Doctor Who: The BBC Books #5 – The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#3
The Bodysnatchers
By Mark Morris

Ah, The Bodysnatchers. We meet again.

When I was a kid and these books were new I developed a strange habit of buying them but not reading them. I’d take them with me on our weekend visits to the grandparents – literally packing dozens of books into a sports bag. I just liked having them around, I guess. They were smooth and diversely colourful (something they had over the more visually organised Virgin books, which is a bit funny when you consider their more outrageous reputation) and from the blurbs they all sounded like interesting and weird Doctor Who stories. So much potential there. Somehow, having that choice of books to read was as enjoyable to me as actually reading any of them. Sort of like paying for a streaming service now. Or possibly a sign of ADHD.

Anyway – I did read The Bodysnatchers. With a recognisable monster on the front and a recognisable character in the blurb, it tickled my fan brain in much the same way as The Eight Doctors. I could not resist.

Certain moments from it have lingered in my mind ever since. I still remember the opening meeting between grave-robbers Jack and Albert and their shadowy employer, a man with much of his face covered but still something noticeably odd about the eyes. I recall the ending, with a TARDIS full of (thankfully pacified) Skarasen, the Doctor taking them to a new home. And I remember the rich, dank atmosphere of London; this, along with some of those other memories, is largely thanks to the writing.

Mark Morris is our first new writer for BBC Books. (Or first solo writer. Sorry Keith Topping and Jonathan Blum, it’s hard to know who wrote what on a collaboration. Your day will come…) Unusually for a new Doctor Who novelist, Morris was already a seasoned writer, and that shows in the frequently splendid prose. “Within seconds the fog had swallowed not only the tavern itself, but the welcoming glow from its windows.” / “She imagined the huge ripples of the creature’s passage extending ever outward, a series of concentric circles like a widening shiver of fear on the dark skin of the Thames.” The Bodysnatchers is at its best, even as I read it now, when up to its eyeballs in the muck and murk of the Victorian capital.

Something else that would have captured young-me’s attention is – whatever this says about me – the violence. The Bodysnatchers starts with grave-robbing and goes downhill from there, taste-wise; Mary Whitehouse certainly would not approve. But all that’s in keeping with one of the show’s more bloodthirsty eras. As if to underline the parallel, this one takes place in the same location, 5 years on, as one of the most celebrated Gothic stories, even sharing a guest star. Absolutely no prizes for guessing whether Mark Morris is a big fan of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang, what with Professor George Litefoot asking follow-up questions about the Fourth Doctor and Leela, even down to their old joke about said companion having been found as an infant in a hatbox. (There are many other examples of Morris undoubtedly being One Of Us, such as “an almighty KKLAK!”, but I’ll bet there are nevertheless still people complaining that Henry Gordon Jago spent the whole thing in Brighton. Call yourself a fan, Morris?!)

That sense of sheer fannishness would have greased some wheels with me at the time, and I wouldn’t have been alone. I mean, look at it! Zygons! A popular monster that wasn’t done to death in the telly show, back again with no watershed to curtail them! Absolute manna from Heaven for the morbid young geeks who made up at least some of the readership for these books. (With grumpy old geeks filling out the rest.)

I stress this stuff because, stepping away from the author’s talent for atmosphere, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot to The Bodysnatchers otherwise. The Zygons are suitably creepy, although I’m not sure if Morris knew quite how hard the marketing guys would go on their inclusion: they slap one on the cover and name-check them (and their TV story) in the blurb, yet The Bodysnatchers takes half its page-count to name them. It also spends a lot less time on questions of body-swapped identity than you, Zygon fan that you probably are, might reasonably expect; barely anyone gets replaced by the infamous copycats. A rather more urgent concern seems to be the Skarasen, their infamous Loch Ness monster-inspiring pets, who receive much the same “they don’t look crap any more” makeover that the Slyther got in the Dalek Invasion Of Earth novelisation, only with more blood and guts.

