Doctor Who: The BBC Books #118 – Combat Rock by Mick Lewis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#55

Combat Rock

By Mick Lewis

Get ready for Round Two with Mick Lewis. If you’ve read his earlier book, Rags, then you’re probably not expecting much in the way of puppies and lollipops. Even so this is a bit much.

This time Lewis maroons the whimsical team of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria in Papul, a politically fraught island on the planet Jenggel split between the downtrodden but welcoming locals and the imperialist Indoni. A group of rebel Papuls have formed the OPG, with the intention of ridding their land of invaders in as bloody a fashion as they think necessary. The Indoni president, Sabit, knows this and is more than happy to disrupt elections and employ mercenaries to stir up trouble, even creating false flags to better capture off-world sympathies. In the middle of all this there are tribal mummies (or Mumis) which are, unaccountably, coming to life and attacking people. This has something to do with peaceful Earth missionary areas suddenly reverting to barbarism. Oh, and there are cannibals.

Combat Rock is, as bizarre as this sounds, one of the more realistic Doctor Who novels. (Let’s just ignore the bit about mummies for a moment, shall we?) By which I mean it resembles real-world conflicts in an almost 1:1 way, what with its imperialism, its grotesque practices on all sides and its lack of any broad resolution to Papul’s struggles at the end. I’m not geopolitically savvy enough to know how well any of this tracks with events Lewis may or may not be mapping his novel onto, but that feels like what he’s doing here. (I’m slightly afraid to say for example “oh this is about Papua New Guinea and Indonesia” based on his comments in About The Author, but if that is the case then wow, he barely even changed the names!)

He at least adds some accoutrements to make it a Doctor Who joint, so you’ve got mummies, extra-terrestrial megafauna and the TARDIS crew making the unhappy acquaintance of the various violent groups. The plot hangs together quite well when it comes to explaining the mummies and so on, with a suitably Doctor-ish unmasking scene at the end; Combat Rock feels more cohesive than Rags, if nothing else, which used much the same “call to violence” idea but with far less defined details. However there are still long stretches of this that read like a random, brutal war story he felt like writing which perhaps sold better with the TARDIS in it.

The over-arching question is probably the same as it was in Rags: how far is it acceptable to go with violence in Doctor Who before it stops being Doctor Who? I don’t know the answer. If it helps, I don’t think anyone should go further than Combat Rock.

Lewis’s writing style is once again expressive and interesting, although as usual it’s mainly devoted to descriptions of death and mutilation. He’s still capable of great subtlety and conciseness, like “the wine-coloured sea, endlessly shushing the beach,” “[She was] dancing, dancing. Jamie was looking, looking,” or “Red sand, and purple sea. On the beach a box.” He can, bizarrely given all his other proclivities, absolutely nail the description of a familiar Doctor Who character, such as Troughton here: “This face was lined and contoured by a life beyond strange, a facial map bursting with character and mystery.”

And on that score, despite popular complaints that it makes no sense to put these characters in this story I think he’s put clear thought into this match-up, with Jamie’s experience against the Redcoats brought explicitly to the fore against a new and senseless warzone, and Victoria’s imperialist upbringing making her an uncomfortable foil for her Indoni capturers who seem, as far as she can see, like reasonable enough chaps at first. Victoria’s views are challenged, just as Jamie’s horrific experiences seem utterly hollow compared to his perhaps rosily remembered “Craig a duir” glory days. The odd man out is the Second Doctor, who surely seems too eccentric and friendly to upset with things like guerrilla warfare and cannibalism – but then, this only brings out his friendly and diplomatic side all the more. Lewis nails his clumsy foibles the rest of the time, adding a good deal of friendly bickering such as “‘Where are we?’ ‘Well, it seems almost to be... er, it could be –’ ‘Och, he doesnae know,’ Jamie finished for him helpfully.”

