Doctor Who: The BBC Books #16 – Eye Of Heaven by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#8
Eye Of Heaven
By Jim Mortimore

Mortimore alert! Stand by for strangeness.

I would not have laid odds that Jim Mortimore’s first BBC Book would be a Past Doctor Adventure. Wouldn’t it be more enticing for him — a well known experimental Who writer — to jump into something new instead? That is, of course, assuming that all PDAs will feel a bit like a lost telly episode, and that is, of course, entirely wrong in this case.

Eye Of Heaven feels new. For starters, after 33 fruitless Missing Adventures my prayers have been answered: Leeeelaaaaa! Now, it might be sheer coincidence that she never got a whole novel to herself at Virgin, but I tend to assume her popularity was at a low ebb at that time and nobody asked for one. Out of all the companions it could be said that she has the most unusual background and most identifiable narrative voice, which might have made her seem like an outlier? Eye Of Heaven clearly views this as a feature and not a bug, however, as it’s an entirely first person novel — which means we’re not only getting lashings of Leela, but Leela as-told-by-Leela. If you’re anything like me this is like several missed Christmases showing up at once.

Mortimore captures her voice well. She is a hunter, always assessing situations from a point of attack. She is blunt and to the point. (“My name is not ‘gel’. It’s Leela. Use it or do not speak to me.”) She lacks the context to understand civilisation’s foibles but does not lack intelligence; in 2024 this reads a bit like neurodivergence. Perhaps that’s just me, but regardless, it makes for an unusual and fun method of teasing out information as Leela interprets it all in her own way. (“The holy marks meant, The Times, London, 21 August 1872. The Doctor had told me this cloth was a sheet from something called a newspaper. He said there was a different newspaper every day. I thought this was good: the cloth was so flimsy I could poke a hole in it with my fingers. I did so now to prove how strong I was. The hole joined others beside different marks, ones I had been told meant, Noted Archaeologist Seeks Sponsorship for Expedition to South Seas.”) There’s also a good deal of comedy to be had here, as social mores pass her by: “Stockwood groped in his pocket and pulled out some breadcrumbs, which he threw at the birds. They began to fight over them. Clever. Provoke them to fight and then kill the survivors. Twice as much food for the tribe. I held my hand out for some bread.”

As if to make up for lost time, there are bits of back story around Leela’s family and the Sevateem way of life. This serves as a handy refresher for a character that hasn’t exactly been over-saturated in print, and it allows Mortimore to indulge in some visceral and highly visual moments. He’s good at those: the trippy first person account of the death of Leela’s younger sister is not likely to leave my brain, joining the likes of the perilous star-bridge crossing in Lucifer Rising. (Which was co-written, I know, but experience suggests that this bit was mostly Jim.)

Perhaps for the same reason, this is Leela at her most Leela, with the Doctor’s personal influence appearing somewhat minimal. She is fiercely superstitious throughout, convinced that various characters are agents of Cryuni, the Sevateem spectre of death. (The Doctor attempts to right her on this but it mostly just amounts to helpless eye-rolling.) She is also unapologetically violent, at first somewhat cautious about the Doctor’s no-killing rule, then eventually leading a wholesale war against a gang of pirates, killing many and “gutting” at least one. She justifies this quite understandably with “We were at war. To lose was to die.” Do I have any better ideas? No. But it is perhaps unfortunate that the Doctor has no opportunity to take her to task for this; it feels like a not insignificant step backwards from where she was in the series at the time. (This is way beyond a Janis thorn against an assassin, last deployed in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang.) All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mortimore simply wanted to showcase what is different about the character in this instance, and if so he is successful.

It is not, however, an entirely Leela-driven novel. We toggle narrators as we go along, a list that eyebrow-raisingly includes the Doctor. This is another rare treat (added to Leela, and first person in general) and Mortimore carries it off with breezy confidence. The Fourth Doctor is a difficult character to crack, but the voice here straddles the line between whimsy and depth. Even in the other characters’ segments he leaps off the page as fun (“The Doctor took out a pocket watch and flipped open the lid. ‘Eighteen seventy-two… half past August’”) and mysterious (Leela, who is able to perceive honesty through body language, notes that “The Doctor’s expression told me nothing. His body also told me nothing — beyond his interest in Stockwood’s tale”). In his own passages he regards the human world with affection and occasional surprise, and we get occasional peeks behind the proverbial curtain, such as his use of transcendental meditation to cure a bullet wound. (Featuring, casual as you like, the back story to his acquiring the Holy Ghanta before The Abominable Snowmen.)

It’s also worth saying that, although I think Leela gorges on her impulses in Eye Of Heaven, when the Doctor takes an interest it rings very true: “‘I am a hunter. There is nothing here to hunt. Except fish.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘If the mind is willing there is always something to hunt.’ ‘I do not understand.’ ‘Then hunt that. Hunt understanding. Make it your enemy and track it to its lair. Grapple with it. Take it and make it your slave. Your tool. Use it. Feast upon it. Grow fat on it.’ ‘That is silly. Understanding is not an animal. It cannot fight.’ ‘Galileo wouldn't agree with you.’” I very much agree that “hunting understanding” is how Leela approaches the world around her. Big Finish makes for good further reading here. (As, I hope, will BBC Books.)

The Doctor isn’t in it much — quite right, as you wouldn’t want to overdo the first person bits with him, but even so Leela is mostly fending for herself here. This allows for a few more narrators. To list them all would verge on spoilers for the story he’s telling, so suffice to say the main one is Horace Stockwood: a fifty-something anthropologist who visited, and fled Easter Island decades ago, leaving a friend to die for fear of the natives (angry at his theft of a sacred tablet) and some apparently, terrifyingly mobile stone heads. Stockwood’s initial prologue is another of those “in the moment” Mortimore passages, all the better for being in first person. The juggling of narrators means taking a moment to orient yourself at the start of each chapter (do they mention Janis thorns, or refer to the TARDIS as “old thing”?), but it all helps to paint an interesting picture with the story, probably more so than if we’d just had one narrator. (That is, provided you don’t find this whole setup a bit annoying. I get the sense that some do, but that’s just the nature of taking a swing.)

But wait — there’s more. As well as being a first person novel, told by rare-book-companion Leela, but also told by the Doctor, and other characters as well, Eye Of Heaven also happens out of sequence. Not bewilderingly so, it must be said: we are for the most part either following the sea voyage back to Easter Island (so Stockwood can make things right — fulfilling what has become his life’s obsession) or the lead up to it in London. It’s quite binary. But as we go on, things juggle around more enthusiastically, with more narrators added into the mix. There is a whiff of a plot reason for this (see Chapter 23), but that comes and goes somewhat in isolation from the rest of the book, leaving the stronger impression that this was simply an interesting way to tell the story. If so, well — it is interesting! But I never quite felt the last-act-of-Memento zipping up of perspectives that I hoped was coming. For what it’s worth.

The blender of viewpoints only has minor casualties, such as a critical piece of Leela’s story only being related to us later by Stockwood after she told him about it. (You would think “how I escaped from inside a whale carcass caught inside a tornado” would be worthy of its own chapter, but BBC Books are pretty rigid on page counts, so maybe that bit had to go.) There is also a major character reveal that happens in the earlier portion of the story (pre-voyage) but is related to us in the later portion, entirely without ceremony because at that point the characters already know who it is, which seemed an odd choice. Nonetheless, I didn’t have too much trouble following it, and the vast majority of the story is there. (NB: If you’re struggling to keep it all together, as I was occasionally due to sheer attention span vs excessive chopping and changing, it might help your concentration if you try and figure out the correct order of events. This only occurred to me late on and all of a sudden I raced through it!)

You could be forgiven for thinking Eye Of Heaven was a pure historical, what with so much time being spent on London malfeasance and treachery at sea. It certainly reads like a kind of genre pastiche, not unlike Mark Gatiss’s approach in The Roundheads or Andy Lane’s in All-Consuming Fire. (Another first person-er!) There are shades of Robert Louis Stevenson here, and perhaps some H. Rider Haggard. But the story is bookended with horror and sci-fi, and when the time comes to tie it all up, there’s no doubt that we’re in Doctor Who territory. The secret of the stones is a satisfyingly brain-bending one, full of dazzling visuals and huge implications. It’s a pity this is only the icing on the cake, but again, I suspect BBC Books’s 280-pages-or-bust style guide had something to do with that. (The existence of Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts suggests there’s always more book somewhere.) For good measure, the Doctor does mention the Ogri, which perhaps subtly reminds us that there are only so many “stones moving about” stories you can tell in Doctor Who before you’re on the same ground. Maybe it avoids repetition if we keep them more as a spooky suggestion.

Eye Of Heaven takes some swings. Narratively, it’s an unusual thing sprinkled with different flavours and wrapped in another unusual thing, but I’ve seen criticism levelled at it for not having enough actual plot. Is there something to that? Well, what we have is comfortably secondary to the way it’s told; I think it’s fair to say there is more artifice here than is strictly needed. But in an ongoing book series, finding interesting ways to tell stories is vital, and frankly, it’s more fun that way. I doubt this particular approach is for everybody, but I lapped it up. The characters, despite all the first person, are not the most rounded individuals outside of Leela, but there’s still a definite poignancy to Stockwood’s life story, and latterly his part in the wider sci-fi meaning. Ultimately I’m glad we passed the narrative parcel.

It’s a deceptively straightforward story for Mortimore, at least at first glance, but the narrative complexity and commitment to intensity in its action sequences made it one that fizzed around my brain after reading it. I think it justifies its choices and I think it’s one I’ll read again.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #15 – Option Lock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#8
Option Lock
By Justin Richards

It’s time once again to spin our Lazy Susan of Returning Doctor Who Writers.