And that, frankly, is another thing. There are times in these books (Virgin too, of course) when you’re aware that an older readership is being catered for, and I think that’s fair, just as there’s a fair middle-ground with the “watches horror movies that are too old for them” kid crowd. But there are a few moments in The Bodysnatchers that go too far, and I’m fairly sure I noticed that back in the day as well. I’m not saying Mary Whitehouse was right, but bloody hell, Mark, some of those Skarasen kills are a bit much. Certainly the bit where Jack mutilates a young lad for speaking out of turn should have had a second pass, if not been taken out.

As for what the Zygons are up to, shall we say, not much? There’s nothing exactly wrong with having your aliens want to kill all humans and take Earth as their own and leave it at that, but there’s consequently not much to say about such a plot that hasn’t been said before. The Zygons themselves seem to be going through the motions over it, as perhaps was the author given that this is an actual line: “Invasion. Colonisation. Something boring like that.” Even the novel’s interesting opening gambit – the local Burke and Hare unknowingly supplying the monsters with a ready stock of the dead – turns out to be nothing more interesting than feeding the Skarasen. Keeping it simple probably helped get younger me on board, in all honesty, but it’s an aspect that really falls off if you’re not just now reading your first Who book.

Characterisation is in a similar sort of ball park. The Doctor strikes many of the right notes, with that unstoppable motion that unifies all Doctors, plus the occasional moments of apparent innocence unique to this one. (Morris even includes that rather odd clairvoyance habit from the TV Movie. What was that, anyway?) Once you get past the confidence and the charm, however, the Doctor does a pretty terrible job here. The usual “aim for a peaceful resolution until it all goes belly up” thing happens, of course, but not because of dreadful old humans interfering: it’s because the Doctor makes an almighty cock-up with his Zygon anaesthetic, killing nearly all of them and irredeemably enraging the rest. Events move too fast to stop and examine this, so allow me. Doc: what the hell happened there? I normally hate the clever-clever argument that the Doctor is the cause of most of the universe’s problems, but when the remaining warrior Zygon unleashes hundreds of hungry Skarasen on London, that is unavoidably part of the Doctor’s mistake as well. And there is no examination of that here, which really ought to be the price (if not, the actual interesting bit) of doing something so out of step. Very odd choice there, and/or a messy execution.

More examined, and a bit less dangerous, is Sam. It’s taking me a while to warm to the new companion. Partly this is down to her general demeanour: she’s as aggressively abrasive as Ace, but unarmed; she sticks defiantly (and unwisely) to anachronisms when out of her natural time; she responds to every comment either with sarcasm or with pouty outrage at not being included to the extent she prefers. She’s kind of annoying, then, but that’s at least plausible, if not inevitable for a 17-year-old. More significantly she has a major chip on her shoulder about what kind of companion she’ll be, reacting furiously to not coming along to a mortuary and castigating herself for seeming weak or afraid. At one point she ponders how “she wanted to be indispensable to him, wanted to be an equal half of a dynamic duo that would become feared and revered throughout the galaxy.” And I mean, you what? I dimly recall that this is all intentional and it may well be Going Somewhere, but it doesn’t feel organic so far. Where her origin story basically had her follow the Doctor on a whim, I’m not seeing a basis for this desperate need to live up to something. (Unless her competitiveness with Carolyn-the-would-be-companion in Vampire Science really set something off.) Crucially, with Sam sparking off at everything and the Doctor more or less reacting as he would to any companion, the bond isn’t really there. They don’t seem especially to like each other and she doesn’t seem especially to like being here. In Sam I just see a Totally Radical 90s Companion who doesn’t want to be a Typical Screaming Doctor Who Girl – except I have no idea where she’d have heard about them, and therefore how she can react against said concept.

