#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
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