Of course BBC Books sought out Justin Richards. Another sensible choice, along with the likes of Bulis and McIntee, Richards had published several Who books already and was also contributing to the Bernice Summerfield range. Option Lock was his first novel of three published in 1998; he’d increase that to four the following year. We must assume he slept at some point.

I’ve always regarded him as a safe pair of hands, which I know sounds like a dig, but I genuinely think there’s something of Terrance Dicks in his work ethic and general readability. That said, he is capable of writing strange and unexpected things, such as The Sands Of Time, which indulged in a lot of timey-wimey storytelling before Steven Moffat did it. (Though admittedly after Kate Orman did it.) More often he likes to write thrillers that contain some element that personally interests him, such as theatre in Theatre Of War and programming in System Shock. We might infer from Option Lock that he finds nuclear warfare pretty interesting, given the loving detail it receives. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves where the plot is concerned, front cover mushroom cloud notwithstanding. (While we’re jumping ahead, though, this one feels like a mix of his “thriller with bits I like” and “bit odd” approaches.)

The TARDIS arrives (while experiencing an odd power loss) near a country house. As they make their usual recce, the Doctor and Sam are promptly taken for historical surveyors interested in some nearby ruins. They are welcomed into the home of Norton Silver and his wife Penelope, and by all accounts they spend a fair amount of time there. This passes pleasantly enough, apart from a Hot Fuzz-esque encounter with a robed miscreant, and a hypnosis-induced sleep-walk through a fountain at night. Sam builds a a rapport with a military man named Pickering, there to receive hypnotic therapy from Silver, who advises important people from across the globe in the same manner. There are mysteries regarding an ancient society that operates near the house, and the sudden death of a local painter (and what it was about his final painting that drove him to it), which keep the Doctor somewhat occupied.

All told, it’s a leisurely start — stuff is here and stuff is happening, but it’s not noticeably driving us anywhere. Even the Doctor at one point thinks “the whole enterprise was really rather boring in comparison with his usual investigations,” and honestly, including a line like that is absolute death, don’t do it. Because he’s right and now it feels like a lampshade. Option Lock drifts along amiably enough for a while, but it lacks a clear sense of what problem exists that the Doctor must solve. If I wasn’t determined from the outset to finish this book in order to get to the next one (because marathon), this one would be at serious risk of going on the “I’ll get back to you” shelf. It’s not bad, but there were times when I wondered how Richards even persevered writing it. Is this really a strong enough hook for a novel?

While all of this is happening (or barely happening at all, ho ho) there are cogs turning in America, with a political assassination and the replacement of the dead man in the President’s staff. This clearly has some link to Silver, but it’s obscured at first, which is fine — it’s a whole novel and you haven’t finished it yet, chill — but that sense of obscurity is not helped by hard-cutting the action from a country house in Britain to intrigue in the States and then back again. Richards is a good enough writer to buffer these jumps with similar-sounding prose: we go from “A moment later the gallery door opened and the two soldiers started down the staircase, their boots clanking on the metal steps” to “Their feet rang on the stone steps as they raced down towards the water gardens.” But even so, every time it happened it felt like jumping out of the frying pan and into a coffee table.

If you made it to around the 100 page mark (and to be fair, plenty of readers might love all that build-up and not find it stagnant), then Richards has a life-jacket for you. The action ramps up instantly, as some of the inhabitants of the house turn out to be working towards a grand plan, and we get the hardest cut yet: they have instigated a nuclear launch drill in Russia, but in such a way that it will actually launch the nukes. America scrambles to either retaliate or, in case this isn’t what it looks like, hold fire, just as forces in Russia struggle desperately to stop this happening. Events escalate past the point of no return and the US is forced into unveiling one of its deadliest secrets.

It’s a hell of a sequence, both as an exciting piece of writing and in length — it’s fully 50 pages of the book. Option Lock got my attention at last, but then it also raised further questions, such as: is there any chance Justin Richards thought of a great nuclear thriller plot and then had to retrofit it into Doctor Who? Because wow, the Doctor does nothing here. Eventually an escape is made, but until then he sits and watches this play out. Again I had that disoriented feeling of going from one thing to another — here, remembering with a thud that it was even a Doctor Who book.

Not long after this, we get some exposition (slightly inorganically with Sam asking what’s going on and the Doctor unspooling it — yes that’s the tradition way of it, but they really lean into it by the end), and this puts the first hundred pages, or at least the first ten, into context. I was honestly impressed by the pulling together of ideas here, although the most interesting one doesn’t amount to enough: the arrival of the TARDIS played a part in what’s happening. The way it’s executed, this is a functional and useful idea, but not a thought-provoking one. There is no pontification on the inherent dangers of landing somewhere, which perhaps throws away some of the impact of even suggesting it. Similarly, there are moments where Sam considers contacting her family, since this adventure makes that possible. She doesn’t though. (Just think, in the not too distant future of the series that would be unthinkable.) Ultimately all the “oh, how clever” feelings that follow that leaden first act don’t retroactively make it engaging to read. I wonder how many readers simply binned off before they got to the good bit.

I found it hard to shake the idea that the Doctor and Sam were passive voices in Option Lock, despite a growing emphasis on Sam’s interest in Pickering. (The comic possibilities of the name are not lost on Richards: “‘Pickering?’ the Doctor asked, in a voice that suggested he enjoyed a good picker when he got the chance.”) There is even more sitting and watching before the end, with the Doctor and Sam literally placed in front of a big screen, and when the time comes to prevent the villain from completing his mission it’s over to TV Tropes so that a secondary character can make the ultimate sacrifice instead of the Doctor. This is nonetheless a memorable, violent sequence, with a decent amount of psychological impact on Sam. She continues to feel these reverberations in a post-TARDIS epilogue. Both Sam and the Doctor have had one now; we must be building to something seismic. (For those keeping score, we can add Sam’s unwitting actions here to those mind-altered crimes in Kursaal and her regretted actions in Genocide. Her Scrapbook of Sadness floweth over.)

Despite the eventual downer, or rather before we get there, Richards writes a good rapport between the Doctor and Sam. Their overall level of “Is this a fun time, do they both want to be here” is higher than in some of their adventures so far, and that’s how I like it. (I’m not against a bad time in the TARDIS at all — Sam’s certainly getting the mileage for it! I just don’t like it to seem like a chore from the outset, which can be the default Doctor/companion setting — think early Sixth Doctor and Peri.) The Doctor overall has had better days than this, watching bad events unfold and failing as he does to spot treacherous parties all around him; a moment right before The Ultimate Sacrifice (of some other geezer) where he is totally capable of blowing up the bad guy goes bothersomely unexamined. Perhaps another time. (Again, I’ve nothing against saying bleak things about the characters or showing them to have flaws — I just want it to be for a reason. I can’t tell if the Doctor’s slight ineffectuality in Option Lock is there on purpose, if it is meant to say anything. For the most part he just seems a bit dotty.)

There’s a scene in Option Lock where characters must force themselves through a psychic barrier. That’s how I felt reading the first wodge of this (admittedly, without the nausea), and although Richards goes on to pull together his plot strands and pay off his mysteries, it’s still an uneven read, with the highs feeling like they wandered in from somewhere else altogether. There’s not enough personality to the high number of characters who, like the Doctor and Sam (only this time deliberately) are going through the motions — meanwhile, the shadowy force that sits behind them barely registers at all. It’s one of those stories that technically ticks the boxes but never quite comes alive, finishing up blinking blearily as if revived from hypnosis.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #14 – The Face Of The Enemy by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#7
The Face Of The Enemy
By David A. McIntee

Well well, look who it is.

This one came out in January 1998: the early days of BBC Books, when they were still putting together what would become their regular stable of writers. It’s unsurprising, and actually quite practical that most of their picks were already regulars at Virgin Publishing.

David A. McIntee wrote six Who novels prior to this. As is perhaps inevitable after all of that, he is one of those writers with lots of easily identifiable habits. This makes reviewing his books a bit like a marking exercise. (Or perhaps, nerdy Bingo.) He likes to start with an introduction; he likes to incorporate historical research; he likes to make it abundantly clear that he has done said research, usually in the introduction (but also in general); he likes to use a lot of visual detail, ideally as much as he can get away with before needing to include diagrams; he likes infrequent but intense action sequences; he likes to cut frequently between scenes and characters to heighten the tension (but also as a general style choice); and lastly, more of a subtle one here, he has a consistently good eye for a fan-pleasing concept, often involving the Master.

Most of the usual McIntee stuff is present and correct in The Face Of The Enemy. (Well, it is his seventh rodeo.) This week’s concept, though, is a humdinger: we have the rare but not unheard of Doctor-lite story — but also, a Master story — but also, a Master story set during that brief bit of the Pertwee era when he was under lock and key, before he escaped in The Sea Devils! I’m honestly surprised no one else thought to show The Man In The Nehru Suit doing porridge, and not escaping before this.

And that’s just the fannish stuff you get in the blurb. The Face Of The Enemy also features — I don’t think you could call this a spoiler since they’re in most of the book — Ian and Barbara! Roped in to help investigate a downed plane and a mysterious duplicate, they’re soon in the thick of it with UNIT as some sort of invasion begins to take shape. We’re following on from a dollop of continuity in The Devil Goblins From Neptune, with the pair not only being married, but parents. (Slightly annoyingly, McIntee seems to contradict that same scene in Goblins which said that Ian and the Doctor had met up again. Oh well.)

Continuity is sprinkled quite liberally through this one, including: the introduction of a major telly character who never officially showed up for the first time on-screen; the explanation for why an impossibly minor character dropped off the radar after two stories; nods to stuff as disparate as Delta And The Bannermen and Gary Russell’s Virgin books; setup for the Master’s post-Sea Devils escape in The Eight Doctors; and a ref to an upcoming BBC Book. (Ian recalls The Witch Hunters.) But where Ian and Barbara are concerned, continuity tends to serve the character, which is a relief.