I’ll always have a soft spot for The Bodysnatchers, for much the same reason I’d fondly recall any book that captivated me enough to finish it as a kid, and had then stuck around at all in my memories since. In the less flattering light of adulthood there isn’t much more here than a solid Past Doctor Adventure – everything you’d want on the telly, only more so – except it’s an Eighth Doctor book, and there’s perhaps an expectation of more depth where they are not boxed between existing episodes. Clearly there are things afoot here, what with the epilogue featuring an Eighth Doctor notably and cagily without Sam. But apart from that future nugget, and his protégé’s awkward fixations, this could easily be a story you’ve heard before – only with something noticeably odd about the eyes.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #4 – The Murder Game by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#2
The Murder Game
By Steve Lyons

Back when the New Adventures were new, fans used to debate the different kinds of book you’d get. One kind was trad: books that felt like photocopied scripts, lovingly familiar but a bit staid. And the other kind was rad: books that felt like someone took all of the drugs and was, at best, dimly aware that Doctor Who used to be a TV show. The Missing Adventures, by virtue of slotting between existing episodes, skewed more trad. Of course they did. And now we’re getting into their successors, the Past Doctor Adventures, I’ve got to wonder how much variety they’re going to have viz trad and rad.

Well, The Murder Game is trad. Very, very trad. It’s as trad as the annual Christmas luncheon held by Sir Henry Tradwell, head of Traditional Studies at Tradition University, a hereditary post that has now been held by ten successive generations of Tradwells. It’s really rather trad, is what I’m hinting at.

Is that a problem? Well, it depends on the reader. Obviously there is a market for stories that feel like gently reheated stories you’ve already heard, or a good chunk of Doctor Who just wouldn’t be there. But when it comes to investing hours and hours in a novel, it’s not really what I’m after.

We begin in the TARDIS – which straight away feels like a throwback to ye olden times, forgoing the novelistic setting of the scene that usually comes before treating us to yer actual Doctor and companions. (At least it spares us a moody and incomprehensible prologue which is often standard in Novel Who.) From here it’s a hop, skip and a jump to a distress signal, a seemingly empty space station, a gaggle of characters who are mistakenly expecting our heroes to turn up, and then a murder mystery game that – don’t tell anyone – might involve a few actual murders before very long. All of which is a bit, oh no, that script fell through, what else have you got that’s ready to go?

Some of this is undeniably fun, with the Doctor in particular relishing the opportunity to put on a costume – his character is “Miss Lucy Buxom” and all that entails – but the Agatha Christie-esque sequence of events that follows still feels like the oldest of plots, and without a veneer of metaness or even Romance Of Crime-ish comment to set it apart. Some people are not who they seem, even when they are not in costume, but they all have that unmistakeable stink of Look, We Need The Numbers So There’s Enough Of Them To Kill Off. I occasionally mixed up my Daphnes and my Dorothys; it seems so inevitable just from the setting that they’ll each have secrets that it’s more surprising when they don’t.

Not much happens in the first half – or rather, so much happens in the second half that my memories have now been taped over. (We’ll get to it.) But anyway, murders are happening for real, and all of this has something to do with the Selachians: aquatic space monsters with a chip on their shoulder. The Doctor and co must find what they’re after before they arrive and ramp up the killing. Red herrings abound, and Ben seems to find himself knocked unconscious quite often. This presages one of the novel’s recurring habits, never-ending jeopardy, with a sudden bout of oblivion lurking behind every corner. It gets a bit silly, but one of its other habits – the announcement of a death, but you’ll have to wait a few pages to find out whose it was – works very well at ratcheting tension.

Eventually it’s time to pay off this Selachian thing, and it’s worth debating whether the long wait was better than giving them a dramatic entrance sooner. Characters mention this murderous species quite a bit, but I kept imagining all this on screen and thinking, well show them, then! When they arrive they don’t disappoint: sharks (or are they dolphins?) so fed up with persecution from land dwellers that they’ve gone to war with everybody, they travel about in water suits with aggressive shark artwork painted on for effect. There’s certainly a hint of Chelonian about them, with the shark replacing the rather more anachronistic tortoise, but their commitment to kill-kill-kill is certainly to be reckoned with.

