Doctor Who: The BBC Books #78 – Festival Of Death by Jonathan Morris

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#35

Festival Of Death

By Jonathan Morris

For a show about time travel Doctor Who is surprisingly shy about its mechanics. There aren't a lot of Groundhog Day-style time loops to be found, or Bill & Ted paradoxes, especially in the days before Davies and Moffat. Of course we know that's because time travel isn't really the point of Doctor Who: it's just a handy way into whatever story you'd like to tell. The TARDIS could be a wardrobe to Narnia or the Starship Enterprise and many of the plots could still work. If you were new to Who though, you might expect more (nyurgh) timey-wimey.

Jonathan Morris is perhaps a bit over-excited in claiming (via his Introduction) to have done all of this stuff first. (He at least goes on to credit The Sands Of Time as an early adopter, though he omits The Left-Handed Hummingbird which came even earlier. Tut tut.) Regardless of who dunit first, Festival Of Death probably does time travel shenanigans the most up to this point. It finds the Fourth Doctor and Romana stuck in something like a time loop, where their involvement in a crisis always seems to follow another still-in-their-future intervention. Thus they have to work backwards, parsing as little information as possible along the way to avoid breaking the laws of time, whilst still somehow being effective at solving the problem. It's a pickle and no mistake; Morris, like Richards before him (and perhaps like Orman, but who knows) had to use a flow-chart to keep it all straight.

The problem I have with these kind of stories – including, to be fair, Sands and Hummingbird – is the baked-in reassurance that the characters will get out of scrape A because we know they're going to pop up in scrape B later on. (Or should that be scrape -A?) Yes, the safety of popular characters is generally something you can assume, and it’s a downright certainty in canonical tie-in fiction, but suspension of disbelief still needs to work in individual stories; actively shooting it down with foreknowledge doesn't help. Morris neatly solves this problem by making it clear early on (as well as in the blurb, before anyone shouts about spoilers!) that the Doctor is going to die at the end. Is the reader likely to believe that, in a story that prominently features death and resurrection? Well, perhaps not, but the Doctor and Romana seem convinced. Drama is therefore assured, and the Doctor's knowing journey towards his own doom keeps the tension up, despite his increasingly comical responses to characters x, y and z having met him before, even though he's on his second or third or fourth trip further into the past.

It's not an especially confusing read, although some deliberate scene repetitions (no doubt meant to refresh the context) occasionally gave me unhelpful déjà vu. Morris grounds the story by allowing the Doctor and Romana to be as out of the loop as we are; although they're both brilliantly versed in the technical terms for things (well, Romana is anyway) they're essentially just doing their best to remember which bit of the plot slots into which other bit, which is exactly the experience we're having. There are moments when it threatens to become too much, with all sorts of Doctors and Romanas running about, but Festival Of Death is a light enough read that it doesn't feel as though you'll need to pass a test afterwards. For contrast, I had to make notes while reading Heart Of TARDIS simply to stave off a headache. (I made notes about Eye Of Heaven for fun.)

That's probably the other significant thing to take away: Festival Of Death is a funny book. Perhaps that's not surprising where it's set during the Douglas Adams years, but Morris is keen that it feels authentic to all that. (Indeed, you can point to City Of Death for an example of "Doctor Who already did timey-wimey stuff".) This Doctor/companion combo easily lends itself to comedy, hence the comedic focus of their Missing Adventures, and there are lots of opportunities here for more of that. The Doctor at one point bumbles about disguised as a conveniently mute guard. He clashes multiple times with Metcalf, the small-minded controller of the derelict ship/space station that houses all the trouble, and he makes short work of two unpleasant policemen. The Doctor's "death scene" is a long day's journey into ham, throwing in as many quotes as he can think of until another character gets sick of hearing it and helps him shuffle off. Romana, for her part, is more concerned than acerbic in this, but she enjoys playing along with various fibs that (thanks to all the paradoxes) she already knows about.

At times it's too broad, or perhaps a little too eager to please. Take this Monty Python paraphrase, which is as likely to elicit a groan as a giggle: "My card is marked, my number’s up, my goose is cooked. I’ve cashed my chips and have ceased to be. I am an ex-Doctor." Yes, this should all be a bit Douglas Adams-y, but we don't need a character to reference "life, the universe, and everything!" on top of that, or have a far-out character actually named "Hoopy". The space station's computer, ERIC, is a fairly obvious mish-mash of Eddie the upbeat computer from the Heart of Gold and Marvin the depressed robot, depending on the date when we meet him. We're not talking Slipback levels of "yes we know you're a fan", but it's not far off.

