#40
Rags
By Mick Lewis
Duck and cover, everyone. I’m doing Rags.
Doctor Who novels are a niche within a niche, so there’s not a lot of discourse surrounding them. Nevertheless, for good or ill a few books have stuck their heads above the parapet. Many readers (including me) think The Also People is pretty spiffy; lots of folks (hello again) think The Ghosts Of N-Space isn’t. That sort of thing.
Then you have a book like Rags. People don’t just dislike it: they haaaaaaate it. There is a vociferousness about the negative reactions to Rags that you don’t often see; helpfully, they are unanimous about what they don’t like, which is the violence. It is generally felt that Mick Lewis went too far here.
I wouldn’t dismiss that out of hand as a criticism. Rags is indeed a gleefully, gluttonously grisly book. I think there is a debate to be had, however, about quite how out of step that is with the book range that spawned it.
Doctor Who is a mostly non-violent show (pipe down, Mary Whitehouse) but expanded media is a little different. The New Adventures used those differences as a selling point: many of those books featured shocking (at times, I would argue, indefensible) violence. You might expect BBC Books to tone it down a little, and they’re certainly easier to recognise as Doctor Who products, but the writers have often felt just as comfortable throwing blood at the walls as the Virgin guys. Mark Morris wrote two books, both gore-fests; Mike Tucker and Robert Perry seem to specialise in people or things that murder the hell out of everyone else; Steve Emmerson had a zombie licking blood off a pitchfork as well as a tree decorated with heads; Keith Topping sat down and thought, “I know, I’ll have a scene where Turlough gets violently anal probed.”
So in other words, it’s not completely unheard of for BBC Books to get nasty, and “but it’s a Past Doctor story” doesn’t seem to make any difference to the rules. If you’re reading a lot of them, particularly in sequence, it’s just not that unusual. (Admittedly if you picked Rags out of a pile, or god forbid made this your first Doctor Who read, or even just read it as a child — which is not an unreasonable thing to do! — I’d understand being shocked.)
I know this seems like a pretty thin defence for big violence, so here’s another one: at least the violence is part of the story. We’ve had books before such as Strange England or Falls The Shadow where everything’s a bit weird in an anything-can-happen sort of way, and the “anything” just so happens to be ever-so-edgy violence. To me, that feels token. In Rags, the fact that people are temporarily losing their minds and attacking/killing each other in horrible ways is at least relevant to the plot, and beyond that the themes of repression. Okay, Mick Lewis still chose to write a story that is overall pretty gross, but it was also commissioned and edited. I guess what I’m saying is that if it appals you — and there’s nothing wrong or invalid about being appalled by it — then perhaps some searching questions need to be asked of BBC Books and Justin Richards et al, and not just Mick Lewis or his admittedly questionable taste.
I have to say that in other areas I quite liked his taste. When Rags isn’t staging horrible murders in the West Country — and occasionally when it is — Lewis demonstrates a very nice turn of phrase. Demented events will roll off the page like this: “The thing from the rock felt the rage of the two, and the rage was good. He wanted more. More of this. With sinews that had once been stone, the creature raised its arms. And the two men became one. Became none.” A band playing frightening counter-culture music becomes “a tremble of subversion in the sunshine.” A slim young woman is noted as having “a waist you could easily strangle.” When observing the kind of people coming to see the band, we find that “it was like the band attracted nature’s strange.” Rags is full of these odd, offbeat observations. I often found myself pausing to enjoy them.
Lewis also has a good grasp of the regular characters. Rags might be an objectively strange Third Doctor story, and it doesn’t always use the characters well, but the Doctor for instance is well characterised. Pertwee’s likeable pomposity is on full display here, with a few opportunities to rankle against intractable people, including the Brigadier when he insists on interrupting his experiments. He can also be utterly kind to outwardly unpleasant people. His current situation of being exiled to Earth is made somewhat relevant to the story, and Lewis makes note of this Doctor’s not-quite-black-and-white relationship with authority, observing that he “purported to be on the side of freedom, yet needed the narrow-minded might of the military and all its conservative, stifling authoritarianism to back him up.” That conflict is mirrored in the plot, which pivots around a mistrust of different groups, particularly authority figures. Pretty good work.
The rest of them work well, but it’s diminishing returns based on how well they’re utilised. Jo spends most of the book working undercover following a band on tour, an already dicey idea of the Doctor’s considering there is an obvious mesmeric influence at work here. Pretty much straight away she’s under the evil spell and beginning to doubt the Doctor and UNIT. Now, I wouldn’t put it past Jo to fall under the influence like this — the Master did that to her in her first story — and I think it’s quite neat to throw Jo into a movement like this and give her objections to her day job based on a moral stand, even if it’s fake. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the environmentalists in The Green Death (whose point of view she actually shared), and you could even argue that this is a way to set that up: clearly Jo is not simpatico with UNIT. The trouble is, Jo’s in the book so little, in terms of actually doing anything, that there isn’t a proper conversation to have about it. She barely cools down with the Doctor afterwards. She just shows up, gets hypnotised, says and thinks some pretty nasty things about him and then gets better. I imagine big Jo fans were not impressed by Rags.
UNIT put in a good showing — sort of. The Brigadier’s mannerisms leap off the page, as does the wryly funny shared irritation between the Doctor and the Brig. (“The Brigadier took this as his cue to advance into the room, like a vampire receiving a welcome invitation.”) Mike Yates’s struggle to belong is nicely underlined by giving him a frustrating undercover job; Benton gets to assert his Sergeantly authoritah at times. But the plot requires that UNIT remain at a remove from danger for most of the book, a point that is occasionally articulated so we know it’s deliberate (“It really wasn’t like the Brigadier to procrastinate over something as important as this”) but it’s not articulated clearly enough that I actually know why they’re doing that. (It’s the same for the Doctor: “Maybe this time he would have been wise to let the Brigadier have his way. Maybe this time he had let things go on too long before making a direct move, and maybe he had endangered Jo in the process.” General evil influence I guess?)