By the time they arrive on the space station/hotel it has been knocked out of orbit and is inexorably falling towards Earth, and that’s the pace in a nutshell, suddenly ramping up towards imminent heat death. The Selachians want a weapon that was smuggled aboard the station and will kill until they get it. The weapon could doom thousands so the Doctor and co must keep it from them, all while not perishing in Earth’s atmosphere. On top of that the weapon is finally deployed – an algorithm that will use anything mechanical or computerised to kill its target – which leads to Ben evading some very holistic assassination attempts over and over again.

This stuff is quite exciting, and from a quick glance at reviews the last stretch seems to be the agreed upon Favourite Bit. However, there does come a point where constant (and it does become constant) peril gets a bit tiresome, like continually hopping between frying pans and fires. It’s exciting incident with nothing underpinning it; yes, the Selachians are terrible and the weapon (though decidedly wacky) is a big problem, but it’s just a bottomless bag of cliffhangers after a while.

The characterisation is very good, though there’s not a huge amount to dive into with the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly at this time in the series. Ben yearns to be back at sea, and has conflicting feelings of friendship or-possibly-something-more for Polly. Polly feels similarly, but gets slightly shoved down in the mix with all these other characters milling about. The Doctor is fiercely himself, offering up beguiling smiles, outraged outbursts, childish panic and sudden ingenuity. His frustration at being in the company of murderers, and not wanting to encourage any more deaths, believably underscores his Troughton-ish antics. And Lyons makes this the point where he canonically decides that a sonic screwdriver would be a neat idea, if you like that sort of thing.

The Murder Game falls somewhere between a tried and tested 60s episode and a wet Sunday afternoon with Big Finish. It really is very authentic – I kept picturing the lights glaring off the studio floor – but then I kept waiting for it to be funnier, remembering that Steve Lyons was the Conundrum guy. To be fair there are funny flourishes, like the murder mystery game (not enough is made of that), and some oblique Whovian references like “Nobody would end up as cinders floating around in Spain if he could help it,” or – triple nerd points for this one – “He burst into a song, about business being business and always aiming to please.” But I’d hesitate to call it a comedy.

There’s just nothing at all under the surface – and for what it’s worth, barely anything I can say about it. The Murder Game executes its plot very efficiently and gets the voices just right, and I appreciate all of that. Perhaps that ought to be enough, but something is missing here that left me wading all too slowly through its pages.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #3 – Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#2
Vampire Science
By Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman

Okay. You’ve got your new Doctor and his new companion. What’s next?

Televised Doctor Who tells us in no uncertain terms that there are Rules; there are Done Things. The Doctor must show the new companion wonders and dangers, usually in the future and the past, in quick succession. The Eighth Doctor Adventures happened long before all that, and the New Adventures before them never had a fresh start to deal with; whenever those companions started it was always straight over to somebody else’s novel afterwards, and they probably didn’t want the burden of dealing with the new girl, thank you very much, so intros tended to bed in slowly.

Enter Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, picking up after Terrance Dicks very hurriedly did the whole bigger-on-the-inside bit. No pressure, but this is where it really begins.

At first glance, Vampire Science is one of those New Adventures-ey occasions where we’re not going to deal with it after all. We don’t pick up the action right after The Eight Doctors. The Doctor and Sam are on an adventure some indeterminate amount of time later (we’ll come back to that) and our point of view character is a new one, Carolyn.* She witnesses these two weirdos on the hunt for a vampire. Again, at first glance this looks like that same old routine: avoid dealing with the new companion by writing your own. But there’s other stuff at work here. (Side note: it’s always worth giving in media res a go. Vampire Science starts with a wallop, and isn’t that more fun than easing us into it with “Where will the TARDIS take us next, I wonder?”)

*Carolyn was at one time intended to be Grace Holloway, but then rights happened. Knowing this made me go “Ohhh” about the San Francisco setting. Info courtesy of the Pieces Of Eight podcast.