Sometimes it's a less specific broadness. Most of the supporting characters are somewhat lacking in depth, usually for comic effect. Space coppers Dunkal and Rige might be the worst offenders, with one of them mentally noting that "he was getting too old for this sort of thing. He couldn’t run more than twenty metres without getting a stitch. Drinking cheap coffee, slamming his fist on desks and roughing up suspects against fenders; that was more his style." Yes, all very The Sweeney; they drop out of the story after the first "loop" and are not missed. Metcalf is an awful guy for comic effect, which is fine as far as it goes but he never grows. Doomed spaceship commander Rochfort is another ghastly bloke, as well as being one of those bores who refuses to believe things so that we can stall the plot for a sec. Villain Paddox is eventually revealed to have interesting motives for what he's doing, but up to (and including) that point he's still just a creepy man in a lab coat. Harken Batt is perhaps the best example of a shady character: a disgraced documentary-maker with few scruples and fewer positive attributes who nevertheless endears himself to the Doctor and Romana.

Some of what I'm calling broadness might be because the story has to work so hard mechanically that there isn't time to focus on the finer details. Morris admits in his introduction that like a lot of first time authors he was anxious about never getting another shot at this, so he included as many ideas as possible. Consequently Festival Of Death has a couple of competing plots, even apart from the Doctor and Romana playing temporal catch-up, and they don't always chime exactly. For instance, Paddox needs 218 people to go into his "death and resurrection" machine in order to get what he wants. That happens to be the exact number of people used by the villainous Repulsion for its own ends, piggy-backing off of Paddox's work. (At one point it's suggested there's no such thing as coincidence, but I mean, isn't there?) It's hard not to imagine earlier drafts of Festival where he just used one plot or the other.

The structure of the story means that we have to wait a long time to find out what Paddox is up to, and it's a satisfying call-back once it comes, but we're waiting equally long to get to grips with the Repulsion, and that's about as standard a villainous force as you could imagine. We also get a mix of monsters, some of them memorable, some not. The Arachnopods are artificial killers that can reconstruct their bodies, each limb having its own intelligence, which is all fantastic but they're contained to one strand of the plot. Whereas we're also doing zombies again – man, they were really in vogue at BBC Books – and as well as being quite dull beat for beat, they come with the semantic nitpickery of being potentially more dangerous once they're being possessed, rather than merely remote controlled. Which, sure I guess, but it's not as if there are good zombies, is it?

It's worth saying that most of these complaints are themselves nitpickery. The process of following the Doctor and Romana (and don't forget K9) as they tumble through this ridiculous mess is a lot of fun, both in storytelling terms and because of the general light atmosphere. (Granted, it's debateable how light, given that the story revolves around a recreational suicide machine designed for temporary stays in the afterlife.) Morris is able to mine quite a bit of pathos out of the time loop – I'm not sure it is a time loop actually but I'm not sure what else to call it – with the Doctor and Romana both at points lying to people about their imminent doom, knowing that they can't change it. The story ends on a sombre, if slightly overwritten note as reality closes in on Paddox, and there's a lot to think about with the life cycle of Gallura and his people – ethereal creatures who experience their entire lives in loops. There's often a sense of pushing past the plot machinations to really think about what time travel means to people, what they can and can't do within it, and although Festival Of Death refrains from getting very heavy about any of it, I'm glad the story had that on its mind.

Jonathan Morris would go on to write a hell of a lot more Doctor Who, but it makes sense that Festival Of Death is still spoken of highly. It does a very good job of a seemingly chaotic bit of time travel, and it hews closely to the characterisation of its two leads, who pretty much guarantee an entertaining time just by showing up. I think the book makes life harder for itself than necessary, at least when it comes to finessing the things that live between the lines of a flow chart, but it's still very satisfying to make it through the maze.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #77 – Casualties Of War by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#38

Casualties of War

By Steve Emmerson

This is another of those books that I’ve read before. A few years ago I was kindly asked to talk about it on the We’re All Stories In The End podcast (recommended!) and for reasons that made sense at the time I read it in a day. As that conversation showed, I loved Casualties Of War; I was swept away by its grisly imagery and emotive storytelling.