But those three are the only lights in the dark of an angry, upsetting novel. I can’t stress enough that it is wall-to-wall unpleasantness otherwise. An infant gets shot in the head on the second page. One character is separated from the group and then turns up again as the barely identifiable centre of a cannibal feast. Likeable hostages have no guarantee of surviving the experience. And when a friendly “re-educated” man regresses into barbarism, he attacks a local missionary by force-feeding him the brains of another. (That was a convenient “I think I’ve had enough book for tonight” cut-off point.) Said missionary sequence is well written, of course, with the poor bemused instructor earnestly thinking that “the Kirowai region further along the south coast would be next to succumb to the benefits of civilisation and Christianity.” Fabulous word usage there, “succumb,” which tells us just where Lewis’s stall is set out on the issue. There is an angry balance-of-nature theme to all this which sympathises, unsurprisingly enough given his About The Author spiel, with the cannibals. But my god it’s not easy reading. I really do wonder about commissioning this for a Doctor Who audience. Perhaps Justin Richards thought the front cover would be enough of an age certificate.

So much of Combat Rock is just “how am I going to come up with a new way of describing that,” with occasionally (however begrudgingly) creative results. I suppose I ought to appreciate “The torturer collapsed on top of him, ousted brains fused with flesh, blood and bone into a grisly ice-cream whip sculpture.” I think I actually do rate this one, however much I audibly groaned at the time: “It squeezed the guerrilla’s body like a tube of toothpaste and soon everyone in the canoe was red.” But now and then he decides that there just aren’t enough not-for-kids sentiments flying about, so we also get: “For a moment he was back in Culloden. A claymore sweeping across a Redcoat’s neck, opening just such an orgasm of blood.” And then – he really ought to have got some sort of derisive award for this one – “The man’s eyes were fluttering glazedly open, as though he was awakening from a long and particularly bloody wet dream.” Ugh. Mick.

Not all of it’s revolting just because of his word-choices: sometimes it’s the company he keeps. The mercenaries, for instance, whom he delights in describing one by one, over and over, as if we’re going to be enchanted to behold them every single time. (His descriptions run a peculiar gamut from “guy with an eye in his cheek due to botched surgery” to “bisexual man.” 2002 was a while ago, wasn’t it?) We also get little blobs of back story on them, particularly Pan, a committed rapist and otherwise fan of “whorin’.” Now, I’m not going to get puritanical here, but what exactly is anyone gaining from scene after scene with this guy? Is there really anywhere to go with him after he sleeps with a prostitute, tires of her conversation and then shoots her dead in bed? Yes, he’s bad news. They all are. They still are. What bad news they continue to be. Oh my god I’ve still got 200 pages to go.

It’s a question of taste, I suppose. There really is a lot of thought and, presumably, research to back up Combat Rock: the political machinations of Sabit, the confusing feelings of the Papul inhabitants about freedom vs terrorism, the uncomfortable existence of groups such as cannibals – it all feels rooted in something. I think there’s also an argument in favour of asking awkward questions about characters we know and like, such as Jamie, who seems to be deflecting some latent attraction towards Victoria by going clubbing instead, then has to confront his frequent urges to charge into battle – a thing that conveniently rarely ended in bloodshed on telly. And of course there’s Victoria who, to her credit, somewhat notices her faults as it goes along: “Not for the first time she felt shamed by her Imperialist upbringing.” But she’s still a prude, and still struggles to outpace layers of her own racism. “He spoke astonishingly eloquent English (she had to keep reminding herself that he was an alien, and not just a foreigner). He even offered to hold her hand to steady her progress, but of course she wasn’t going to allow that. His brown face was angular and, with the clipped moustache and dark, intelligent eyes, she had to admit, rather handsome. But then, as her father had constantly reminded her, she always did have a bit of a wild streak, and had always had a penchant for people and things that were rather out of the ordinary.” (Whether this is really fair game since she’s not especially racist on-screen is another argument.)

Part of me is sure that Combat Rock has something to say, about familiar Doctor Who stuff as well as the things Mick Lewis finds interesting and urgent. I can’t call (most of) it bad. Another part of me actually had to read it, though, and he left us a message: this is ’orrible. No thanks.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #117 – History 101 by Mags L. Halliday

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#58

History 101

By Mags L. Halliday

Time for another one-and-done BBC Books author. I think it’s fair to say that Mags L. Halliday has a distinct voice, and one that it would have been interesting to see develop across further books.

History 101 seems at first to be familiar territory. Even the characters think so, with Fitz commenting: “Oh bloody hell! It’s another alternative history thingy, isn’t it?” When the Doctor notices that Picasso’s painting of Guernica doesn’t look quite right he’s led to understand that history — or the perception of history — is dangerously off-kilter, so the three of them must travel back to 1936 and investigate. Fitz has the muckiest job, observing the bombing of Guernica first hand. The Doctor and Anji settle in at Barcelona, mixing with anarchists and keeping an eye out for events (or the perception of them) slipping out of true.