Sam seems pretty confident by this point. Mind you, she seemed pretty confident on arrival, back-talking drug dealers and just as easily assessing the impossibilities of the TARDIS. Some of this, no doubt, is just who Sam is – similarly moral and right-on to Ace, less explosive about it, with a (slightly annoying) 90s self-awareness that helps with all the sci-fi. But through the course of Vampire Science it becomes apparent that she still hasn’t entirely grasped what she’s got herself in for, nearly getting killed several times and winding up seriously hospitalised at least once. The bravado is, in part, an act. It wasn’t a new one just for the Doctor’s benefit – see, drug dealers – but perhaps she’s felt a need to keep it up for him. And it’s potentially reaching exhaustion point here. I kept thinking about the observation that she’s already on “her third pair [of trainers] since Coal Hill”. Running all the way, and with all the time to stop for a breather that that entails. She acts like it isn’t still early days, but there’s still some adjusting to do. The authors have their cake and eat it, then. Phew.

Carolyn adds an interesting wrinkle here. She sees the Doctor and Sam only once, in the 70s, and then not again until 1997 when vampires once again bubble to the surface of San Francisco. (Yes, the Eighth Doctor is back here and no, they don’t make the obvious connection.) As with most people in that situation, she has thought about the Doctor a lot in the intervening years, and presented with him once again the possibility of joining him seems irresistible. Has she been living a life at all, or just waiting to catch that train some day? Just as Sam is potentially rethinking all of this, Carolyn is barrelling towards it. Who wants to be with the Doctor? Who wants to just live a life? It’s an active and unresolved question throughout: Brigadier-General Adrienne Kramer, a weary soldier who knew the umbrella-wielding Doctor of old, is only too happy to school any impressionable young things on the dangers of trusting him. (But also, through gritted teeth, the enormous possibilities of same.) “They all go through this,” she tells Sam pityingly. Is it all worth it?

After a while I found myself standing back from Vampire Science and admiring the authors’ theme, and how far it goes. Vampires – eternal life. Remind you of anyone? I occasionally forget that in Doctor Who (Classic, anyway) the undead are bona fide nemeses of the Time Lords, but then that sneaky, creepy parallel isn’t one that has been greatly explored. (Even Terry, who started it, doesn’t seem all that interested; his vampires tended more towards Hammer Horror.) There’s shedloads of it here, particularly with a reference to vampires living “forever, barring accidents.” Joanna Harris, a doctor who secretly leads the local vampires (but not so much the troublesome youngsters who are causing all the fuss) yearns to live less like a predator and put her centuries of knowledge to good use – not wildly unlike the Doctor, at this time of life. At one point she tries to lure a fellow scientist to her way of life, prompting this Doctorish comparison: “‘So you’re willing to destroy him?’ [the Doctor] said, outraged. ‘Shatter what little faith he’s got, just so you can have him pass you test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are?’” In a last ditch attempt to trust each other, the two even create a psychic bond, putting them so firmly on parallel lines that one can’t die without killing the other. When the time finally comes for the Doctor and Carolyn to broach The Subject, in amongst all this it can’t help sounding like a vampiric bargain that once made, cannot be unmade, especially after Sam’s brush with some distinctly over-sharpened canines. Clearly there are different kinds of long life and different ways to live them, but you might want to think twice before signing up in either case.

Yeah, okay, theme-theme-theme. It doesn’t sound very exciting, I suppose, and there’s something to that. The prelude with the Doctor, Sam and Carolyn hunting down an out of control vamp is all action, perhaps to give you a taste of what you want after picking up a book about vampires, before sneakily settling into a more thoughtful exercise. The slowly mounting deaths in San Francisco are mostly down to one try-hard Nosferatu called Slake, who feels that the old must make way for the young. Sort of like the antagonist from Blade, then, except he rejected tradition and wanted new ways of doing things; Slake is mad that Joanna wants things to change, and prefers the old fashioned hunt instead. Slake is not fascinating, and nor are his dopey followers, but the book isn’t terribly interested in them or in action anyway. The vampires in this are more terrifying and their crimes more tragic when on a small scale. Sam never fully recovers from the shock of her attack. At one point, the Doctor takes Joanna to a victim’s funeral.

