#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
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