Ian’s scientific background leads him to suspect that an irradiated piece of airplane has been to another world; Barbara’s historical background leads her to think it has been far back in time. Until NASA filled her in, Barbara had no knowledge of other people possessing TARDISes (she left before they saw another one in The Time Meddler), but her experience jumping a time track in The Space Museum helps her to understand a bizarre journey here. This stuff is well-judged, and only wheeled out when it’s called for. McIntee seems broadly more interested in their importance to each other as people than as ex companions of the Doctor, with emotions running terrifyingly high on that later. It’s not a very nice time for them, all told, but for once I’d say it was worth bringing someone back. (I might have had a different opinion if the original aim of killing off Barbara, as stated via Terminus Reviews, had been realised. Honestly, sometimes it’s good that the BBC stick their oar in. It seems, to me anyway, a particularly cheap way to score drama points with a particular audience, just parachuting in a familiar face so you can blow it up.)

I’d hesitate to say either of them was the protagonist, and it’s perhaps to be expected that this question feels unresolved when the Doctor and his companion are both busy off-world. We spend a fair amount of time with different players instead, such as Grant (a mob lawyer who scrubs up good), Boucher (a cop broken early on by a death in the line of duty) and Kyle (one of the shady antagonists behind it all). McIntee succeeds in making them each a worthwhile investment, despite some fairly repetitive inner preoccupations — yes, we know Boucher is upset about his nephew and yes, we know Kyle has mixed feelings about her “lost” father and husband, but neither of these situations really grows in the telling. The survival (or otherwise) of some of these characters can make it feel like a bad investment at times, however, but maybe that’s just me being soft. Damn it, I thought that character worked! Why kill them off, you big git? (In one case, off-screen. Did McIntee really resist the urge to roll up his sleeves and show us that untimely end, or was there a bit of editing, I wonder?)

The bit we’re all waiting for, of course, is the Master. McIntee is several rodeos into this character now, and it shows: there is light and shade, but also an unwavering commitment to his goals at the expense of all else. The Master is cheerfully running a bank to finance his criminal enterprises, all from prison. When unknown assailants attack first his bank and then his prison, he escapes (which was already well rehearsed and could have happened whenever he felt like it) and decides that he needs the Brigadier’s help.

This is easily the book’s (groan) master-stroke. Pairing UNIT with its most regular nuisance provides a constant source of colour, especially when it comes to Ian, whom the Master at one point comforts and then manipulates to achieve his ends. I have inevitably mixed feelings about the scene where a distraught Ian seriously considers suicide, but the peculiarity of the Master sitting with him and encouraging him to keep it together has, just as inevitably, stuck with me. (There is of course a hint of disdain baked into it that Ian misses.) The Master really will help others if it is useful to his plan; his duplicity not running entirely amok is, for my money, a lot more interesting than the all-mad-all-the-time version of the character we so often see on television.

Like a few of McIntee’s books, there is a bit of a struggle between the stuff that is interesting and the stuff that is just stuff. There are plenty of opportunities to unleash a bit of action (more specifically, violence) with the bank job and later a Godfather III-esque helicopter strafe run leaving bodies all over the place. I had a growing awareness through these sorts of scenes that I was waiting to find out anything useful. The answers are genuinely interesting once they finally arrive, but — like the Master reaching out to UNIT to forge an awkward alliance — once you reach the good stuff, it becomes a bit difficult to remember what the rest of it was.

This isn’t helped by McIntee’s rapid-cutting style, with up to six scenes occurring across two pages, and not always because we’re nearing an action climax. I just don’t get it when authors do this — it’s a novel, not television. You have my attention. For me, being able to dig in and concentrate when you’re employing this kind of itchy-footed setup is as likely to succeed as getting to sleep after a stressful day. Accordingly it’s taken me about twice as long as usual to get through The Face Of The Enemy, despite the good bits.

Those answers, though. Much like the Master working with UNIT, I wish they had come along sooner. You know, just from the long wait, that there will be something big here, something that is consequential to fans, and there is. The forces seeking to invade Earth are following on from a previous story — and I’ll keep shtum on the details in case you want to go and read it*, but like the choice of time and place for the Master here, it’s a genuinely creative use of continuity and you could continue to work with it. (Indeed, this is not ruled out at the end.) The only downside is that by making it, effectively, a twist, there isn’t time to explore those motivations or the place that they come from. That stuff sounds more engaging than the authentically beige 70s cop show we’re largely here for.

The good stuff’s really good. And this one doesn’t even labour the historical detail very much, that usual McIntee bugbear. (He says in his intro that there would be little point what with UNIT dating, which probably explains it. There are even some deliberate anachronisms in the book, though I couldn’t say where.) You can tell the author delights in taking full advantage of the possibilities where the Master is concerned, such that I hope others get the opportunity to give him a run for his money. I’d say The Face Of The Enemy is one of his more measured efforts. I wish it had been reshuffled somewhat at the planning stage, but enough moments in it are striking for it to be worth investigating.

6/10

*Spoilers for this pretty old book. Okay? Don't want, not read...

SPOILERS...

...the villains are the survivors of the ruined world in Inferno. They’re not duplicating or copying people, they are people’s actual counterparts. For obvious reasons, they want to swap one world for another, and oh yes, they’re far right whack jobs. Great setup! Not, IMO, enough payoff. Will we hear more, I wonder.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #13 – Kursaal by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#7
Kursaal
By Peter Anghelides

New writer alert!

Oh all right, new novelist then. Peter Anghelides (it’s pronounced ann-ja-LEE-deez) had by this point written two short stories for the Decalogs. I loved his first one and didn’t think the second one worked at all, so I had no idea what I’d make of Kursaal — a novel that, on the whole, no one talks about. Maybe that’s ominous, but I don’t care. I love not knowing what’s about to happen.

Famous last words, I suppose, as Kursaal is not what you’d call a mystery novel. We open on an archaeological dig (which immediately triggered my Bernice Summerfield sensor — alas, no sparkling archaeologist in this one) and we are promptly confronted with a series of strange animal attacks. What could be happening there, then? And, I mean… what with the front cover, it’s probably werewolves, isn’t it? Knowing that is not exactly a mark against the book — I’m guessing the cover design was not the author’s edict, see also The Bodysnatchers, and anyway it’s a very nice cover design — but it’s perhaps an unfortunate choice when it takes around 100 pages for the reader to get to the moon-howlin’ monsters.

Still, there is something to be said for delayed gratification. And there I was saying how nice it was to be surprised: it’s surprising that Kursaal is for a large part more concerned with the development of, and environmentalist activism in defence of the planet Saturnia Regna, which will eventually host the theme park/world of the book’s title. It is admittedly a little awkward that the Doctor has come here on purpose, albeit a few years early, as that straight away tells us that the environmentalists will not stop it being developed. But nobody joins those dots, so hey ho. (I suppose it would just have made things uselessly awkward.) Kursaal, as it’s probably easier to call this planet, is somewhat interesting to behold, with its giant terrifying bulldozers moving it all into shape, and its occasional vertical walls of water. You do however get the impression that it will be more interesting when it’s finished.

The Doctor and Sam quickly find themselves impersonating police pathologists, which earns the suspicion and enmity of chief of police Kadijk. Sam then unwittingly falls in with the “eco-terrorists” (as per the blurb), who it turns out aren’t as bad as all that. The grizzled, zero-tempered policeman seems irritatingly cocksure about the Doctor being the terrorists’ leader; we frequently seem to be in his orbit hearing about that. The book mines more tension from Kadijk pushing back against these guys than it does from what happened to those distinctly dog-eared corpses, at least at first.

But the penny eventually drops: lo and behold, it’s werewolves. Or rather it’s the Jax, a species who procreate by infecting other life and turning it into them. Strangely most of their converts start off dead. (Are the converted Jax now properly alive, or is there a shelf-life? If they need converts then what’s with the crazed killer instinct? Too much damage to the body means no new Jax, surely.) Once that’s out there Kursaal becomes a fairly blood-soaked affair, which to be fair is often the assignment for a good horror story. But this one has surprisingly little to say for itself beyond that.

The Jax are mostly mute; they only seem to get one “I was converted and all I got was this lousy flesh wound” spokesman at a time, which leads to a lot of grandstanding baddie dialogue when there’s anything to say. So the Jax are baddies, then: the Doctor calls them “vile” and seems keen to rescue their converts. That makes things a little bleak for our eco-terrorists, perhaps (trying not to psychoanalyse) saying something about the misguided motives of such individuals? But then the cops who are out to stop them are so heavy handed that lives are lost in the process, so I dunno if any of this is anything. It feels to me like if you’re going to do a story about indigenous werewolves, it is legitimately a take to go somewhere other than “it’s important to respect nature”, but in execution it’s quite hollow. The Jax themselves are literally drones; copy and paste horrors. By their nature they skip what is generally agreed to be The Good Bit of a werewolf story, the fear of your own actions, the horror at your own transformation. What a shame. Even the talky ones are just full on Bad Guys, giving it the old “how can you stop me now, Doctor?”

Once our heroes/that bloody policeman track down and deal with the head Jax, the story takes another surprising turn, this one really quite massively surprising with bells on: with a hundred pages still to go, the Doctor and Sam (having barely escaped with their lives) bugger off in the TARDIS. Yes, they do that in every story, but the dust hasn’t even begun to settle on this one when the duo catapults fifteen years ahead to enjoy Kursaal at its most (or, at all) relaxing. Canny readers might twirl their moustaches at all the remaining pages, and sure enough something is afoot that you might have spotted glinting in Sam’s eyes. And if you spotted it, pat yourself on the back, because at least someone did. (Looking at you, Doctor.)