Despite what that first chapter suggests, the Doctor isn’t here to go vampire hunting. Yes, the book is interested in long lives and how to live them, on top of how the new companion feels about this crazy lifestyle, but it also has the job of bedding in the new Doctor. The previous book barely touched that – the story wasn’t built for it, and even when it was the choices were questionable. Here, we get to muck in and think about what this Doctor is like, and how he copes in a crisis. In a nutshell then: the Doctor he is, but Machiavelli he ain’t. Almost out of habit, he gets people to listen to him and follow him, but what looks like a grand plan is just as likely a bunch of short-term wheezes that paid off because, well, he’s just very good at this. Crucially he spends most of Vampire Science trying not to engineer the doom of his enemies, preferring to defer, at one point keeping Slake talking long enough just for the military to escort everyone else out of harm’s way. He goes to great lengths even for the possibility of peace – hence the dangerous link with Joanna, and the humouring of her mooted plans for “synthetic feeding”. (Oh, Doctor.) He gladly offers to throw himself off a building if she threatens Sam, and despite her getting a terrible revenge for that threat he then keeps his compassion for Joanna right to the end. He’s all hearts, this one.

But don’t be fooled: the enigma is still in there. Despite his protestations, he goes along with the destruction of the worst vampiric elements in the end. (But with less of the glee, particularly in an incredibly fast course correction from The Eight Doctors: “It was easy for me to kill Lord Zarn’s followers, I didn’t know myself well enough at the time to know that’s not what I do.” Yes! Mic drop.) In the 70s he gives Carolyn a means to contact him and, in a thrillingly clever and ever so slightly threatening moment, he then arrives early and urges her to still send it or he’ll never have come, all while standing behind her unseen. Still early, he can only watch as someone falls into danger just as predicted – but we later find out that he tried to help anyway, because what the hell. He is often likened to a magician. He loves making people breakfast. Cats are inexorably fond of him.

Perhaps most otherworldly though is his time with Sam. She says that he once left her to go on an errand, returning moments later (because TARDIS), but he had actually been away “a pretty long while – like a year” in relative time. He got distracted. (And it’s worse than that, because the numbers don’t add up. He later tells Carolyn this regeneration is three years old. Sam is still 17 – so he has lived more of those years than she has. Where was he?) This seems like something for other authors to pick up and run with, but even if they don’t, it’s an important separation of Doctor and companion. They’re together, they’re close, but there must still be a distance because he’s something else altogether. Your move, other writers in the series.

It’s been one of those reviews where I want to talk about the book rather than about the book, if that makes sense. Trying to wrestle myself back on target, then: I don’t know if it’s what every potential reader would want from a book about vampires, but it’s what I needed from the series right now, done with a degree of nuance that you just don’t expect this early on. And Kate Orman is involved, so where there’s nuance you can expect a sense of fun to follow. She’s worn through a few of her own sets of trainers by this point.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #2 — The Devil Goblins From Neptune by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#1
The Devil Goblins From Neptune
By Keith Topping and Martin Day

The Past Doctor Adventures, then. It ought to go without saying that if you’re doing a book range about the current Doctor then you should also do one about the rest, but you know what? That wasn’t a thing until Virgin did it with the New and Missing Adventures, so pour one out for the MAs. The BBC took their lunch money.

That said, the Missing Adventures never quite figured out what to do with themselves. Replicate the style of a TV script? Too derivative. Get experimental or dark? That’s what the New Adventures are for. They tended to oscillate between these extremes, with only occasional gems like The Empire Of Glass grasping that you can just tell a good story in an era.

I mention the MAs because, well, the comparison is inevitable, but also because there seems to be some crossover here. The Devil Goblins From Neptune (I’ll say it, goofy title) was co-written by Martin Day, who got his start with Virgin’s The Menagerie. (Many of the BBC Books writers cut their teeth with Virgin, which is sort of nice. And it’s good sense, because you don’t want to rely on a procession of first time novelists. You could try established higher-profile writers, but they may not flock to your TV tie-in range – no offence.)

