#15
The Scarlet Empress
By Paul Magrs
Magrs attacks! After popping up in the first Short Trips collection, Paul Magrs — already a seasoned author — makes a splashier landing in The Scarlet Empress. It’s his first Doctor Who book of many.
You know his style when you see it. Imagination, colour, sheer abandon and a good degree of camp are never far away. He also has a fondness for shaggy dog stories, evidenced in the later audio series Hornets’ Nest (where the Fourth Doctor tells Mike Yates one yarn after another), but also back here in The Scarlet Empress, which owes some of its inspiration to Arabian Nights.
The Doctor and Sam are already running for their lives on the eccentric planet Hyspero when they encounter rambunctious lady Time Lord Iris Wildthyme; she’s on a quest which scoops them up as well. They must find and reunite the four members of a mercenary team and bring them to the Empress of the title. And… that’s sort of it for the overall plot, though there’s plenty of other stuff happening along the way.
You can tell Magrs is excited to explore every avenue — he said on Pieces Of Eighth that he put everything in here in case this proved to be his only go at it — from the fluid way The Scarlet Empress moves from one set piece to another. There’s a bus crash that leads to an encounter with a djinn; there’s a buttoned-up town that descends into madness every so often, like in Return Of The Archons or The Purge; there’s a society of shaved bears that all work for a blind bearded lady, above whom a society of birds live and obsess over stories; there’s a giant spider who guards an ancient passage and is crippled by loneliness; and there’s a battle on a pirate ship that ends only when a giant fish swallows some characters whole, leaving them marooned Jonah-style in its stomach.
The storytelling itself is rather fluid, showing us home video footage of characters larking about out of sequence, then slipping between narrators — occasionally working together to assemble the same story. Even on a prose level The Scarlet Empress barely contains its excitement, sometimes having character B react to a line from character A in a paragraph containing more “A” dialogue, so it reads momentarily like character A reacting to themselves. At every juncture the thing is bursting, perhaps even stumbling to express ideas.
All of this, of course, in a story featuring Iris Wildthyme: galactic adventurer and very probably world-class liar. Introduced in his Short Trip Old Flames (but actually before that as a non-Time Lord in one of his early novels), Iris is a cheery, working class Gallifreyan ragamuffin who chronicles her adventures — only most of those appear to be find-and-replace versions of the Doctor’s travels. This infuriates the Doctor no end, and the explanation seems to wobble somewhere between Iris being his unofficial biographer (since he never writes things down and, for the purposes of this book anyway, he tends to forget them) and those events maybe having been Iris all along, somehow. I’m guessing it would spoil things to be definitive about this. For good measure, the Doctor also gets hold of an ancient book called the Aja’ib which contains excerpts from his life, presumably with the names changed, and he never seems to notice. (I wondered if Magrs was Doing A Thing here and the book was leeching away his experiences, but as far as I can tell, no. Weird coincidence or all part of a rich themed tapestry? Probably the latter.)
Iris is surely the highlight of the book, evidenced by her continued existence in Doctor Who. (Some of it unofficial. There is no way that River Song doesn’t owe some of her boisterous, Doctor-infatuated history to the mad lady with the double decker bus.) Iris, and the proximity to her necessary in a quest story mostly taking place in her TARDIS/bus, provides an amusing flip side to the Doctor. Her attitude is different; she seems more down to Earth, which is perhaps why she seems less reliant on companions. She’s a love her or hate her sort of a character. I bought into the novel’s eventual investment in her safety above everything else.
The Doctor becomes more relatable and ordinary in her presence, even by simple virtue of being in a domestic setting, making breakfast and cups of tea for everybody, and occasionally driving the bus. He seems at once more irritable and more comfortable in his own skin than usual in The Scarlet Empress. He even takes over narrator duties several times, in a way that seems pointedly less momentous than when he did it in Eye Of Heaven. (Again with that narrative fluidity: narrators simply come and go here. If you ask why or to whom they’re even narrating, you are probably considered a party pooper.) He is given frequent cause to marvel at his surroundings in this, and just as frequently share moments of heroism with his colleagues on the quest, seeming like a more ordinary (but no less remarkable) character, only — in my opinion — coming unstuck from his character in a moment where he rambles on about how it’s his job is to avoid “tidy plots” and stay in more loosey-goosey genres, which feels more like the author on a meta soapbox.
It feels de rigueur to check in on Sam, so then: she’s good in this too, sharing in the Doctor’s wonderment while also making it clear inwardly where she stands with her travelling companion these days. (Caring about, not fancying; she sees herself as “his only link with the world of common sense.”) The rigours of the plot occasionally leave us scrambling to spin all the plates, with Sam and grouchy alligator man Gila over here, the Doctor and Iris over there, and moments of high drama (such as Sam thinking the Doctor and Iris are dead, eaten by the giant fish mentioned earlier) don’t really land. There are plenty of big moments that do that, such as the fate of the Duchess (last seen “heading for home” — is she dead?) and the confrontation with the, oh right, Scarlet Empress, which seems over in a ludicrous flash after all the build up. (I never quite shook the absurdity that the Empress is expending effort to capture Iris and friends even though they are expressly on their way to meet her.) But anyway, Sam acquits herself well, adding another layer of context to the absurd meta textual games of the Doctor and Iris.
And oh, what games. If you like references to things then you’ll be overjoyed with The Scarlet Empress, which is just as engrossed in colourful yarns as it is in cheekily referencing the plot of The Time Monster, companions from comic strips, Lungbarrow, unseen events in earlier Eighth Doctor Adventures and the fact that the Death Zone on Gallifrey looks suspiciously like North Wales. It’s fannish on deeper levels too, offering its own twisted alternative to Paul Cornell’s “Doctor afterlife” where they all live on in the current Doctor’s head — in this one, they perhaps do the same thing as heads on spikes. See also the rather spirited idea that Sam might be able to communicate with the Doctor across time. Or not. (Did that really happen? Fluidity again/god knows.)
I first read The Scarlet Empress years ago, long before any interest in marathons, and I loved it. I’m clearly a bit more lukewarm on it now. Mind you, I think I’ve changed somewhat as a reader. I like a sprawling bit of adventure fun as much as the next guy — just look at Sky Pirates! — but it seems there’s a certain amount of story-point juggling that starts to lose me, and Empress exceeded it, leaving me drifting in and out of the tale. It’s still a huge, colourful, joyful jaunt, and Magrs is still undoubtedly a welcome addition to the ranks. I suspect I’m just keener nowadays on stories themselves rather than the loosey goosey world of storytelling they inhabit.
7/10
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