#37
The Burning
By Justin Richards
We’re a little over three years into The Eighth Doctor Adventures at this point. That would be a good enough run for any series of tie-in books, let’s face it, but this is Doctor Who we’re talking about, so stopping isn’t really an option. This presents a problem: how do you keep things fresh?
The obvious answer is to do as the TV show does and regenerate the Doctor. But you can’t easily do that in books — it’s hard enough writing about a guy we’ve only seen for 90 minutes, let alone somebody made out of whole cloth. That means keeping the same Doctor’s adventures interesting over a long period, so arc plots must come and go, along with supporting characters. It risks getting a bit convoluted. New readers might not bother jumping aboard.
Enter Justin Richards and The Burning, which is pretty obviously intended as a jumping on point. Continuity has been muted, if not jettisoned altogether. There are no characters you need to recognise. The monsters weren’t in a previous episode. Everything that happens is self-contained, with the exception of the Doctor’s story, which has places to go from here.
In another life The Burning might have made sense as the first book of the run, easing readers into things in a much less hurried fashion than The Eight Doctors. Richards even plays with the idea that readers might be unfamiliar with all this: he refuses to identify the Doctor at first, whilst also introducing characters that seem to embody his personality. I found these misdirects quite fun and creative — it’s a gag that can only work in prose, with no actors to give the game away — but I can see how they might be irritating. He pushes his luck with exchanges like “‘Did I hear correctly, sir, that you are a doctor?’ ‘I am. Of divinity. So I am equally used to being called Reverend.’” The Doctor eventually arrives more or less between sentences, again playing with prose, which is a bit of fun. I think it’s encouraging that the format itself, as well as the format of the stories, is open to reinvigoration.
Richards doesn’t stop at literally reintroducing the Doctor, however, because this Doctor is no longer himself. He has (I know, here we go again) amnesia, which gives us even less reason to humour any past continuity. He doesn’t have a TARDIS (hold that thought) and what’s more, he has no idea why he’d need one. The Doctor here refers to the future as “a closed book.” There is no hint of time travel in The Burning, just a bloke turning up unannounced and getting involved in some local difficulty. The barest essence of Doctor Who, in other words. (As well as, to be fair, Knight Rider.)
Would new readers come away from The Burning with a clear idea of Doctor Who? Yes and no. You get the basic shape: there are terrifying forces that only someone like the Doctor can stop. The Doctor is someone who endears himself to strangers and throws his weight around as necessary; he stands his ground against villains and encourages heroism and change in those around him. He’ll either defeat the monsters or be the one who made it happen.
But on the flip side, this Doctor doesn’t seem very good at it. At one point he takes a new friend into danger to investigate; when fleeing said danger shortly afterwards, he takes no great pains to keep his friend safe and promptly gets him killed. When another character is found horribly murdered he doesn’t express a lot of sympathy to those that knew him, but he finds the crime scene “interesting”. When the solution to the crisis presents itself, and that solution involves probably killing a lot of innocent people, he casually writes this off as the lesser evil and no further debate is had. And when the villain of the piece finally realises his mistake and reaches out to the Doctor for help, our hero pushes him away and causes him to drown, presumably hoping that this will tie off any possibility of the crisis starting all over again. If he feels any remorse about that, we don’t hear about it.
There’s something to be said for calling this a contrivance. We know what the Doctor is like, and he’s not like this: setting him back to someone more callous and indifferent gives you somewhere to go, obviously, but it requires a pretty drastic overcorrection to get us there. I’m a bit on the fence about it. I can understand the need to strip away everything comfortable since (some of) the authors complained that they didn’t “get” this Doctor and found him hard to write for. Solution, gut him and start over. It’s not very elegant, and it feels weirdly like an admission of failure after 36 books, but maybe it’ll work.
Amnesia is a useful panacea for something like this. (Though Richards doesn’t worry too much about how it works, since the Doctor apparently does remember being a different incarnation who wore a hat.) It’s also worth pointing to the absence of any softening influence, aka a companion. The First Doctor was ready to cave a guy’s head in with a rock until his companions said otherwise. He grew into the person we know. By that logic, showing the reader what the Doctor is like sans friends might create a genuine need for companions. That couldn’t hurt, since we know what it’s like when the books simply tell us that a spunky side-character needs to be there. Since we’re starting over, we can avoid those mistakes. (I’m not convinced they have a better idea yet however. We already know we’re not getting a new companion as a priority, since we know that Fitz will return, but we also know that won’t happen for years in-universe — all of which puts the Doctor in a bit of a holding pattern. I guess it’s not that much of a reboot after all.)
There’s not a huge lot else to think about besides the Doctor. The Burning is a plot-driven monster story and it has plenty of incident, although it takes a while for that to really get going — possibly because the Doctor isn’t playing with a full deck. He still makes friends with the local Reverend, a visiting scientist and his assistant; the group develops a certain Victorian kinship not unlike The Banquo Legacy (and, tired reference point I know, Dracula). There’s a sense that they are banding together to fight something really evil, with the added frisson that the brilliant guy bringing them all together might just as easily get them killed, or otherwise allow bad things to happen in the interim.
As for the evil, Roger Nepath (another strange visitor) seems connected to a mysterious molten rock substance which can do many things, including the duplication of people. Richards is a bit of a kid in a candy store with this stuff, also using it for marauding zombie-like figures, molten Claws Of Axos blobs, bodily possession and even surveillance tech, depending on the needs of the scene. The Doctor’s amnesia seems to be catching, with the suggestion that the creature also “has no past that it is aware of. No memory of who or what it really is.” I suppose this reassures any visiting reader that there is no homework, whilst also doubling as “look, it can do whatever the hell we need it to, okay?” This includes, rather spuriously, a happy ending for one of the dead characters. Shh! Amnesia! (To be fair to Richards, you can also see him working this theme on the town itself: Middletown is “a place defined by where it was rather than what it was, with no identity of its own.” If anything in this book requires the reader to know about it already I want it caught and shot immediately.)
The set pieces are all very solid, if not always surprising. If you somehow missed the signs pointing to the location of the finale, please go to Specsavers. The monster chases are exciting and easy to visualise, and the climactic moments are downright cinematic. Richards also enjoys little motifs like dangerous characters having fire in their eyes; he likes to repeat words and phrases, such as “burning”, in a way that’s almost mantra-like. It builds atmosphere, and reminded me of some of Terrance Dicks’ better books. (E.g. “Like a waxwork” in The Auton Invasion.)
There’s a dearth of really interesting characters in this, however, perhaps to make it more palatable when Richards kills most of them off. The only one that’s really going anywhere is the Doctor, with his dual questions of who/what he is and who/what he isn’t at this stage. This also extends to the TARDIS, as it turns out he does have it after all, except that it’s just a mysterious black cube that tells him where he needs to go. An encounter with the molten rock turns it into more of a big blue oblong with a sort of woody finish. Clearly it’s going to grow and change alongside him. And perhaps it needs to, as the decision to come here was likely driven by its need to encounter that deadly gloop and make use of it — suggesting the TARDIS in its current iteration is just as callous as its master.
There’s plenty to enjoy about The Burning, but it’s not a book that really lingers. The Doctor isn’t yet the kind of character to care deeply about what’s happening, and without a companion to fill that role, nobody really does. But it’s all suitably gruesome, and it’s good at things like setting the scene for the Earth arc, giving new readers some idea about Doctor Who and hopefully giving the other writers something to work with. If that doesn’t work, well, you can always wipe his memory again.
7/10
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