The last act of Kursaal should get kudos for unexpectedly diving off to the side, but doing so creates a few problems. First, the unmistakable feeling that you have actually hit reset and moved on gives you, or me anyway, the feeling that after all that effort the first act doesn’t actually amount to very much. Most of the characters are dead and only one or two of them were likeable, whilst any plotty revelations not explicitly to do with the Jax already feel like optional footnotes. Second, the actual story choice being made here is not one I liked.

Spoilers, I guess.

…

Still here? Okay then: Sam is infected, and she’s still alive, so she’s going to be the new President of Running Around Savaging People Inc. The transformation happens almost entirely offscreen — again we’re shying away from The Good Bit Of A Werewolf Story, grr — and when it’s done, she’s a bad guy now. Not conflicted, not here’s-her-inner-monologue-trapped-inside, just our A-villain to ride out the novel. We know how Sam feels about killing; we are reminded twice of her guilt around the events of Genocide. So the casual fact that Jax-Sam must have killed a few people ought to be a loaded gun for storytelling. But no: when (probably not a spoiler!) Sam recovers she doesn’t remember any of it, and the Doctor doesn’t tell her. Is that one in the bank for a later book? Quite possibly. (Look at the use we’re still getting out of the Tractites.) But for all the good it does Kursaal, the actual book doing the actual work here, Sam might as well have body-swapped with someone else for all of that. Loaded gun? With blanks, maybe.

Third (remember we’re counting off here), the Doctor. I know good characterisation is partly subjective, but I mean… he should have figured this out, right? That just feels right to me. He takes Sam away so suddenly to keep an eye on her, surely. But… no, he really just oopsied there, and his decision to visit Kursaal a decade and a bit later results in more deaths, just as his decision to leave Kursaal in relative disarray a decade and a bit earlier will have done. So what’s all that about?

Sadly, I’m not convinced the Doctor in this has great depths. When we meet our two heroes they’re pretty much on autopilot, Sam griping and moaning like a committed Tegan Jovanka cosplayer, the Doctor blandly not noticing or minding any of that. I’m fairly certain this is not the first EDA to go with this kind of default Doctor-companion dynamic, but I still hate it. (Especially the grumbling companion. You’re in space! And the previous book established that you are preternaturally disposed to want to do this sort of thing!) When it comes to the Jax, the Doctor can’t stop most of the carnage; when Sam goes bad, he is totally unable to spot it and then, for a bit, unwilling; by the end, despite half-heartedly floating the idea of rescuing untold numbers of semi-converted Jax, he’s thwarted in that too. He does not cut an impressive figure, and worst of all, he runs a genuine risk of not brightening up a scene when he appears in it.

Kursaal’s final surprise is more a sense of disbelief. You get about five pages to decompress, with Sam barely needing that much thanks to some memory hokey-cokey. The last chance to really say something is given over to a monster epilogue. (Curiously, after the acknowledgements.) I have no idea if Kursaal will warrant Genocide-esque follow-ups in later books. I suppose it works out so that it doesn’t need to, but then, why write this stuff for these characters in the first place if it’s not for a purpose?

It’s not what I’d call a bad book. I can’t say the writing really bowled me over one way or the other; the only tic I noticed was how the dialogue and narrative seem strangely keen to avoid swear words, with an awful lot of “Jeez!”, a guy who says “Oh, poo” all the time, and Sam apologising for the bad language just because she exclaimed “Gordon Christ!” a second time. (This was apparently an editorial decision from BBC Books and not Anghelides, which makes sense given how jarring it is. It sort of makes sense not to want these things getting all sweary since they’re aimed at kids. On the other hand though, Kursaal is still a werewolf novel with blood, body parts and sick everywhere. Make it make sense.) As a story it’s the kind of gruesome yarn you might want, or at least expect from Doctor Who tie-in books that exist outside the watershed, and I can’t fault it on readability, or its occasional genuinely unusual choices. But there were opportunities here to underline what’s happening and speak to the characters, and these passed by unnoticed, so Kursaal will likely end up doing much the same in my memories.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #12 – The Roundheads by Mark Gatiss

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#6
The Roundheads
By Mark Gatiss

Historicals are underrated.

A show about time travel automatically gains a license to tell any story it wants — you can go anywhere, have anything happen — yet Doctor Who seemed curiously averse to taking advantage of this. Travelling to the past? Well, you can expect some aliens that are up to no good. It’s practically mandatory, which after a while raises some questions about the Doctor’s choice of landing spots.

All in all the books haven’t been much better about this than the episodes off the telly box, with the vast majority still being of the “something weird from space” variety. (This really ought to be optional since something-weird-from-space appears in every episode, usually accompanied by his companions.) But at least we do get occasional prose adventures in history, such as Sanctuary, The Plotters and oh right, that was it. Well, here comes another one. It’s nice and early in the BBC Books run which hopefully signals that they won’t be quite so shy about the format.

The Roundheads is the third book by Mark Gatiss. I have had mixed feelings about his writing. Nightshade is a hugely evocative horror story but it gets a bit bogged down in executing its central gimmick. St. Anthony’s Fire is a game of two halves, with a rather poignant warzone in space contrasted against some wildly over the top religious satire. This time he’s exploring a known historical event with as much colour as he can muster, and honestly, he’s like a duck to water here.

London in late 1648 presents Gatiss with an opportunity to go on a prose rampage, and he does not disappoint, dirtying up this city in the grip of winter and filling it with memorable and often smelly people. The dialogue is that faux-historical kind that’s slightly gilded, almost corny, but in a way that recalls old adventure novels. People have names like Nathaniel Scrope, and say unironic things like “What next for this benighted land of ours?” So there’s plenty of character and atmosphere even before the TARDIS arrives to deposit its historically deficient quartet.

This feels like a nod to the series’s educational roots: despite their obvious advantages, the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly seem equally uncertain about the order of events surrounding Oliver Cromwell and the death of Charles I, with Jamie coming in for an amusing amount of stick over it because this should all be recent history to him. (He didn’t spend much time in school.) This gives The Roundheads a decent excuse to help out any readers who don’t recall their school days. The Doctor even goes to retrieve a textbook that might help and, with a quasi-magical bit of help from the TARDIS, he finds Every Boy’s Book of the English Civil Wars: an amusingly simple tome that he’ll eventually regret picking out.

The travellers split up, mostly intent on having a nice time, and you can probably guess how that goes. There’s perhaps something to be said for how incredibly easy it is for Ben to get into hot water over one anachronistic clanger chuckled in a pub, but I think this speaks more to the Doctor (this one in particular) being a messy little imp than it does to any contrivance worth complaining about. Frankly, joining the TARDIS crew ought to come with mandatory lessons in what not to say abroad.

Ben and Polly are assumed to be anti-Royalist conspirators, and though they escape unscathed they are promptly involved in a secondary scathing incident that leaves Polly back with some suspicious characters she met at the inn, and Ben press ganged onto a boat headed for Amsterdam. (There are distant echoes of The Romans here, where Ian ended up rowing with slaves.)

Meanwhile the Doctor and Jamie fall afoul of the law. They soon find themselves in Cromwell’s orbit and the only way to avoid suspicion is to pretend that Jamie can see the future. This leads to some amusing shenanigans (including a very funny use of the old escape-only-to-be-recaptured trope) and some genuinely alarming peril, as that pesky textbook leads to difficult questions from Cromwell’s son Richard, who does not have a very bright future ahead. Forcing the Doctor to walk a tightrope around what he can and can’t reveal about the future feels like the natural place to go when a story involves historical events of this magnitude; this gets interestingly muddy when Gatiss’s plot works around, but not necessarily against the facts in order to keep things unexpected for the reader.

The Roundheads takes a measured view of the whole affair, initially painting the King as somewhat sympathetic and fixating rather strangely on Cromwell’s warts (in particular, a boil on his buttock) as if to clearly denote goodie and baddie at a visual level. Sympathy then leaks into Cromwell, such as a memory of being moved to tears at the sight of Charles reuniting with his children, just as we eventually realise the dangerous zeal of the monarch to continue his reign at any cost. There are prominent people on both sides of the conflict, filling out the various conspiracies swirling all around the Doctor and co. Allegiances distort interestingly as The Roundheads goes along, and in the name of Sydney Newman, you might even learn something along the way.

Of course, the best way into history is through people, and starting out with four protagonists gives us a fairly wide net. The Doctor and Jamie deal with history as facts and information, with the perils that follow all that. Jamie, it must be said, loses out a bit here; Gatiss captures Hines’s eye-rolling annoyance at some of the Doctor’s wheezes, and astutely observes that Jamie feels a step behind the other more experienced companions, at least for now, but there’s not a great deal for him to do once the Doctor sets up their carnival act. The Doctor, more the proverbial organ grinder than the monkey here, gets plenty of good moments. Perhaps the best is when he counsels Richard Cromwell with a wisdom that believably fits his age and experience.

Ben has perhaps the most exciting time of it on a literal pirate ship, swapping one for another once he reaches Amsterdam and making fast friends with Captain Sal Winter, a buxom old menace with more replacement parts than originals. Swashle is most definitely bucked by Ben in this: at one point he fights for his life on a storm-lashed boat, later he cannons over rooftops to seek revenge. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me really content to leave behind monsters and aliens for a bit because honestly, what more do you need?

The emotional heft of all this comes down to Polly, who befriends a young girl with allegiances on both sides, ends up inveigled in a plot to rescue the King and then arguably — a bit — maybe? — falls in love. It’s subtle bordering on transparent, but her attraction to one of the conspirators feels real enough, and is supported by a gentle flash-forward prologue that’s so light-footed I almost forgot about it. (I made myself re-read it afterwards.) Her last scenes in the book somewhat recall the Doctor’s heartbreak in The Aztecs, and nicely underscore the lack of a clear triumph in setting history right. All the same though, the high number of companions does make it difficult to give Polly and her feelings their due. I could imagine a version of this that leaned into it more and was better for it. (But maybe I’m just remembering Sanctuary.)