I think the self-enforced time crunch must have helped, because revisiting it now with no deadline and a much shoddier attention span I’ve spent a lot longer with it and… it’s not great.

I know that’s a very negative way to start a review, and I’m not about to slate the thing, honest — it’s still a pretty good book. It’s just so weird having such a different second opinion. (Sort of wish I’d written a proper review the first time. Ah well.)

Let’s start with the good. It’s another in the amnesiac Doctor arc (“I thought you were starting with the good,” yes, ho ho) and the Eighth Doctor is once again a pronounced and compelling presence. He’s enough of a charisma wizard to enchant everybody he meets, including the villain, despite a back story even flimsier than psychic paper. He still has no idea about his past but little bits squeak through, whether it’s monster encounters or future Earth culture. He once again causes romantic palpitations just by being there, but he maintains a slightly frosty indifference about it (and about everything else) that he picked up in The Burning. He still lacks some of his usual forward planning; while not directly endangering any companions, he lets one of them stray into danger, and while not actively killing the villain during a moment of weakness (otherwise known as murder) he sure seems to terminate the bad guy here.

I noticed similarities with The Burning the first time. (Back then I read The Burning as homework. I know right, what a conscientious podcast guest!) Both novels are set in rural towns in the early 20th century; both open with a mysterious hole in the countryside; both feature a noticeable class gap between a wealthy man and the rest of the townsfolk, and he’s the baddie in both; both feature monsters in human form, often taking the form of the dead; both have the Doctor strolling along and inveigling himself in everybody’s business to surprisingly little pushback. It’s enough to raise an eyebrow at least, especially where Steve Emmerson thanks Justin Richards for his Whovian inspiration in the acknowledgements.

Where Casualties Of War diverges — apart from the amusingly up front identification of the Doctor, no “who’s Who” this time — is its very specific setting. The Great War isn’t exactly present on the page but the absence of fit young men in Hawkswick makes it very clear. There’s a ghost town quality to the place, with a reverend, a farmer and his wife, a widower policeman and a spirited young woman forming practically the whole population. The only other people of note are in Hawkswick Hall, now a recovery centre for the war wounded. (So there’s a good reason, if you need one, for the easy acceptance of the Doctor’s cover story. There simply isn’t enough going on around here for anyone to assume otherwise.)

The war instantly adds meaning to the story. Casualties Of War is all about the horrible lasting effects of trauma, with a few moments directly relating incidents from soldiers’ pasts. There’s a brutality to the novel as a whole, which is never far from a grisly set piece, that speaks to the sort of everyday awfulness witnessed by these men. Whether this strays into bad taste is perhaps up to the reader; personally I enjoyed Emmerson’s horrific gags more as nightmare fodder than as a reflection of any specific nightmares. The “blessing tree,” adorned with the heads of animals and people, is genuinely upsetting, as is the moment when a zombie soldier removes a pitchfork it uncomplainingly finds embedded in its leg only to lick the blood off its prongs.

Perhaps the best evocation of the theme of loss and the secondary effects of war is Mary Minett. Lonely but headstrong, Mary misses her brother (killed in the war) and her father (away on business) but is otherwise a force of nature in the little village. She falls into easy lockstep with the Doctor when he arrives, as well as (you knew this was coming) falling head over heels. The Doctor is a kindred outsider, also touched by war; it doesn’t feel too easy to present him with a could-be love interest like Mary. Their questioning energy really does sync up, with the novel noting that between them is “something of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object”, to such an extent that I could easily imagine her working as a less doe-eyed companion akin to Grace Holloway. Alas, there’s too much feeling on her end for that to ever work, espoused beautifully when we see her goodbye letter at the end, and with a gut-wrenching laugh when his innocent “I think it’s time we went to bed. Don’t you?” is followed moments later with a cheery “Goodnight, then.”