I have my suspicions. Rags is on the short side for a BBC Book and, not to pick on Mick Lewis or anything, but there isn’t much plot to go around; it no doubt would have helped to meet the word count to say, “let’s keep UNIT on the other side of the barrier until page 200-and-something,” or “let’s have the Doctor disappear off to investigate in his lab for ages, then get stuck in a metaphysical realm for a bit so he can have, I dunno, some New Adventures-y angst about his selfish desire to leave Earth and his guilt about companions he left behind until he can show up again.” Tellingly, when it’s finally time to resolve things, the Doctor still doesn’t have much of a role: it’s one of those where the bad guy’s own nature somehow causes his downfall (?) helped along by a useful self-sacrifice from the supporting cast. Despite Lewis’s obvious familiarity with the characters, his choice to have the Doctor all but cheering “go on, son!” from the sidelines and Jo mostly off her nut the whole time means that Rags very nearly avoids being a bona fide Doctor Who story at all.
This is where critics of the excessive violence chime in with, “yeah, you could have fooled me.” So let’s add context: Rags is about a rock band who come into contact with a violent, apparently primordial force in the countryside which takes them over. They travel around playing evil gigs and driving people insane, triggering murders at each site. This is eventually seen to be the work of the Ragman, an ancient alien not unlike Stephen King’s Pennywise, who thrives on violent energy — in particular the kind created by class warfare.
Lewis has some good ideas here, particularly the way an unscrupulous man uses the furore around the killings to more easily gain access to a popular figure, the better to exercise his own class warfare. (This goes horribly wrong.) I’m not sure Lewis really interrogates this stuff, however, since most of the people affected end up dead, or not heard from again. It’s for instance the Ragman, a disposable villain, who makes certain very arguable points about the Doctor’s flaws, and not someone actually useful like Jo, who has her own problems with him throughout the novel but all of those can be written off as hallucinations. UNIT are also forced to confront some very real classist undertones in the ranks, but again most of the perpetrators end up as crime scene decorations. If the Brigadier feels bad about his participation, well that’s just not important right now.
This is presumably where Lewis’s own characters ought to shine — it’s them, after all, that carry the novel home. He invests a lot of effort in the supporting cast and they do feel lived in and damaged, but there is a certain shared nastiness about them that gets in the way of actually caring about them. For example there’s Kane, a drunk with a hatred of bullies and a historical link to the Ragman, who ought to be central to the novel — but he just feels like another really unpleasant guy in the mix. Charmagne, a journalist who also matters greatly (at least in the grand scheme of things) spends too long lost in the curiously metaphysical back of a lorry. She has a recurring nightmare but there isn’t really time to dwell on it. I’m not sure what happened to her in the end.
More frequent characters include Sin, a young woman who is close to Jo for a lot of the book, but who doesn’t actually like Jo, hates her boyfriend and then completely falls in with the Ragman, at least until the very last second when it’s too late. Bit hard to chart an interesting character arc there. (Also: Sin is ethnically Chinese, which in one of Lewis’s rare weak characterisations means she is relentlessly referred to as “the Chinese girl.”) Other recurring figures like Jimmy, Nick and Rod run the risk of requiring a spotter’s guide, especially when (in the name of world-building) Lewis occasionally spends time on new characters who are only going to get splattered in a few pages anyway.
Perhaps inevitably, we’ve circled back around to the violence aspect. I suspect that this was another way, consciously or otherwise, to get Rags to the finish line: all those grotesque, protracted violent scenes that (here we go) do earn a place strictly speaking because the plot calls for them, nevertheless do go into a level of detail that is perhaps a bit much. I think the book’s reputation on this has been exaggerated, as these sequences are not at all constant, but much like the generally manky characters there is a certain skuzziness to the proceedings that is never far away. The story of Kane’s childhood bully feeding him slugs, for instance; the demonic band member who kisses Sin with a mouth full of maggots; the rest of the band who occasionally projectile puke, Exorcist-style, into their willing fans’ mouths. It’s a bit hard to stop and think, “hmm, yes, those themes of classism” when the book is generally just trying to gross you out.
So that naturally becomes the thing Rags is known for: violent scenes and gross bits. There isn’t a lot else to cling to, despite what is obviously supposed to be a general idea of repressed violence in society. The regulars are well characterised, but they feel peripheral; the supporting characters feel like they have lives, but they’re not dissimilar enough from each other; and although there is a plot and there are things to discover along the way (such as Kane’s family history, which to be honest still comes out of the blue), you more or less have the measure of Rags before the Doctor even turns up. Ancient evil glomming onto people and making them do horrible things, then generally sort of feeding on that was my guess after the opening car crash scene, and 250 pages later I wasn’t wrong. Attempts to enrich this include selling the Ragman as a “universal peril” that might worry even the Time Lords, but I just didn’t buy that.
Without a profound sense of threat (beyond just violence) or really any idea what can be done about it (beyond just, stop them I guess?) Rags becomes something of a slog despite its quick page-count: it’s a case of waiting for awfulness and then having the subsequent awfulness happen, rinse and repeat. All in all, the whole “small town generational folk horror” thing on display here held together better in The Hollow Men. I do think Mick Lewis displays a lot of talent on a sentence-by-sentence level, and he clearly loves Doctor Who, despite how he wants to present it. Rags isn’t the abhorrent wash-out I’d been dreading, nor is it unique in its mucky execution, it’s just not compelling or deep enough to justify all of that putrescence to any reader not fully on the author’s wavelength.
5/10
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