You can tell Gatiss is enjoying himself, or at least he seems to be (which is just as important) with descriptions like “a skinny, blond young man with the face of a disreputable cherub” (Ben) and “eyes that sparkled blue and green as the sea.” (The Doctor.) Much of The Roundheads reads like an actor’s prose, to be read and savoured over candlelight. It’s often funny, always in ways that ring true of the character, like Jamie’s thinning patience for the Doctor’s plots, or the Doctor’s ability to get hopelessly lost in his own TARDIS. The violence is grim, albeit not to a St. Anthony’s Fire extent; some of the pirate scraps push the, er, boat out as far as it’ll go whilst still being theoretically suitable for younger readers. Well, maybe the grubbier ones. (There are a couple of swear words in here as well but hey, it was a civil war, tensions were high.)

I didn’t make a lot of notes, which tends to be a sign that I’ve been entertainingly swept along, but then it leaves me rather out of puff on the descriptive front. I will say that The Roundheads could arguably be better, but what we’ve got here is still the strongest Mark Gatiss book so far, and comfortably the best Second Doctor novel. What with me always moaning that I don’t know what a good Missing Adventure or Past Doctor Adventure looks like, it seems sensible to conclude that it looks like this.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #11 – Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#6
Alien Bodies
By Lawrence Miles

So then. Alien Bodies. Bit of a big deal, as these things go. It’s The Lawrence Miles Book That Everyone Likes, which is no small feat. Plus it’s stuffed to the gills with lore and ideas, much of which will go on to inform the Eighth Doctor Adventures later. It’s sort of like the BBC Books equivalent of Timewyrm: Revelation, showing up in a puff of colourful smoke to say — well that’s all good fun as far as it goes, but what are we doing here, what’s it all for?

The range editors must have sat up very straight when Lawrence Miles (I’m presuming it was him) suggested we see the Doctor’s funeral. Well, if you wanted to look to the future, how’s that? It certainly kicks the dust out of the tyres to gallop so far ahead, then drop that clanger right into the present so the Doctor can react to it here and now. The Doctor of Alien Bodies is still coming to terms with his latest regeneration. (“He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.”) Knowing for sure that he’s going to snuff it might well help with his sense of identity.

Events conspire against him on that front — but like Miles, I’ve jumped ahead. I should have mentioned that the Doctor becomes inveigled in an auction for an ancient relic, and that it turns out the relic is his corpse. Naturally this creates great interest. (Just imagine all the Whovians trying to get access.) Only the auctioneer, a slippery figure called Mr Qixotl, knows that the bloke in the green velvet with the brown curls is the Doctor; for obvious reasons he is keen that this stays a secret. Uninvited and unwelcome, the Doctor skirts around the edges of events. It feels like he has trespassed in somebody else’s book. Heck, there are more than two Doctors in Alien Bodies — we meet one at the start, then we see a future one later who may or may not also be the one in the casket — which pushes Dr. Number Eight, as Paul often puts it, even further from the spotlight.

If he is not always in front of you, however, he is still often on your mind. Alien Bodies has a stacked guest cast, and you might well notice certain patterns about them. There’s the two officers from UNISYC: a dotty old explorer and his young, female, insecure-but-capable second in command who does all the work. There’s a legit Time Lord and his futuristic, disguised-as-a-humanoid-female TARDIS, who share a professional bond but appear to be in denial about caring for each other at all. (They do.) And there’s a couple of spooky cultists who arrive in what is, when all’s said and done, a TARDIS, albeit one that operates on black magic. The operator is an aloof young woman and her second is a grubby, angry up and comer. Lots of double acts here, all sort of… mirroring something. Hmm! At a time when the Doctor is (apparently) unsure of himself, it’s interesting to surround him with echoes and surrogates.

Of course he’s only half the equation, and all of this is just as revealing about the symbiotic heart of all these stories, showing just how easily that balance can go wrong. The strongest Eighth Doctor books so far — in true Star Trek movie style it’s the even-numbered ones — have been very interested in the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. I’ve struggled a bit with Sam, sometimes feeling that she’s more a companion-shaped placeholder than a person. (I know that’s not entirely fair or accurate, but it’s my general impression of her.) Well, either they decided to turn a bug into a feature or that was the plan all along, because Sam is confirmed to be something along those lines here. Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but why not: it’s revealed in Alien Bodies that Sam is somehow living the wrong life, or rather a version of it that involves the Doctor, with a separate set of biodata that never met him, and never became the sort of person who would tear off in the TARDIS. Where this is going, I don’t exactly know, although Miles plays amusingly fast and loose with the concept even here. Has Sam been manipulated by a third party? On some level, the Doctor doubts it. Is the Doctor somehow influencing time and space to bring about someone like her? It’s proposed, but who knows. (And frankly, it sounds like a fib.) The wider supporting point that the Doctor always needs someone around, or-does-a-tree-falling-make-a-sound etc, feels earnest enough, but I dunno. Watch this space I guess. (And there we are! Seated and interested in where the series is going. Job’s a good’un.)

The downside to this is the trade off between very interesting (and it is!) context and yer actual, pound for pound scenes with these characters. Sam’s psychoanalysis plays out very much externally in a nightmarish sequence with blood-coloured duplicates, and it’s shared with Lieutenant Bregman (the junior UNISYC officer) who undergoes something similar. The whole biodata thing is then discussed over Sam, between the “antibody” version of her and later on, the Doctor. Sam herself impacts the novel like a small stone impacting a window. I’ll be honest, this was a little disappointing. I wish Miles had found a way to make this turning point for Sam more, you know, Sam’s turning point. But it’s a very busy book and I guess it had to give.

I mean, look at all those characters. And we do, taking time out to hear each of their stories. These are all quite interesting, but they mostly serve to set up the wider stakes in the world of these books. Because oh yes, the Time Lords have got competition.

Quick sidebar: I’ve read Alien Bodies before. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it was back when I were a nipper and this was all trees as far as the eye could see. I was an adult when I first read this one. More or less.) Alien Bodies is The One That Introduces Faction Paradox, aka the creepy cult version of the Time Lords. And for some reason my brain decided in the intervening years that they were the book’s antagonists. I mean, they are antagonists, but they’re not the enemy the Time Lords are facing. The unspecified Enemy (no name, ooooh) have beaten them back so much that the Doctor’s corpse (and all its weird upgrades) could seriously turn the tide of war. Their agents include anarchitects, beings who can rearrange and delete matter, such as buildings. Miles had by this point already toyed with the idea of unimaginable wars across time and space in Down, and he would go on to perfect it in Dead Romance. (Where amusingly, for rights reasons, the Time Lords are the unnamed party.) All of this strangeness is much more my preference for what a Time War should look and sound like than, to pick a totally random example, Time Lords Vs Daleks, done for the simple virtue that you’ve heard of both of them. (Ever the time traveller, Miles manages to rip the piss out of that idea nearly a decade before the TV series did it: “Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.”)

The Enemy — who don’t exactly appear in Alien Bodies, for much the same reason we’re not resolving the Sam crisis right now — are not the only oddities. Alien Bodies is bursting with possibilities, including a third party in the war, the Celestis: descendants of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency who took themselves out of time and corporeal reality and mostly use zombies as their agents. Look at characters like Mr Trask (a zombie) and Mr Shift (a concept of language who floats through people’s perceptions in a way that is distinct each time it happens and also distinct from the bits where Miles has chunks of prose acting like dialogue, sometimes in conversation, which in itself is very hard to pull off). Look again at that secondary Time Lord and his female TARDIS, the gently impressive pushing along of that technology. And look at bloody Faction Paradox! A gross, creepy, upside down version of Time Lord orthodoxy where the ultimate punishment is erasure through self-murder. They don’t, contrary to my wrong memories, figure all that hugely in Alien Bodies, but it’s still a hell of an impact, and I can see why they encouraged further study. (And having them not be the novel’s be all, end all is just more of a flex. This is one of its ideas. There are other flexes, like the intriguing early setup for a Brigadoon-style disappearing city, which is explained pages later as a simple trick that Mr Qixotl “doubted anyone would have noticed.”)

I’ve complained before (who, me?) about Lawrence Miles’s tendency to have ideas and just sort of sit in them. Alien Bodies… well, it does do that, quite frankly. Don’t worry, we’re not swerving into “actually Alien Bodies is terrible” here, but it’s worth saying that all of this creativity and setup is not what you’d call a very forward moving plot. The auction is called; the interested parties arrive; the Doctor, rather inconveniently, is there too; several parties stir up trouble; trouble overflows until it explodes and then the Doctor does a thing. I did reach a certain point in Alien Bodies where I thought, oh this is it, isn’t it, plot-wise? And the frequent diversions to hear this person’s story or that tenuously sentient form of language’s story made it a bit of a higgledy-piggledy read at times, although I don’t remember that being the case when I first read it. (Back when I were only twenty-one and this were all trees m’lad, etc etc, music from that Hovis advert.) I suspect my attention span has shifted (Shifted?) a bit over the years, or perhaps it’s just the accumulated weight of 130-odd Doctor bloody Who books rattling around my head now, but anyway, dash through Alien Bodies I did not. Although I highly enjoyed paddling through it.