This, too, feels a bit familiar for the EDAs: the Doctor sending his friends on missions, said friends spending an ungodly amount of time hanging around and suffering terribly and — as if there was a conspicuous absence of a cherry-on-top — the TARDIS getting knackered and the Doctor catching yet another case of the wifflies. There are even arc hints from the resident rotund boogeyman, here swapping out his military outfit for a snazzy fedora. (It’s not a spoiler, he’s in it right at the start.) You could win BBC Books Bingo with this one.

Halliday, however, has an unusual focus. The threat facing our heroes (and I suppose the course of history, the universe etc) is not one that’s going to jump out and attack you — although latterly it affects people’s behaviour in strange and violent ways. There’s a sense of simply having to immerse yourself in history until the answer pulls into focus. The Doctor and Anji, especially, have a pretty loose remit here.

If this seems like a shortfall for a [Doctor Who story, well maybe it is, but Halliday fills it with character. These are wonderful depictions of the TARDIS crew circa 2002. Anji especially, whom Halliday places firmly in the audience-surrogate slot when it comes to viewing the comparatively crazier other two. Anji sees them as “two younger brothers on permanent sugar rushes,” and has a particular affection for Fitz, an “old scruff” whom she’s delighted to see after his extended absence. She has a distinct older-sisterly concern for the Doctor, particularly when he (heart-rendingly, even if we do go to this well a bit often) seems to lose his marbles out of concern for the TARDIS. The thought of her slowly pulling the doors open, waspishly annoyed with him for not helping even though she’s scared for him, was a favourite moment for me.

The Doctor is great too. His breakdown feels like another little microcosm of what’s going on over this series, as he suddenly seems cut off from his abilities, even just his ability to be of use. Halliday has a great handle on his energy and whimsy when it thankfully returns: the scene of him joyously mending the TARDIS with a ticker-tape machine was another one that made me grin.

And there’s Fitz, long-suffering as always — possibly for sheer mileage the longest suffering companion there’s ever been, even recalling here some of his Interference woes, yet still utterly affable in the face of wartime horror. Many of his scenes are shared with Sasha, a Russian spy, and I can’t be the only one wondering if their at first bristly camaraderie leans somewhat adorably homoerotic. On a less fluttery level, Fitz’s inner monologues about the quality of his cigarettes, and his earnestly having forgotten that a damaged hand might prevent him playing the guitar, really sold Halliday’s understanding of the character.

She has also quite obviously, if perhaps not to a David A. McIntee extent, done her research. Barcelona circa 1936-37 feels hard-won and lived in, richly selling the idea that Anji has been stuck here for six months. She’s surrounded by characters who feel like they have inner lives upon which we are only briefly intruding. We’re privy to some of their suspicions about the Doctor and Anji and, although this is informed by the “perspectives” plot, it seems entirely reasonable for a revolutionary to wonder if a stranger keeping a log of their comings and goings might be a bit suspicious. Siding with a guest character in a moment like that, in a book that so firmly grasps what makes the regular characters interesting and appealing, is a feat in itself.

I couldn’t help wishing, though, that there were slightly fewer characters in this. For every Jueves there is a Luiz, for every Enrique an Alberto. Sometimes, despite loving the way Eleana was written, I got her confused with Pia; just now I had to look up what Enrique was called despite him featuring heavily in the finale. I meant what I said about them all feeling like real people — in the moment, Halliday sells this world full of busy, impassioned people. But we’re not always inside it with them. This also goes for the historical research: I wasn’t remotely surprised to see a bibliography at the end, what with the level of convincing incidental detail on display, but some of the basics aren’t quite there. A working knowledge of the Spanish Civil War would be a boon (I don’t have that), a basic geographic understanding of Barcelona would help (I thought “Eixample” was a typo) and as for the casual deployment of terms like POUM, PSUC and NKVD, help a guy out, honestly. When the story concerns the literal perception of history you could do more to bed in what that history should be. (This is normally where a less-than-brilliantly-informed companion would come in handy, but apparently Anji and Fitz attended all the school days I missed.)

