#59
The Room With No Doors
By Kate Orman
It’s almost the end. The moment
is being prepared for.
The Doctor has regeneration on
the brain. He knows it’s coming; chances are, the reader watched it happen
months before this book came out. So we find the New Adventures in the
bittersweet phase of winding down, knowing that the new Doctor is a concern for
somebody else* but also that they have just enough time to go out on their own
terms. That pregnant pause is the essence of The Room With No Doors. How does the Doctor feel about his
impending change? What will he leave behind? I love character-driven stories,
and Room is definitely in that vein, with one of Kate Orman’s helter-skelter
plots playing second fiddle to the real, smaller material.
Things are strained between the
Doctor and Chris. A combination of disasters – the loss of Roz, the recent loss of Liz**, the overall absence of Bernice – underpin the basic awkwardness of
these two being alone together, which let’s face it isn’t the ideal outcome for
either of them. One of my favourite observations in Bad Therapy was that they
were like an estranged father making time for his kid, and that’s a real
problem the books have had to work on. Eternity Weeps was more trauma for the
pile. The Room With No Doors is an
answer to all that. But first we find the two of them in the TARDIS, awkwardly
writing goodbye letters to one another, both unable to finish. It’s a
really well orchestrated bit of writing in a book that hums with them.
An unusual time trace in
sixteenth-century Japan is as good a distraction as any: a mysterious pod is
causing prosperous harvests and (more low-key than you’d think) the
resurrection of the dead. Two already warring armies get wind of this and both
want to take possession. An alien figure knows what the thing is and isn’t
telling; a band of large anthropomorphic birds feels similarly. Into this
arrives not just the Doctor and Chris but a Victorian time-traveller named
Penelope Gate and Joel Mintz, one of the Doctor’s fanboys from Return Of The Living Dad, who has his own schemes afoot.
Busy, isn’t it? And yet, the
Japanese armies don’t even know what they’re fighting to possess, lending their
quest an almost going-through-the-motions quality. The alien and the giant
birds are so reticent it almost becomes irrelevant what they’re actually
arguing about. Underneath, ticking away, are the Doctor and Chris. The Doctor
is training him more and more it seems, which isn’t helping his own feelings of
helplessness about Roz and Liz. He eventually realises this might be a way for
this Doctor to leave something behind. After causing his own earlier self to
regenerate simply because he wasn’t able to get things done – or so he believes – he’s about to find
the shoe on the other foot. I went back and forth over what would be a more
cruelly ironic fate: being out-manipulated by his future self, or the master
manipulator getting killed at random. We all know which one it was, and to some
extent he comes to terms with that as well. Chris is manipulated by him a
little, but not so much that he’s mad about it – “Chris suddenly felt terribly
sorry for the old bastard” – and hey, what’s one more for the road?
Kate Orman gets a lot of mileage
out of the Doctor’s dilemma, even going so far as a bit of first person writing
when he finds himself buried alive and debating whether he deserves to die. He
and Chris have frequent conversations about regeneration, as Chris wonders more
and more about his own death and then worries about losing the Doctor. It’s
fascinating to have the Doctor be so frank about all this – frankly, it’s now
or never – and the concept of change and renewal dovetails so neatly with
Virgin losing the Who license that it could all have been orchestrated. This
change is inevitable – it literally already happened, we’re just counting down
now. The Doctor has no control over it: Virgin didn’t write his demise and
someone else will write the new Doctor afterwards. The only option left is to
stop worrying and live until there isn’t any life left, and that’s his journey
here. Rather beautifully, the Doctor of the New Adventures becomes the New
Adventures. And it’s nearly time to go. By the end the Doctor and Chris are on
stable terms, happy to continue together for years, aware that they probably
won’t.
