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