On a character level, too, an argument can be made that Goblins is in keeping with the MAs. It’s set between Seasons Seven and Eight on telly: a sea change occurred there, with Liz Shaw disappearing without a peep and Mike Yates materialising as if we’d always known him. Despite sitting in this gap, Goblins does not have Mike arrive on the scene for the first time – so The Eye Of The Giant might still stand. And despite being the first thing that comes to mind when looking at that continuity gap, this is not The Proverbial Liz Shaw Leaving Story either. (Although there’s an epilogue set eight months after she left UNIT.) Is that a case of simply not writing that story right now, or are they politely letting The Scales Of Injustice stay where it is? I guess we’ll see. (Quick reminder here that Virgin sent Liz on her way twice, the first time in the first Decalog. So it wouldn’t exactly be crime of the century if Topping and Day did it again here. But they didn’t.)

I’m probably being unfair to Goblins by starting off with such a lot of fanwank, because it’s not that kind of book. So let’s get back on track. Season Seven strikes me as a good setting for a Doctor Who novel. The stories were longer than usual in the first place, with plenty of characters and subplots and okay, a generous amount of padding. Crucially it was also a time of change for the Doctor, in that suddenly he was part of a team. Yes, he’s always the most interesting one, but crucially he’s not the only one driving the action. Goblins flies with this, allowing the focus to follow the Doctor, Liz, Mike Yates, the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton and visiting Russian UNIT officer Shuskin as needed. There’s enough going on that you’re always fairly engaged – so it doesn’t have to be the Doctor all the time, and the fact that none of the rest of them truly know or understand him anyway gives the authors license to let him hang back and work in an ensemble. (They arguably push this a bit far by having him slip into a coma twice, but again – plenty going on elsewhere.)

Season Seven was also a murkier, nastier kind of storytelling than viewers were used to. Spearhead From Space hints at bodysnatching paranoia. The Silurians features an out of control plague and a morally grey ending that borders on genocide; The Ambassadors Of Death suggests that people are the real problem. And in Inferno we really push the boat out, with the world turning to outright fascism and then ending in lava and screams. (But it’s not our world, so phew I guess.) The season is a good setting for murky allegiances, violence with consequences and unexpected changes of setting: all grist to the mill for a book running about twice the length of a Target novelisation.

So in Goblins, it’s not just a case of aliens invading London and the Doctor leading the charge against them. Shadowy forces are working against UNIT and we follow their agent: Thomas Bruce, suave American and all round, 24-carat a-hole. The aliens have help from humanity – bad apples, of course – so we occasionally dip into the world of Viscount Rose, a part of the English gentry who reckons Armageddon will work in his favour. (Guess how that works out.) There are hippies more or less on board with this, the “Venus people”, led by Rose’s son Arlo, and we occasionally meet them or people on similar drugs. And of course the goblins of the title are out there killing people, so we occasionally cut away to those events, meeting people ever so briefly before, y’know.

A lot of this feels reflective of those long seven parters, particularly the sheer necessity of action scenes. (“Action by HAVOC” appears at the start. Accurate.) Shuskin’s initial mission to recruit the Doctor leads to three failed kidnap attempts, all of which are nominally pointless because she just wants his help but UNIT kept blowing her off, and then actually pointless because the whole “go and investigate happenings in Russia” plot is a massive, insidious red herring. Not that I’m exactly complaining: it’s written with maximum excitement in mind, bullets flying everywhere and the Doctor jauntily eluding danger at all turns. Marvellous. But I know when a certain degree of chain yanking is occurring and – apologies to Thomas Bruce and friends – here be yanks.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this (in all honesty, quite sprawling) plot is the stuff with the Brigadier. Realising that Shuskin’s experiences indicate rot at a high level, he departs for Geneva to see what’s what. (This smartly ensures that the red herring plot doesn’t go to waste.) The Brigadier often seemed a bit of a buffoon on screen, particularly as the years went on, but he flourishes here, responding to dangerous changes of circumstance with intelligence and taking command of soldiers so that any consequences are off their shoulders. I was never entirely sure what the authors were driving at with where this is all going – the “rot” goes very high up and it must be addressed, but that doesn’t obviously reflect anything in Season Eight and beyond, so are other authors going to pick this up? – but each cut away to his one-man spy movie was enjoyable.