There are also (arguably) problems with the plot and how it’s communicated. A vague sense that history is out of joint is a terrific starting point, and it slots neatly into the more holistic approach the EDAs were taking around this period, but it doesn’t present much of a ticking clock; besides the imperative for Fitz to witness Guernica there is little to no sense of pace in History 101. The long chapters amble along.

Halliday’s central concept is an interesting one, but it’s hard to put into practice. Mostly it’s done with characters losing their perspective and effectively becoming someone else, but in an already crowded roster this can be a recipe for mess, and it doesn’t happen very consistently. There is some slightly random icing on the cake too with hallucinations of moving gargoyles or firing squads, as well as a general sense of weird chaos in Barcelona, but Anji never quite puts a name to these things. I often felt like I was experiencing the same effect facing the TARDIS crew, but not in a creative way. A little bit of unfortunate copy-editing also dogs the book at times, with the odd missing or wrong word — that’s no big deal, but it had the effect of heightening the uncertainty of already (deliberately) uncertain scenes. For instance, Fitz witnessing roughly similar versions of Guernica happening again and again is a strange and disturbing idea, but the first time I noticed a repeated but-not-that-similar scene involving a nun I thought there’d been a mistake.

There’s an argument to be made that History 101 simply caught me napping, and fair enough: no one’s perfect, sometimes you just don’t fully get a book. (I’ve seen that others very much do.) But as this one approached its end I didn’t see a lot of closure happening, with that somewhat intangible problem getting resolved intangibly, a particularly nothing-y bit of setup with Sabbath, and no apparent resolution for Sasha. History has been set right because the balance of uncertainty has been restored, after a wiffly man and a wiffly man-shaped object are introduced to each other. Which is nice and all, but if you’ll forgive a follow up question: wha? See also the bit with Fitz and the TARDIS phone: it’s arguably the most impactful moment in the book, questioning how far these characters will go to preserve history and how much they trust each other. But because it’s couched in Fitz drifting in and out of consciousness, and the way it’s framed suggests that it might be Sabbath rather than the Doctor organising it, and the lack of a significant cool-down about it afterwards, I was more stuck on what actually just happened (and how much of it did) than the ramifications of it for Doctor Who.

Like many of the range’s stronger authors, I’ve no doubt that Halliday had a full grasp of all her concepts, characters and settings: that confidence shines through the book. Actual understanding is muddier, but I’d put that more down to the editing. Never mind the occasional wrong word, if a book’s concept is too hard to grasp then maybe it could be refined. That’s why I’m sad we didn’t get any more BBC Books from her. All that interesting stuff could be sharpened into diamonds.

My vague sense of befuddlement through a lot of History 101 wasn’t enough that I wouldn’t recommend reading it. (And anyway, even if its plot occasionally did an “I’ll explain later,” its themes were sharp enough.) If nothing else it makes a terrific case for this TARDIS team, and it has heaps of flavour. Also, you might follow it better than I did. It’s all a matter of — all together now! — perspective.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #116 – Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#54

Ten Little Aliens

By Stephen Cole

This is one of those Who books that everyone seems to like. It must have had a certain cachet in order to have been reprinted in the modern era, with a new cover and everything. It also did well in contemporary reviews. It took me a while to figure out why.

Ten Little Aliens is a peculiar Doctor Who book. Sure, Whovian murder mysteries are ten-a-penny – they were practically the lifeblood of the Virgin Bernice Summerfield series – but then you add in of a bunch of space marines straight out of Aliens. Agatha Christie, James Cameron and late-stage Hartnell era make for a very odd Venn diagram.

Still, it’s not as if Cameron has a patent on space marines. Earthshock sent similar guys underground with the Doctor and friends four years earlier! (Eric Saward should sue.) But I struggled for a while to get into this story as it focussed so heavily on a bunch of tough guys in what is, deliberately, an “all these corridors look the same” situation. The added incongruity of them vs Hartnell, Ben and Polly felt like whiplash at times.

Stephen Cole puts a lot of effort into his guest cast, going over their identities and personalities a few times with a full character roster to boot. This might seem like overkill but we’re going to be stuck with them so we might as well have a fighting chance of telling them apart. (I’d additionally have suggested not using “Shade” and “Shel” as they’re a bit similar. Oh well.) Despite the shared gung-ho attitude there’s a good amount of unique disadvantages and secrets squirreled away here, particularly with Shade, or “Shadow” as he’s disparagingly called. (Perhaps not a brilliant nickname where it’s so close to what he’s actually called, but we are dealing with space marines, not Oscar Wilde.) An early scene where his commander, Haunt, beats him bloodily in front of everyone to prove both the effectiveness and limits of their armour tells us a bunch about both characters.