As much as I like Mary — and I do, she’s the highlight of the book — I can’t help feeling that the effects of war should be demonstrated more strongly elsewhere. Hawkswick Hall and its patients form the obvious outlet for all this, with the seemingly squeaky-clean Dr Banham encouraging a unique form of clay therapy to get the aggression and trauma out of these men. There are certainly poignant moments to be found, such as the prologue which does a fine job of making us care about two men before killing them, and the aforementioned war flashbacks. But when it comes to the actual soldiers and what they’re going through, Casualties Of War overall defers to being a monster story.

The monsters are a bunch of mud soldiers going around committing mostly random acts of violence. They’re clearly an outlet for the psychic trauma at the Hall, but whose outlet exactly? Several soldiers are murdered in the course of the book; when the finale arrives they don’t even take part, the action shifting instead to a New Adventures-y mind battle/trench warfare recreation with non-human soldiers blowing each other up around the Doctor, Mary and the constable. Poignant imagery, yes, but it feels a bit more like a gnarly action sequence, especially in a denouement that zig-zags back and forth to a farmer battling zombies in his somehow-exploded-several-times barn.

None of this is helped by Dr Banham, the man at the centre of things whose evil plan turns out to be… not entirely articulated, actually, but the gist of it is using a magic book he got from somewhere (?) to elicit psychic energy from men with shell shock to give himself telekinesis, second sight and a mud monster army. Bonzer. All of this we find out right at the end, after he’s been a much more intriguing character early on, at points breaking down both mentally and physically into a sort of Clayface monster. We otherwise don’t delve into Banham’s emotional stake in all this, or how (if at all) he feels about his horrifying mistreatment of his patients. By the time his cards are on the table he’s stopped behaving like a character at all: after a brief bit of moustache twirling he barely has a say in the grand climax, dying more or less off screen as a sort of secondhand trauma-fuelled Mr Blobby. (So, a regular Mr Blobby, then.) On second reading I just couldn’t help wishing the story had pivoted around one of the soldiers instead.

A clunky finale and some debatable horror impulses are unfortunately not the only issues. The writing is also quite variable. Plenty of it is enjoyable. Pretty much all of Mary’s dialogue zings against the Doctor’s; his quixotic nature is on full display and all of that rings true, even without his memories. Some of those horror shots hit their grisly targets, but there are subtler moments too, like this description of undead soldiers that jabs you at the end: “No fidgeting, no gestures, no smokes, no jokes to pass the time. No motion. No boredom. No breathing.” Emmerson nicely juggles his themes with the ongoing arc by showing the Doctor intrigued by Hawkswick Hall. The observation that he longs to believe damaged men can return to their former selves makes a virtue of his arc without making a big deal out of it. Mary’s loneliness also feels real and not gone on about. It’s a small point but her dad doesn’t return from wherever he is at the end, which would have been a nice (but obvious) button on things.

The wonky stuff is mostly towards the end. Emmerson has a fine (and foul) imagination, but some turns of phrase err on the downright strange side, such as “The canopy opened and splattered the dead men with grotesque splashes of moonlight” and “Then there was the flight. The last response of the human mammal.” Dialogue is one of the book’s stronger suits, but some characters are lumbered with a strenuous country dialect, leading to awkward lines like “I did see one o’ these before” and “Ey, where yer goin’ now?” The aforementioned finale goes overboard on the dun-dun-DUNNN scene breaks, which is made more apparent by some unfortunate last-line repetitions that could have been caught in editing: “He landed with a crash and darkness zoomed in.” / “Darkness came.” / “Blackness rushed in and there was nothing at all.” The plot lacks complexity, relying on action and horror beats; there’s a lot of traipsing back and forth to Hawkswick Hall, Banham telling them to go away with increasing exasperation, interspersed with mud soldiers jamming guns against people’s necks or lurking or rampaging or attacking the proto-TARDIS for no reason until the book finally feels like exposing the truth. And we all know how that went.

It’s hardly a write-off. With a vivid imagination, in short bursts anyway, and a knack for character writing (for Mary and the Doctor) that makes you genuinely look forward to scenes, Casualties Of War really works at points. With stronger editing and guidance it could have been more consistent. There is clear promise here and I’m keen to read Steve Emmerson’s next book, but I just can’t go home again to my initial enthusiasm. This one’s rough around the edges and it could have sharpened its focus and themes into more than a way into the Grand Guignol. I want to love it, but like the Doctor at this point in the run, I lack a time machine.

6/10