The book makes no bones about its
plot being “less” than you might expect. “‘This
is all a bit small-scale for you, isn’t it? The Earth’s not going to blow up or
anything...’ ‘Oh yes,” said the Doctor. ‘This is just an adventure. A bit of
swordplay, a few jokes, nothing worth taking very seriously.’” / “The world wasn’t going to end – nothing
important was happening to [Chris] or the Doctor.” The pod makes as good a
contrivance as any, and it’s fair that all this chaos can come about without
anyone wanting to take over all of time and space, or have any specific
ambition at all. Warriors find out about a powerful thing and they want it.
Joel’s nefarious scheme (it’s not that nefarious, mostly ill-considered) is
just opportunism. The giant birds and the alien (they’re amusing; she’s not)
have their own power struggle, though no one seems terribly interested. It’s all good,
but it’s a deliberate kind of muchness to make the character stuff stand out,
and stand out it adorably does. (“Whenever
Chris lives through a fifth of September, he just counted it as another
birthday. He’d had five in the last two years. He suspected that the Doctor
tried to land in September whenever he thought Chris needed cheering up.”)
Just to be boringly pragmatic though, it is a little difficult to take to all
the characters buzzing around – there are a lot and it’s not that long a book.
Orman’s writing, much like Paul Cornell’s when he gets near a finale, has a
certain sugar rush quality where lots of undeniably really good ideas get piled
on top of each other fast. You miss bits.
Still, all the business has its
own positive effect: a feeling of things going on that we aren’t privy to, such
as a previous encounter with a “vampire” that earned the Doctor the nickname
“snowman”, Penelope’s first encounter with Joel and their adventures on the way
here, and Joel meeting the Eighth Doctor during a crisis in his own time.
Penelope herself is a higgledy-piggledy mirror of the Doctor, a suggestion that
these conflagrations of eccentricity and brilliance do happen outside the
TARDIS and result in their own time travels. (Paul Magrs would no doubt agree.)
All that’s got to be deliberate what with the Doctor, and this whole series hurtling
towards a close. I kind of see it like Her Majesty on Abbey Road: lost little
fragments that tell you not to worry, it isn’t really over, it will just carry
on somewhere else.
You could easily keep digging
into what this all means – for instance the Room With No Doors, which is an
idea up there with Cornell’s Pertwee-decade-of-death – but Orman’s books rarely
come across as serious thought pieces. For all the academic good stuff she
sprinkles in there, she seems more concerned that you’re going to enjoy
yourself. The writing has an almost casual brilliance that is worth going back
and re-reading. Take the Doctor and Chris’s interrogation at the hands of a
couple of samurai, which – just to make things interesting – happens mostly in
reverse order. Or the way she gently italicises futuristic words Penelope isn’t
familiar with, without ever drawing attention to that. Or simple subtlety like:
“‘Call me Isha,’ said the little man. Now
that Aoi was closer, he could see just how strange this ‘Doctor’ looked.”
Or the terrifying image of a flock of drone “heads” observing the characters,
then “drifting away like neglected
balloons.” Or the nostalgic good humour of the Seventh Doctor, like “All
those with psychokinesis, raise my hand”, and the way his deadly serious
ultimatum to Joel crumbles under the same human foibles that made him give
Bernice a surprising kiss goodbye. Or the fact that she can write him as
adorable and wonderful, but then have him carry a dead child to make a point.
The birds are funny, too.
It’s little, and it’s a lot. They
still have some way to go, but it’s an ending. The Doctor and Chris needed this
and so did we.
8/10
* Wink.
** At the risk of being a broken
record... I still hate the Liz thing. It’s Liz because there’s audience
recognition of the character and we’ll be more sad when she dies. But she’s in
the book so little, and Chris knows so little about her, and the Doctor is so
unaware of what’s going on, that it feels token. “Ah,” you might well
add, “that’s the tragedy, and therefore the point!” To which I say,
poo with knobs on. It’s cheap, unintentionally or otherwise, and it will
probably endure as one of the things I like least about the NAs. Bah!
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