The TARDIS crew find these men and women on what appears to be a training exercise inside a hollowed-out asteroid. There’s a thrilling (to me anyway) sequence where the Doctor and co. require spacesuits because the atmosphere’s not very friendly – a surprising rarity in these novels. The two groups soon meet and encounter a pile of alien corpses: the Schirr, sworn enemies of the humans, pictured on the front cover. There’s no reason for said bodies to be there, especially that of the Schirr commander. And there’s even less reason for the bodies to start disappearing, one by one.

It’s around here that Stephen Cole’s primary influence becomes clear, and that’s saying something because I haven’t actually read And Then There Were None – or any Agatha Christie novels for that matter. Before anybody stones me, I’ve seen plenty of Poirot films, Miss Marple dramas, things that were plainly inspired by Christie and quite recently The Mousetrap, which is more than enough to experience a twinge of the little grey cells when bodies go missing in this, or soldiers vanish despite the local disintegrator guns not having fired.

I’ve got no idea how close the plot of Ten Little Aliens adheres to the world’s bestselling mystery novel (as per Wikipedia) but I tend to assume not much, what with the amount of sci-fi and horror going on here. The general pattern of disappearances and betrayals, merely suspected or otherwise, likely recalls the earlier work. It all fits neatly into Cole’s murky, violent framework.

Because oh yes, Ten Little Aliens is grim, beginning with performative army cruelty and a pile of corpses and not letting up from there. There’s a spate of strange afflictions mostly affecting the army folk, some of which are grotesque in the extreme, and these eventually become outright body horror. There are monsters – giant mobile angel statues if you (or Steven Moffat) can believe such a thing, only these guys do a lot worse than send you back in time to meet the love of your life. There’s also a truly horrifying engine system that essentially eats people, and if they’ve been torn to bits first then all the better for the digestion.

There’s a lot of potential here to revel in cruelty, but Cole keeps an eye on the character side of things so it’s never that bad. We have, by that point, come to at least empathise with the army guys. There’s Haunt with her strict ways, which hide a lot of pain; Shade and his secrets, as well as his desire to make good; Roba, a powerful but insecure man looking to keep his head above danger; Creben, arguably the most senior officer after Haunt and hoping to make a name for himself; Joiks, a somewhat skeezy guy who makes people uncomfortable to feel better about himself; and "Frog", a troubled young woman with scars and an artificial voice box. (There are more of them but to varying degrees they all stay in the background.)

Ten Little Aliens felt a bit limited and trad to me at first, what with army guys in a cave yelling at each other until the monsters come. Not very interesting, surely? But there’s a deceptive power in this as the book moves forward in such a confined space and more or less in real time, with a strict limit to its characters. Gradually a sense of claustrophobia sets in that you don’t often see in novels, which by their nature are often interested in expansion and world-building. All the world-building in Ten Little Aliens is conversational, describing worlds and conflicts outside this godforsaken asteroid that nevertheless inform what’s happening on it. There are at least two malignant alien races and we don’t meet very many of them: the point of focus is the people stuck in this crucible and whether they’re going to get out of it.

Cole’s attention to tension builds to the book’s USP, and probably its biggest talking point: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section. This sounds gimmicky in the extreme, but it fits what he’s doing, as the characters all use interconnected headsets to record thoughts and memories and the Doctor determines that in order to stay alive and solve the crisis they need to keep in contact, and this seems like the best solution. The reader is invited to jump between perspectives in a rough order, but many are optional, which paints a somewhat unique experience for each reader and reading. It also re-enforces the sense of confined characterisation that’s been building throughout the book. Lasting about 40 pages, it’s easily one of the individual creative highlights of BBC Books, up there with Eye Of Heaven and The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, except in microcosm. It’s bloody good going for what looks at first like a trad army story. I can only imagine how long it took to put together.

The story as a whole is less complicated and quite satisfying. I won’t spoil who’s the traitor and what they’re trying to achieve, but it comes together neatly, justifying the disappearances and murders. There’s a late reveal that smacks of a gimmick (and that’s in a book with CYOA), which is at least very Agatha Christie, but I think Cole just about gets away with it via some supporting memories and motivations covertly dotted through the book.