And that’s the last big thing I’ve not mentioned yet. Alien Bodies is somehow really really fun. It’s pleased as punch most of the time, despite the sepulchral, well, everything, frequently letting these events and characters be funny even when the situation is creepy. Look at the Doctor’s funeral, which comes with a joke about how this omnipotent focal point of the universe can still bugger up a timer. Look at the Doctor’s first scene, when he escapes an assassination attempt by diving out of a window into the TARDIS parked 90 degrees up against a wall. (Was Moffat taking notes?) Mr Qixotl is perhaps the funnest single thing here, and you do get to care about the sneaky little git despite, well, him. But then the rivalry between Time Lords and Faction Paradox — big, lore-y stuff! — is allowed to mostly play out as bitchiness. There are plenty of honest to god goofy little jokes sprinkled about as well, mostly the kind that would specifically tickle a Whovian, like the Doctor’s quasi-mystical relationship with his pockets, or the Raston lap-dancing robots (“the most perfect dancing machines ever devised”), or what appears to be a lightning-fast dig at War Of The Daleks (“My Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time”), or the big joke that everyone remembers about Alien Bodies that even now, wading in spoilers, I don’t want to spoil just in case, which then pivots into possibly a meta comment on the previous unavailability of certain characters, and then becomes a clever reinvention of a crap baddie.

So, it’s a fun one, especially for long term fans. But it also manages to be quite sweet about the old two-hearted sod, at least occasionally in between all the buffoonish facsimiles, the winking references and horrible blood rituals. My memory had no trouble preserving the Doctor’s funeral for Laika, his rage about her mistreatment, the unspoken bond he feels with the lost dog. That truly has stayed with me ever since. I had though, delightfully, forgotten Mr Qixotl’s cheeky hint that despite all this fuss over his casket, the Doctor of the future might have pulled a fast one after all and not even be in there.

Alien Bodies then. It’s a lot. At the same time it is strangely small, with the zesty pluck of a murder mystery. (And speaking of Bernice, he manages to sneak in a reference to Tyler’s Folly from Down, one of the Bernice Summerfield NAs. I read them all so I guess it’s my job to spot them.) Normally that’s just what I’m after, but — at the risk of angering the gestalt — I do think Alien Bodies could have been stronger. The hall of mirrors approach to characterisation has its ups and downs, and I could have got more of a feel for Sam in this — indeed, that felt like the point of her story here. Also, I know it seems picky to criticise a Doctor Who book for being more in love with the idea of the Doctor as a general concept than with the McGann version specifically, and I don’t even think he’s poorly served here, getting flourishes of anger and cleverness that would glitter on any Doctor’s resume, but — might as well be honest here — it’s a just plain very crowded book and he’s only one part of it.

Hey, every book deserves the occasional poke and prod to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Even the sainted ones. This one’s still pretty bloody good.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #10 – Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#5
Illegal Alien
By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Daleks! No, wait, it’s the other one. Cybermen weren’t as elusive in print as the pepperpots, but it still feels like a coup for them to show up this early in BBC Books, and in the same month as the Daleks, no less.

Before we get to them, however, it’s worth saying that Illegal Alien is a bit of a milestone. The Seventh Doctor and Ace represented the show’s present when the New Adventures came along. Their stories were the direction Doctor Who was going in, to the extent that it could move without TV screens. Now they are part of its past, and we will only visit them on occasional jollies, handing them back afterwards like a couple of tuckered out grandkids. It’s a subtle change of context but, when you’re used to following the evolution of the strange little chap with the funny umbrella, it’s a noticeable one.

Now we’re getting the Doctor and Ace as they were on telly: thick as thieves and looking for trouble. Who better to write that than someone who worked on the show, and while we’re at it, co-wrote a non-fiction book about Ace with Sophie Aldred? So here comes effects guru Mike Tucker — along with Robert Perry — to bring back memories.

Illegal Alien does this literally and figuratively. It’s set during the Blitz, which is a good call from a character point of view since Ace is a tough Londoner with a keen eye for prejudice; in the shadow of the Nazis she soon has cause to remember her friend Manisha getting bombed out by racists. (See Ghost Light.) There are a few moments where she — not so subtly, it must be said — recalls recent history, for instance wondering how her grandmother is getting on. (See The Curse Of Fenric.) And of course, pitting Ace against another famous Doctor Who monster brings to mind the time she introduced a Dalek to a baseball bat. (See Remembrance Of The you-know-who.)

The Doctor is treading faintly familiar steps as well. He indulges an apparent interest in American culture — this time baseball rather than jazz, see The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis — in his breezy interactions with a black barman. (See Remembrance again.) Later, he dusts off his chess skills against the villain of the piece. (See Fenric again.) I’m not complaining about these reference points, by the way. It makes sense for someone versed in the era to steep their novel in it. The early New Adventures were all over this as well. Tucker and Perry are no slouches at capturing the characters’ voices in general, but all this era window-dressing undoubtedly helps.

Not that I would exactly call Illegal Alien a character piece. With its spooky Cybermen stalking around an easily identifiable, highly atmospheric setting, it’s trad as heck, and it tends never to be far away from its next action sequence. You’re thrown right into that with a bit of first person narration courtesy of Cody McBride, a down on his luck American PI in London. (Circa 1940, so very down on his luck, then.) McBride’s inner monologue might as well come with a boozy jazz accompaniment; at one point he recalls a girl back home named Dolores who, “if he’d asked, would have married him there and then.” After following a crashed spaceship he then thinks of the local law enforcement: “Of all the strange, glowing, flying-sphere-filled bomb craters in all the world, Mullen had to walk into [mine].” I don’t know if Terrance Dicks ever had the time or inclination to read other people’s Who novels, but he’d surely have enjoyed this one — partly because of Cody, partly because he also wrote a Seventh Doctor and Ace vs the Nazis book, but mostly because there are a couple of Cybermen in this disguised as gangsters. (Not a joke. The man would have stood up and applauded.)

There’s lots of goofy, meaty excitement to be had here, what with a confused Cyberman on the run committing random murders (and smearing itself with all the blood and gore — lovely) and Cybermats, converted from local wildlife, carrying out targeted killings. Combined with the unmistakeable squalor of Blitz London, the general ordure brings to mind The Bodysnatchers — and sure enough, Illegal Alien is another BBC Book that a younger me actually bothered to read in 1997, happily hooked by its horrors. Cybermen have a tendency to be very nasty in print, as Iceberg and Killing Ground showed over at Virgin, and they continue that trend here, not only with the berserk Cyber-Leader ripping apart vagrants, but in the perhaps inevitable scene delving into the awful transformation from human to machine. (Here, like Mark Morris with his Skarasen rampage, Tucker and Perry arguably go too far by introducing a converted baby.) While I think you could make the point and still rein it in a little, I nonetheless appreciate it when authors push the Cybermen to a place that Daleks don’t go. As perennial runners up of Doctor Who monsterdom, they could use that distinction.

Atmosphere, action, getting the era right… you can tell what I’m about to say, right? And yes, the odd one out here is plot. Because there’s not much that actually interests Cybermen, it’s perhaps hard to find labyrinthine ways to tell stories about them. Illegal Alien lands on a simple enough structure: some Cybermen wound up here more or less by accident, and some overzealous humans have tried to take advantage. (To their credit, they did surprisingly well in the Not Getting Converted department.) The bulk of the book comes down to finding out who is pulling what string, and what they want out of it. While that’s not uninteresting, in execution it perhaps belies a shortcoming with getting a writer who has hands on, very practical experience of making the programme: we very authentically capture the feeling of moving between half a dozen sets, over and over again, until enough has been revealed or it’s time for another cliffhanger. McBride spends about a quarter of it in a prison cell off screen, perhaps giving us the verisimilitude of an actor on holiday that week.

Eventually the story gets crazy and relocates to a Nazi stronghold on Jersey — which is good character fodder for Ace, obviously, but also low hanging fruit, commentary-on-the-evils-of-mankind-wise, especially coming so suddenly in the last act. It’s even more conspicuous when you remember that Virgin Publishing, as well as already producing the proverbial Really Good Seventh Doctor WW2 Book in Exodus, went and did it again in Just War, and they set that one in the Channel Islands. (Messrs Tucker and Perry can at least claim to have done “the Nazis get their hands on modern technology because of Ace” before Big Finish, but Steve Lyons — who has surely read this — would get more out of it when writing Colditz.)

Much of Illegal Alien seems to be about just understanding the assignment, and there really is something to be said for the characterisation of the Doctor in this, hewing closer to the calculating yet loveable presence he was before the New Adventures looked under the hood. At one point he charms the occupants of an air raid shelter by “conducting an off-key choir with a stick of rhubarb”; at another he (inevitably) turns out to have gamed his chess playing to achieve a secret result. That said, a moment where McBride correctly guesses at the Doctor’s inner darkness all in one go does not convince, and conversely I’m not sure I buy the Doctor’s obliviousness with the villain of the piece, needing to have the penny dropped for him by McBride. They’re going for a pretty obvious Moriarty thing here, and although the secret malefactor is not an unwelcome creation — wanting knowledge for its own sake and causing an Allies/Nazi Cyber-arms race to get there — they overdo the misdirecting wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly thing, making it seem rather unlikely that he’d actually be steeped in so much wrongdoing. Hey ho: I know he comes back in a Tucker/Perry sequel, which I also read years back. Maybe he’s a bona fide stinker there.

You get bang for your buck monster-wise, atmosphere-wise and this-feels-like-they-could-have-made-it-on-the-telly-(with heavy editing)-wise. But with all the memberberries I can’t help considering if other stories did some of these things better, and the wrench from a fairly bloody runaround to a sudden Nazi showdown left me feeling less than satisfied with it as a coherent whole. If you’re into what Illegal Alien has to offer after a chapter or two, though, you ought to enjoy following it between its bombed-out set pieces.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #9 – War Of The Daleks by John Peel

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#5
War Of The Daleks
By John Peel

Daleks! For real this time, sink plunger and everything, DALEKS!

