on their strange meeting – it’s the kind of secret that usually festers away inside a character, and you wish they’d just bloody talk to each other instead.  Plenty of that goes on elsewhere in Damaged Goods.

Something is eating away at Bev’s mother Winnie, and a great deal of unspoken horror haunts the seemingly unrelated Jericho family.  Poor, slowly-losing-her-mind Eva Jericho has a black dress she’s saving for her son’s funeral.  Steven Jericho sits vegetative in a hospital bed, while Winnie’s son Gabriel – curiously influential around his housing estate for a nine year old – taunts a local closeted man, Harry, teasing secrets out of his mind and making him run errands.  Harry longs for his late wife Sylvie and hates himself for his nightly cruising, made all the worse by his confidently gay lodger David.  The whole estate is disturbed by the suicide – and apparent resurrection – of a local drug dealer, the Capper, who quite apart from being reanimated is not the man he was.  The Capper, Harry, Bev, Eva, Gabriel and others are all haunted by inner voices.  Their thoughts and lives are what drive the book, more so than the Doctor Who paraphernalia you’re expecting.

One of the book’s main themes is that this isn’t the Doctor’s wheelhouse – normal people with their private lives and secrets factor into the Doctor’s adventures like bugs on a windshield, but this time they’re vital.  When it comes to shaking down a housing estate, he’s stumped: “I’d find it easier to gain access to the court of Rassilon himself, than to step over Winnie Tyler’s front door.  And there are seventy-six front doors in the Quadrant, seventy-six fortresses I might need to breach.”  Shortly after that line he gets a foot in the door thanks to a random fire-bombing, and for a moment you do wonder if he organised it to hurry things along.  Davies twists the knife several times, including: “These people never knew why they died, never had the chance to understand that greater issues had taken precedence over their little lives ... The Doctor had joined their ranks, powerless and ignorant and forgotten while disaster swept all around.”  There’s something almost punishing about it.  When the finale arrives and all hell breaks loose – more literally than in the vast majority of these books – the Doctor is several steps behind, and he can do nothing to stop it.  Damaged Goods is a bloodbath, it is brutal – central characters die, which okay, doesn’t include the main trio, but still seems outrageous after growing to care about them so much.  This is seemingly the point: the Doctor takes people for granted, and then people die.  You feel every bit as gutted and powerless as the people in the Quadrant when the N-Form goes on its spree, killing at least 11,000 people.  It’s around here you realise the whole cocaine plot has been strangely low in the mix – could the writer have forgotten about it?  I’m betting no, as the Doctor is so wrong-footed he never makes his usual investigative strides, and then gets to watch it explode with the rest of us.  Good god.  (As a final thought on this, it’s interesting that a central conflict for the new series Doctor was learning to “do domestic”.  He went from cold bastard Northerner to genial David Tennant in a Christmas hat.  That’s beginning to look like a long-time itch being scratched.)

Implausible as it may seem, the book isn’t all bleak.  The Quadrant and its outlying areas have a certain warmth – even the graveyard Harry visits for anonymous sex comes with a group of supportive men who would, if asked, come to his rescue.  (He won’t ask.)  Davies is refreshingly frank about sex and gay men, with characters like David all but rolling their eyes and saying “Oh give over” at anyone thinking it’s terribly weird to read about them in the first place.  David is a sweet guy and immediately besotted with Chris – who is virtually omnisexual but doesn’t pick up on his signals at first.  Their scenes are lovely, and David’s make-or-break joke about men having a hinge in their ribs manages to be both a believably earnest attempt to talk to Chris, and probably the bawdiest sex reference in all of Who.  (Except for maybe Ursula the paving slab.)  It’s juvenile to titillate for the sake of it, but it’s more grown up to be honest.  This book has plenty of (mucky) honesty.  And plenty of real, every day horror, including a prostitution ring run out of a downstairs flat by a married couple.  Lovely stuff.

Stepping away from the sex (ahem), the most positive part of it is the prose.  Occupying so many people’s inner thoughts gives the novel considerable drive which heightens the horrible moments.  (Chapter Nine in particular, which moves between an impending suicide and a murder.  It’s so good, you’ll pause.)  Elsewhere, Davies tosses out enough gorgeous phrases and aphorisms that I had to stop taking notes.  Random hits include: “It was a wonderful day, but lurking beneath it all like an unwelcome relative was the question of where the money came from” / “The suit of flame rendered his expression invisible, but all those watching knew to their horror that he was smiling” / “Harry went to Smithfield, always at night, for reasons other than remembrance” / “The pain in his chest was clawing from within – oh yes, the knife wound hurt now, it waited until it had Harry’s full attention and then crawled out of its hole on jagged legs, dancing with glee” / “Briefly, she wondered what equivalent of milkshakes had drawn them into his company” / “‘I’m in love,’ breathed David, then he ran to the bathroom to exfoliate” / “All in all, a reasonable face, bordering on handsome in a bad light” / “The Glamour’s nothing more than a shiver on water” / “Then she said no more and their chances of friendship died in the silence” / “The two women meet could no longer meet without the secret coming along as chaperone”.  Despite being genuinely upsetting at times, the damned thing is a pleasure to read.

Even so, I think I’d refrain from calling it perfect.  There’s a point at the end when one tragedy piles onto another and the clouds absolutely refuse to part, and I felt defeated trying to work out what it was for, other than giving the reader a kick.  In fairness it must be hard to write really horrifying stuff without appearing to do it for its own sake – that way books like Falls The Shadow and Strange England lie, tediously interfering with themselves.  The book says a lot of interesting (albeit unhappy) things about the Doctor and his effect on humanity, which all ring true except that a) he’s really come along in recent years, so maybe it’s a tad unfair to give him both barrels now, and b) the book’s focus isn’t really on the Doctor so much as Bev, Eva, Gabriel, Harry and David, so when it finally comes time to stick the boot in over Gallifrey’s ancient sins and the Doctor’s apathy, it feels a little bit random.  Paradoxically, in delving into the humanity of its characters, Damaged Goods is a little short on protagonists; I felt like Winnie ought to have more say in events, I’m not surprised her other son Carl was written out of the Big Finish adaptation altogether, and poor Gabriel is forced to have very little say in his last dramatic scenes, which might otherwise have helped to offset how creepy he is.  Chris and Roz have several tender and thoughtful moments throughout, the former with David and the latter working around the Doctor, but neither of them drives the story much.  Frankly it’s a bit crowded in here.  And this is sheer personal preference, but I’m not crazy about the N-Form or its links to old continuity.  Talk of vampires and bowships all seems bizarrely grandiose in this context, which I suppose feeds the theme again of the Doctor being disconnected from real life.  I still didn’t love it.

Of course I’d be insane to really nitpick a book that read as beautifully as this, or said as many interesting things about its characters, or felt this uninhibited and was this skilled at executing its ambitions.  In clearer English: this is some of the best written Doctor Who you’re going to find, and if it makes you upset and mad sometimes, consider how many other books in the series elicited such strong feelings.  It’s really something.  And it’s clear that Davies was a smart choice to bring the show back, although it’s something to be grateful for that he had got a few things out of his system first.

9/10