If it seems like the focus is entirely off the TARDIS crew, it isn’t really. Cole makes a very good case for the First Doctor who is initially dismissed by the likes of Haunt, then gradually makes his usefulness apparent. He faces down appalling monsters but still gives them the benefit of the doubt, and maintains a thrillingly aloof distance from Polly and the others (via a clever callback to The Space Museum, of all things) during the mind-swapping section. It’s here that Cole most overtly references the Doctor’s frailty and self-doubt: “We are (we will not waste a second of our life) still young, vital, but trapped inside this awful, ancient (frustration) corpse of a body.” There’s a lot of that throughout, with Ben referring to him as an “old boy”, the Doctor occasionally falling into people’s arms, “crouching arthritically” and even (a bit on the nose) searching for “words that were lost to him like an actor drying up on stage.” In the end when the crisis is averted he considers that he will “feel a new person soon.” (Please ignore the double entendre.) All of which gives the novel a tremendous sense of place in the lead up to The Tenth Planet.

Cole doesn’t sell the Doctor short, despite all his frailties; even his shortcomings feel intrinsically suited to the character, like when Ben observes him working on something “the way [his] dad used to try his luck fixing the family motor, when all else had failed, fiddling with bits of engine he didn’t understand, just in case one of them magically started the car.” The Doctor is nonetheless capable of being unfriendly, like his cutting Polly out of his mind, or making hard decisions, such as a grisly solution to their problems at the end. A cuddly Father Christmas figure he isn’t, or not entirely, which keeps him interesting.

Ben’s POV is achieved quite skilfully as well, with Polly noting that “Ben even thought in a cockney accent.” There are many little shards of his wit and dialect, with Ben observing that someone “had a face like the smell of gas,” that something exploded “like a firework going off in a jam jar,” and making references to “geezers”, “plates” and “jacksies” that we know from the perspective-swapping scenes don’t translate to others. Cole is keenly aware of Ben’s faults, with Polly calling out one of his comments as casually racist, and his strengths, with Ben using his Navy mindset to ingratiate himself with the soldiers and steer them right, such as snapping them out of a trance by telling them Haunt’s coming. He’s a rounded enough character that, even when he’s falling in with the blokes around him, he isn’t sure he should want to. Polly feels like the runner up here, often ending up in a quiet supportive role, but she still has moments to shine, such as a bit of ingenuity in leaving a trail (considering lipstick, then chalk, then making little cairns instead) and an ongoing battle of wills with Shade, whose deal isn’t entirely clear at first.

This is easily Stephen Cole’s strongest book yet, taking a trad setup and milking it for all the tension it’s got, incorporating a classic structure and then going completely off the wall with it. There’s a tight sense of description for the (sometimes abstract) horrors on display, such as “Their smiles were compassionate. Their fingers dripped blood” and “The frozen expressions on the bloodied Schirr faces seemed less representative now of terror and agony, more like those of creatures laughing hysterically, till it hurt, till the tears came rolling down.” It sounds like damning with faint praise, but he really has come a long way since Longest Day.

Probably the only wrinkle in the book, besides a serious case of “cut to someone else” syndrome (which is perhaps necessary for the story but gave me many opportunities to check my phone) is the debatable treatment of its aliens. There’s some typical militaristic small-mindedness about the Shirr and the Morphieans, with the latter being referred to as “spooks” and the former appearing as (among other interpretations) somewhat of a racist stereotype on the cover. The author/book’s proclivities are clear enough what with Polly calling out Ben’s blinkered views, and the Doctor doing the same thing with the marines (“‘They all look so similar.’ ‘How very enlightened,’ said the Doctor”), but bearing in mind the original title of And Then There Were None I did wonder about that choice. Of course I haven’t read And Then There Were None; presumably Cole and Tucker (not to mention Christie) were Doing A Thing here with regards to warped attitudes towards the unlike. There is, after all, textual colonialism and racism in the book. It just isn’t dealt with very much beyond the Doctor wryly commenting upon Earth’s grabby definition of “ownership”, a bit of SF blurring between human and Shirr, and the plot raising questions about whether the Shirr or the Morphiean peoples are really all on the same page as one another. The CYOA section, for example, isn’t used to challenge or deconstruct these views. (Unless I didn’t read those bits.) Perhaps it’s just one of those things that you can leave to percolate in the background of a murder mystery, but in Doctor Who tends to be underlined for emphasis as well.