Say what you will about this one, but this is a big deal and quite an exciting shot fired from BBC Books. Sure, they may have copied Virgin Publishing’s homework in general, but those guys never had the license for the most famous Doctor Who baddie of them all. While I would argue that they didn’t suffer for it (they were all about New things after all), sometimes it’s just plain nice to go Doctor Who = Daleks.

Of course, it’s one thing to wheedle a license out of the Nation estate. You’ve then got to actually do something with all those pepperpots. What does that look like in print? Daleks aren’t exactly famed conversationalists; often the worst bit of a Dalek story IS-WHEN-THEY-ARE-GI-VEN-TOO-MUCH-DI-A-LOGUE.

John Peel — known for, among other things, his Dalek Masterplan novelisations — makes some choices in this regard, and some of them are good. War Of The Daleks is not all Daleks, all the time. They are very much kept in the background for the first 150 pages or so, an implacable force of nature that the plot and characters must work around in order to survive. This might seem odd when not showing Daleks was already our default setting, but there’s a lot to be said for atmosphere. Look at the Borg: were they ever better than in The Best Of Both Worlds Part 1, which is mostly just the Enterprise crew bricking it?

Don’t panic, though, Dalek fans: they’re still here, just a bit off to the side. There are several interludes that show Dalek combat in various forms, and never from their POV. We see a Space Security Service agent working a bit of subterfuge against them on an aquatic world; Draconians in a death-or-glory fight in an asteroid belt; Mechonoids, forced to take a break from their daily routine, attempting to keep them away from their never-to-arrive human settlers. (Possibly my favourite bit in the book is a dying Mechonoid’s final report “to Central Computer, to inform it that another Mechon unit would have to be assigned to check on the insect infestation on the geraniums tomorrow.”) There’s good variety here, with some scenarios playing out how the “good guys” hoped, others going in the Daleks’ favour. It paints a picture of an entire way of life spent fighting these things, which can take as many forms as you care to list. As well as giving a good example to any readers who are (god forbid) unfamiliar with what Daleks are all about, it’s using Daleks as more of a narrative way in than as the whole narrative, and as you can see in stories like Power or Evil Of The Daleks (Peel novelised both) that approach can be a great starting point.

We open with probably the most interesting interlude featuring the oldest Dalek enemy, Thals, in the heat of battle. This is likely just what you want when you pick up a doggarn Dalek book at last: loads of action, new and different types of Dalek, even the first word of the book is “Exterminate!” More interesting still is what it says about the Thals: dropping a nuke to wipe out the nearest attack wave also obliterates a primitive settlement nearby, much to the chagrin of Ayaka, the soldier with the biggest conscience. Immediately after that the entire planet is destroyed; unbeknownst to Ayaka their mission was simply a trap to lure some Daleks to their deaths. The entire planetary population are just collateral damage. It’s genuinely a bit of a swing to open your Dalek novel by asking if we can trust the Thals.

Unfortunately, just as getting the Dalek license doesn’t do everything for you in one go, it’s one thing to set up a conflict — it’s another to make a satisfying story out of it. War Of The Daleks asks these questions about the Thals but then follows them to their most literal conclusions. Delani, their leader, has a plan to capture Davros and — rather than put him on trial or kill him — put him to work. Doing what, you ask? Why, genetically modifying the Thals, of course! Because in order to defeat Daleks, y’see, he is willing to turn his people into Daleks and oh god, the obviousness, it’s giving me a rash. This storyline doesn’t have anywhere else to go once we’ve gazed into Nietzsche’s abyss: it’s evil and wrong, we can see that. So things promptly change afterwards and the power is taken away from Delani, leaving the whole genetically-engineered-Thals thing a bit of an “aaaaaanyway.”

And yeah, Davros is here. That should probably be a spoiler since he’s not on the cover, but the blurb happily gives it away, and besides, did you think we could possibly avoid him? Ever since he first appeared, Daleks and Davros have been like a dinner party with Frasier and Niles: you get the one, you get that other one. Davros is an interesting character in his own right, but he tends to diminish the Daleks — and vice versa. Having him here just feels like we looked at the trajectory of Dalek stories in the 1980s, which all do it like this, and genuinely could not imagine a different approach for the next one.

In Peel’s defence, it matters that we’re picking up Davros’s story after we last saw him, and he is central to the plot. But this is a rather shaky defence because the further you stray into the plot, the more obsessed it is by continuity in place of actual storytelling. Now, to an extent, I think it makes sense to go over some key points about Daleks. Why not? There hadn’t been a TV story about them in nine years, and there were no novels featuring them (apart from novelisations). Some readers genuinely might not know much about Daleks, so having the Doctor, for example, recap the plot of their first adventure might help lay down the ground rules. Having Thals in the mix helps with that theme, continuing the original thread right up to the present. I mean it: not all continuity refs are bad. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

There are harmless little sprinkles here and there, such as references to Marc Cory, Varga plants, the Slyther and “that business with Reginald Styles”. You don’t need to have seen The Chase to enjoy the bit with the Mechonoids, for instance. But the main purpose of picking up the story of Davros, which after that little Nietzsche For Dummies bit with the Thals is all that War Of The Daleks is about, is to reshuffle his previous telly stories in a way that will undo Skaro getting blown up in Remembrance Of The Daleks. Which is… fine, if you happen to care deeply about that, and great if you are in the market for a random conspiracy theory re-reading of some unconnected telly episodes, but it’s not really serving an overall story, is it? Never mind those hypothetical “what are Daleks” readers. After a certain point it ceases to be a novel so much as a paddling pool for big fans of lists. It’s Dalek housekeeping. (And the novel seems aware of that: Sam says the info-dumps are “like Jackanory,” and “coming in at the middle of a film.” Which, I mean, nice lampshade and everything, but…? Maybe don’t do it then?)

War Of The Daleks at least lives up to its name. After the Dalek Prime laboriously fills the Doctor in about their crazy plan to avert the destruction of Skaro (trust me, it’s nuts) he engineers a civil war in order to smoke out Davros’s remaining supporters. And there is a lot of action, which certainly provides some bang for your buck re Daleks. I got a bit bored though, since the whole thing feels like a retread of Evil Of The Daleks anyway. More importantly, who cares? They’re Daleks. We keep cutting back to the fighting as if it intrinsically matters how this side or that side is getting on. Blow up or don’t, guys, just call me when you’re done. (Several of the Thal supporting characters get killed off as well, but most of them never got named in the first place.)

There’s not a lot else going on, since it’s all in service of continuity and the eventual civil war, but it’s worth mentioning that Ayaka is fairly compelling; she shoulders most of the “but at what cost?” war moralising, and does it in a more interesting way than her boss’s mad plan to breed Dalek Thals. It’s not her fault the story just stops finding this stuff interesting. Also good is Chayn, an engineer on the garbage ship that finds Davros’s escape pod. She’s fun, capable and instantly intrigued by the TARDIS, but she conveniently falls in love (more or less) so she won’t be joining the Doctor after all. Boo. She mostly seems to be here just to set off Sam’s jealousy, which is all rather unappealing but certainly on brand for her; where her feelings for the Doctor don’t entirely add up, I suppose we can write them off as belonging to a messy seventeen year old, but her possessiveness and over-eagerness are getting a bit old now. It’s a pity Peel couldn’t work in her guilt from Genocide, especially as there is a brief reference to the aliens from it. There are scenes here of Sam literally carrying a gun and wondering if she can pull the trigger, which practically jump up and down to continue that conversation. Ah well.

(Sidebar: I should probably mention the Doctor as well, so here I am, mentioning him. He’s fine. Bit naive at times, suitably grave at others. His characterisation is at least better than in either of Peel’s Virgin novels, it’s just not especially exciting. Both Doctor and companion are just sort of here, apart from some of Sam’s more annoying habits which are regrettably bang on.)

The final stretch is such an exploding onslaught that I started to forget the stuff I liked. And hey, I like stuff in here. It’s highly readable — genuinely, never something to sniff at. There is some creative context to establish why the Daleks are a big deal, and questions around the morality of fighting against them, which hint more towards one of Terry Nation’s other well known shows. I even empathise a bit with the impulse to write the next chapter in the 80s Davros chronology — since they all followed on from each other already, why break the habit of a lifetime? I just don’t think the answers and ideas he comes up with are as exciting as getting Daleks into a book in the first place, and by the end, despite early promise, this one’s just a lot of noise.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #8 – Business Unusual by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#4
Business Unusual
By Gary Russell

Well, I’ve got to do admire the title. Gary Russell promising Business Unusual is a bold claim, since he is definitely one of those writers who Knows What He Likes.

A fairly bold claim is also contained in the book’s introduction, where he announces a “desire to write a sixth Doctor story that I thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in.” Not knowing Gary or Colin personally I’ve no idea what this means — more dinosaurs? — but perhaps more telling is his apparent aim for “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it.” Any Big Finish listener can point to the cuddlier, less explosive character played by Colin on audio as “the version he liked better”. (Gary would of course have had a hand in that.) You can also find an eerily close approximation of this in Millennial Rites. So, story and characterisation-wise, what does Business Unusual do for the guy in the aggressively colourful coat?

Oddly, he’s a lot like he was on screen, particularly in Season 22 when his demeanour hadn’t yet softened. He’s rude (clapping back at an American that his accent seems out of place because he made a similar comment about his coat), he’s loud (frequently doing that “say a word three times with increasing volume” thing to show up whoever said the word first) and he’s more incongruous than is usual even for the Doctor (there are plenty of references to his weight, an odd thing to highlight about a timeless alien but something that makes him stand out more physically). I don’t know what Colin thought of all that; it’s very recognisable, much as it was in The Eight Doctors, but it doesn’t move him on in the same way as, for instance, The Trial Of A Timelord, when he and Peri seemed able to enjoy each other’s company for once. (At least until he went mad and she got murdered.)