There’s also solid character work happening for the rest of the gang. Mike Yates seems to be having crises of confidence, first when he’s placed in charge and then when it’s taken away – again not entirely sure if that ties into anything, but it fleshes him out. Benton gets partially blown up by a stray bomb, but then adorably rushes back to work and tries to infiltrate the Venus People, which goes surprisingly well until the goblins turn up. And Liz, while not making a point of leaving this time, feels like a person in her own right with skills and interests that just don’t naturally align with UNIT. (She much prefers academia.) Her mentor, Bernard Trainor, turns out to be in cahoots with Viscount Rose, although he soon regrets it. Shortly after she finds out (and after he has changed sides again) he dies of a heart attack, and we see a broken Liz: “Why did you have to go now? Why did you have to go when I hate you?” Leaving now or not, the events of the novel certainly feel like they’re going in Liz’s “cons” column for UNIT, not the “pros”. It may not be her leaving story, which is quite bold in itself, but it contributes meaningfully to that event.

That death is one of several examples that feel a little less throwaway than you’d expect in a monster invasion story. There is certainly more violence than you’d see on television or in a Target novelisation – enough that, combined with the spy shenanigans and the loving detail of all the military hardware involved, I wondered if kids would enjoy reading this at all. (Indeed, I didn’t stick with it as a twelve year old.) But most of it feels consequential and felt. Notably, the Brigadier contends with possibly having to take a life for the first time – a thoughtful character beat, albeit one the Doctor would laugh into silence after some of the orders he’s given recently. (Has he really not done it before?) That said, the Doctor calmly engineers the death of an entire species here, reasoning (albeit not happily) that they “have only themselves to blame.” I think it’s sufficient to say I don’t buy that, and if the Doctor had been any higher in the novel’s mix and thus under more conscious scrutiny from the authors I don’t think he would either.

I’ve gone a long time without talking about those goblins, haven’t I? And with some reason: the Waro (not to be confused with any nefarious yellow-clad plumbers) are murderous aliens who hate everything else in the universe because, basically, they’re the worst and that’s all there is to it. Huh. They have no real voice in the novel (though at one point the Doctor mind melds, aka “soul catches” with one) but they do have a vague environmental disaster back story. And honestly, they’re more of a thing that occasionally happens than a character you’d have any cause to think about. They’re the weakest link in the novel, but I suppose you could argue they’re meant to only be a part of it, like the Doctor; they are stitched into the betrayals and confusions that drive the action, but the real interest comes from the big picture. Spurious reasoning, I know, but I enjoyed the book despite finding the threat boring and the eventual action-packed relocation to a certain UFO site in Nevada also, as it happens, spurious.

In amongst all this is the Doctor, occasionally protesting about wanting to get off Earth, as is his way. I think he protests too much. In a passage that for once does give way to the ol’ fanwank a little, he catches up with Trainor about recent UNIT exploits, and the pair briefly discuss Ian Chesterton, whom the Doctor has met up with offscreen. (!) The sheer domesticity of this leapt off the page at me – the idea that he and Ian occupy the same world now as casual acquaintances. (Ian has a son with Barbara, FYI.) Shortly afterwards the Doctor resumes his membership at the swanky, rather dubious Progressive Men’s Club, in that way that seems quintessential to this Doctor. Later there is a somewhat on-the-nose reference to UNIT being “like a family,” and there are enough hints that the Doctor has settled into it without even noticing, which provides another nicely subtle bridge between the two seasons and a pleasing snapshot of this time and place, in what is otherwise a sprawling, bloodthirsty, giddily globetrotting and sometimes oddly thoughtful ride of a novel.

7/10