It’s arguably a bit questionable and often very trad; it’s quietly creative, then very much so. On the whole it’s a winner.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #115 – The Crooked World by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#57

The Crooked World

By Steve Lyons

I got this one decades ago, free (if memory serves) with DWM. It’s been a funny little curio on my shelf ever since, this freebie that doesn’t look very much like a Doctor Who novel, and now I’ve actually gone and read the bugger. It’s a strange feeling; I think it was the last Doctor Who book I’d had since my youth but never read.

 

The Crooked World was Steve Lyons’s last Wilderness Years novel. (See also, Christopher Bulis’s Palace Of The Red Sun. We’ll be seeing more of these as the range ticks towards its end.) Thematically it’s a bit like Lyons’s first, as he once again embraces different media. Where Conundrum tackled alternative strands of fiction such as comic strips, The Crooked World focusses on cartoons: the TARDIS seemingly lands inside one, or at least a planet populated with noticeably off-brand recreations of Road Runner, Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races, Top Cat and Scooby Doo.

 

There are a few ways you can tackle this – including, it would only be fair to acknowledge, a comic strip rather than a novel. On that, I think Conundrum demonstrated well enough that Lyons can write a prose story about comic books, so he’s well within his capabilities doing something similar here with cartoons. Besides which, The Crooked World is more interested in the rules and restrictions of cartoons, things that you would want to talk about, than in their visual capabilities, so it works nicely as prose.

 

What starts as a jolly interlude for the Eighth Doctor and friends quickly turns into something nasty, as the Doctor is shot by a farmer and (contrary to local physics) actually gets quite badly injured. This starts a chain reaction of differences in cartoon logic which causes the blunderbuss-wielding pig, Streaky Bacon, to rethink his actions and consider his place in the world. There are other knock-on effects, some deliberate (like Anji telling Angel Falls, an ersatz Penelope Pitstop, to stop relying on men) and some indirect (like Fitz inspiring Jasper, aka Tom, to leave his kitchen and consider the wider world), and that’s the gist of the novel: cartoon characters wondering if that’s all there is to life.

It’s a bit like Pleasantville in other words, but then I’m not averse to seeing Doctor Who’s take on that, and anyway cartoons aren’t the same thing as 1950s TV shows. Lyons isn’t here to interrogate issues of race and sexuality as that film did, although both ideas are obliquely and humourously invoked here; the focus is on free will and what it means to break out of patterns. It’s quite a small-scale novel, despite concerning the fate of an entire world. There’s a feeling about a third of a way in that the plot isn’t going to escalate in the traditional way so much as continue to explore an idea to its natural conclusion.

I’m fine with that, quite honestly. There have been other books with dynamite ideas that didn’t have time to look in every nook and cranny. I tended to come away from those feeling a bit frustrated. Grimm Reality is one to which The Crooked World bears a more than passing resemblance; Lyons (via Anji) gently lampshades this a few times. Even apart from any concerns about repetition – and for all I know, Lyons was directly inspired by that earlier book – it’s worth pointing out the increased lean of the series towards overt magic and fantasy that is implied by seeing more and more novels like this. For my money, The Crooked World is a more balanced effort than Grimm Reality: the cartoon characters don’t just re-enact their little narratives wholesale, they think about them and sometimes change what they’re doing. The Doctor and co. feel less like passive observers this time – indeed, their arrival is the main driving force of the plot. I like idea-based stories that have a “just-right-sized” plot and this is one of those.

It’s a good showcase for the regulars, or at least an accurate one. I can’t be the only reader getting a little tired of the Doctor’s fragility post Adventuress Of Henrietta Street; his injury at the start of this absolutely fits the plot and moves it along, no complaints there, but it risks being yet another reminder of the poor wiffly Doctor with his one heart, a concept that Lawrence Miles sold as something more interesting than a difference in his physiognomy which subsequent writers have largely taken to mean “he runs out of breath now, the poor duck.” Never mind: once he’s back on his feet the Doctor is a joyous force, enthralled by the nonsense logic of the world around him as well as the challenge facing its people. Although he leaves the decision-making to them wherever possible he’s quite partisan here, insisting that to embrace free will and break out of their “cartoons” is the right thing to do. I don’t know if that was an attempt to underscore a more impulsive Doctor or if that was just the way Lyons felt he ought to lean, but it certainly creates sparks with Anji who argues – not unreasonably – that these people seem happy with their lot.