Some of this abrasiveness is deliberate, as the Doctor in this is attempting to avoid his own future. Business Unusual gives us, at long last, Mel’s introductory story, as the Doctor’s travels have brought him to Pease Pottage in 1989, where Mel is from. He reckons that if he doesn’t become friends with her then his path will change and he won’t eventually become the Valeyard. QED. We’ve had shades of this before in Time Of Your Life, when he lived off the grid on a distant world to eliminate any possibility of a red-haired fitness fanatic entering his life. This time it’s all a bit more pointed: the Doctor tries to avoid meeting her, then pours cold water on the wonders of space and time travel, being fairly rude to her in general just to split the difference.

This idea ought to be valid, what with there being a prior attempt, but I just don’t like the way it’s done here. Living on a backwater planet is one thing, especially for only a brief portion of the narrative. Actively trying to put Mel off her established future (for most of the novel) is direct interference, and more overtly self-involved than I’m used to for the Doctor. (Perhaps, ironically, this talent for manipulation is a hint towards his future.) Who is he to say that Mel shouldn’t have those experiences? Why is his happiness worth more than hers? It’s also worth saying that the more direct his action to change his future, the more we’re putting it under a microscope and the less it actually makes sense for a Time Lord to think that this is even possible. He has met and interacted with a future, Doctor-adjacent Mel. He even used evidence of their adventures in his trial! Hell, the paradox of even trying this might end up creating the Valeyard. (You can argue that this is all a desperate Hail Mary and even he doesn’t think it will come to much, and fair enough, but there’s little suggestion of that in the text. Even showing us some genuine fear and concern about his future as the Valeyard would help justify it, but the whole thing is presented merely as continuity: he will become this thing so he needs to not do that thing. The Trial Of A Timelord is left to do all the heavy lifting.)

Long story short: “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it” ends up being pretty much the same Sixth Doctor who stomped around shouting at Peri. The stuff I like about him in this is more incidental. We begin Business Unusual with the Doctor closing off a previous adventure (featuring the Master! No, he’s not in the book) which right away is a fun place to start, but in practical terms this means working with the police. By making this the end of an adventure we skip all that tedious “you have to believe me” stuff, and the Brighton constabulary instead have a wonderfully eye-rolling acceptance of the Doctor and his foibles. It’s refreshing to cut to the chase like that, much as it was for Hartnell when The War Machines suddenly repositioned him as a known quantity in the British scientific scene, and for Pertwee during pretty much his entire run. The Sixth Doctor in this also manages to be quite persuasive with new people he meets, such as Mel’s somewhat open minded father Alan and, oh yes, Mel herself, who despite the Doctor’s best efforts to the contrary accepts that he is an alien and quite fancies a trip in the TARDIS. (Perhaps dialling down the “I’ve got a spaceship” bit might have helped his plan along. Ah well.) The Doctor might be a certifiable pain but he brings other people along with him. Perhaps this is what Gary was going for viz “what might have been” etc.

But enough about Joseph and his very colourful whatsit: Mel is here! And Business Unusual does a good job of introducing her, meshing the character’s slightly disparate interests of fitness and computer programming in ways that a novel can do more comfortably than a few frenzied TV episodes. We learn that Mel took a gap year and went to university as a mature student, which right away makes her seem like someone apart from the world around them. The technology she’s working with feels beneath her, the job offers doubly so. It doesn’t take long to believe that this person would be doing a smart thing to get off this rock altogether and see the universe. Her refusal to be cowed by the Doctor (in full “don’t do it” mode) also bodes very well, suggesting a kind of authority that — for better or worse — she rarely had on screen. (See the moment where she screams at something awful, and we make a point of saying it’s the first time she’s ever done that.)

I would rather her first adventure had not been so interested in an abortive attempt to call the whole thing off, and had instead focussed on building their Doctor/companion rapport, but she nevertheless comes out of it well. Or at least she does until the final stretch, when she pleads and pleads with a still-implacable Doctor to let her aboard and he still says no. When she sneaks onboard anyway he gives way genially enough, but by this point she’s ceded some of that authority she’d built up, and the turnaround comes with no apparent resolution of his (highly questionable) future-avoidance plan and certainly no humility about trying to neg her out of her destiny. (Although maybe I’m onto a loser expecting that from the Sixth Doctor.) On balance then, as a companion intro, it’s hit and miss.

Of course there are other reasons to read Business Unusual besides the new companion schtick. What of the proverbial business? Sadly, to quote a Welsh philosopher, it’s not unusual. We’re picking up threads from The Scales Of Injustice (and further down the rabbit hole, Who Killed Kennedy) with the “pale young man,” a shifty inhuman presence with access to a lot of discarded alien tech once again making a nuisance of himself. (He has rebranded as “the managing director”, which makes for a less irritating repetition.) With him as before are the creepy Irish twins and a Stalker — a giant dog infused with Stahlman’s Gas which makes it even deadlier. This is not an inherently bad toy box, and it gives him a completely valid license to regurgitate old continuity. Certain other familiar elements creep their way into the plot, which generally concerns sinister video game consoles; the discerning Whovian will surely develop suspicions about the plastic figures and glassy-eyed duplicates that begin to show up, and let’s just say they’re onto something.

But after a while, when all the pennies have dropped and it turns out the guy who collects old alien stuff is going to (brace yourself) use the old alien stuff, it begins to feel like the writer forgot to actually bring his own idea to the table to make it any different. The villain’s collection ends up as a sort of accidental mirror of his own limited imagination. (Here’s his grand plan: “I want to take over the world simply to give myself something to do.” 200+ pages for that, honestly.) The creepy game consoles are a nice idea, but the “game” part never really manifests; they’re supposed to be a means of control, but the initial test just activates the free toys that come with each one and kills the nearest kid. Which is horrible, obviously, but also pointless. (Do you want to control them or kill them?) And hey, we already did a version of this in Terror Of The Autons, only that was just the toys and not the random game console as well. If you’re going to add elements but not explore them, what you end up with is the old ideas again, with bonus clutter.

The less than intricate plotting is supported by a Gary Russell staple: casual excessive violence. Heads and various other limbs are bitten off by the Stalker, horrific injuries are sustained generally, and we hear about similar awful things in flashbacks — sometimes wistful ones, recalled by psychotic characters. I got whiplash going from the horrible story of a woman taken to bed then (mid-intercourse) violently pulled apart and mind-wiped so she can be a cybernetic secretary on wheels (I don’t even) to the general Enid Blyton cheeriness of the prose in other scenes, but that’s how it goes. When characters die the length of time we’ve spent with them has no bearing on the quickness of their passing, like a man with a tragic UNIT backstory, forgotten by the Brigadier and corrupted by the managing director, only to finally turn and fight back and, oh right, now he’s dead, next. (The secretary doesn’t even get her memory back before being unapologetically bundled out of the book.) There’s a creepy indifference to this stuff that seems to happen in book after book. I wish he’d find a balance between blood and guts and the other stuff he writes, which tends to be blandly inoffensive if prone to a continuity reference.

Speaking of which, we’ve got one more box to tick besides plugging that gap in Mel’s timeline: the Brigadier is here, ready to meet the Sixth Doctor, because Dimensions In Time doesn’t count. (Gary’s own words via Terminus Reviews.) And look, fair enough: everyone likes the Brigadier, so why not. That said though, it’s a curious impulse when the other thing he wants to do is lock up the Brig for almost the entire book, and only have him meet the Doctor briefly at the end. The lone Brigadier stuff is at least worthwhile, having him reflect on the odd situation of living after UNIT (and teaching maths at an all boys school — his life story is in places as disparate as Mel’s), jumping at the chance to get back in action. It’s an excuse to reflect on the cost of what he used to do for a living, particularly when faced with a now corrupted ex-subordinate. This is good character fodder. (Which also ran satisfyingly rampant in The Devil Goblins From Neptune.) Later, when forced to confront Mel with the necessity of killing, he reflects eloquently that living with it means “never forgetting … not letting one face, one name, ever fade away.” I like that very much, although I wish the author would take it on board too.

There’s plenty of introspection elsewhere, but it’s generally just “halt, introspect, onto next bit”, like the sudden mucky remembrances of Mr Jones, or the record-scratchingly abrupt change of heart for the Irish Twins. The prose is as harmless-if-unpolished as ever — unpleasant asides aside — with some purple bits probably thrown in as tribute to Pip and Jane Baker, who get a favourable mention in the introduction. (They’d have loved “Do you possess even the most rudimentary auditory organs under those flowing locks of golden gossamer?” Although I can’t say that I do.) And it does at least try something different, which is to start each scene with its exact time and place. This is perhaps intended to give the story an urgent real time feel, but ultimately it’s stage directions we just don’t need — it’s a novel, there’s already enough context. I’m not likely to bother reading the likes of “Madeira Drive, Brighton, East Sussex, 24 July 1989, 12.36” more than once.

Clearly there’s a lot to say about Business Unusual, and yet there’s really not a lot going on here. Is this a more developed Sixth Doctor? Not that I noticed, and in some ways, he’s worse. Am I glad we finally “met” Mel? Sort of. It mostly works. Am I pleased that the Sixth Doctor met the Brigadier? Well he didn’t particularly, although it was nice to see the latter again. Is this a good finale for Gary Russell’s Scales Of Injustice toy box? Honestly, not really. Similar ideas would later be repurposed as Torchwood, and although I never cared much for that, clearly you can get more mileage out of this stuff than “gosh, this guy’s evil isn’t he? I wonder if the aliens from Terror Of The Autons that he’s manipulating will turn on him like they did in Terror Of The Autons oh.”

5/10