Lyons has a good grasp of Anji, someone who “couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything without tangible proof”; throwing her into a world of nonsense is a good challenge. Her feminist flag-waving with Angel is perhaps a little on the nose, but this is a cartoon, so fair enough. Her scenes with the Skeleton Crew (aka the Scooby Gang) are probably my favourites here, as she forces them to confront the patterns they’re stuck in and adapt how they do things, only to then understand that they’re pretty on the ball and can respond reasonably well to threats and mysteries by themselves, even incorporating what they've learned from her. Lyons prods at her uncertainty around going home, a theme the books have had-their-cake-and-eaten-it with so far, landing on it never seeming like “the right moment” to broach it with the Doctor. He also picks up on her withering relationship with Fitz, having her observe that cartoon characters have discovered the concept of sex and instantly know where that came from. She has a fairly accurate long-suffering opinion of the loveable schlub, such as when the local sheriff tells the Doctor: “‘You call this trouble, boy? Your skinny pal’s been kidnapped, that’s all. It’s not like he’s started to think or nothing serious.’ That was true enough, thought Anji.”

Fitz has long since achieved that Bernice Summerfield status of being hard to get wrong, and sure enough Lyons has a blast with him here, having him adorably care for the wounded Doctor, clumsily reveal the ins and outs of evil lairs to a cadre of supervillains, then make Herculean efforts to explain sex and love to Angel Falls. He wipes away a genuine tear of relief when he hears the words “Tell me about this Earth thing you call ‘sex’” in earnest. (“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for someone to say that. I mean, you really don’t know.”)

For me the most affecting parts of The Crooked World were the reactions of its cartoon characters to their changing landscape. Jasper, a mute cat, tugs the heartstrings in a surprisingly sophisticated fashion as he lopes around after Fitz, who fails to notice him, then gets trapped back in his routine only to escalate it horribly; Streaky, the roundabout sort of Porky Pig/Elmer Fudd creation, seems to be having an existential crisis throughout the book which pays off nicely at the end; Mr Weasley, Angel’s guardian/masked nemesis, starts a schism among the bad guys that leads to an evil witch working on medicines for the injured instead. It could be argued that the cartoons of The Crooked World lack originality or very much in the way of diversity – they’re all knock-offs and their individual storylines would not, with respect to Lyons, impress Chuck Jones very much. But first of all I’d say the plot has a baked-in reason for that when it’s revealed where all this cartoon stuff has come from*, and second we’re not really here to be dazzled by the brilliance of these cartoons. Breaking out of them is the point.**

*This doesn’t particularly explain Anime City, which is mentioned as another part of the world outside of the more Looney Tunes “Zanytown” we find ourselves in for the duration. Maybe Lyons came up with the explanation after he wrote that bit.

**It’s worth pointing out that for some reason Fitz and Anji never say “This is a bit like Tom & Jerry” or “Isn’t that Scooby Doo but with different character names”, and that feels a bit false. They would know these things. But I suspect it was a copyright thing. Perhaps I’m also just used to characters going “Look at that IP!” in the current landscape, which wasn’t as expected or legally possible in 2002.

The Crooked World doesn’t break a sweat explaining itself. That seems to be par for the course with the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this time, magic and fantasy being more normal all of a sudden. Anji pokes the bear a few times and gets a sort of science-y explanation from the Doctor: “In some places, in some entire universes, [reality is] stretched too thinly and the fabric becomes weak.” That’s a bit of a sop in-text and on the meta level as well, like when vampires in New Who turn out to be (gasp!) aliens that act just like vampires. As with his earlier book Salvation and, yeah okay let’s mention it again, Conundrum, the fun of it is in exploring the strange idea he’s come up with, which is: what if Doctor Who landed in a cartoon. It’s a “just go with it” novel that makes a good fist of what it’s trying to achieve, even if the lack of a particularly kinetic plot keeps it from being what I’d call a page-turner. There are plenty of jokes to tide you along, like the observation that an increase in thinking has led to a shortage of lightbulbs. It’s a sweet, creative effort that acts as a fitting send-off for one of the Wilderness Era’s more colourful writers.

7/10