Doctor Who: The BBC Books #112 – Amorality Tale by David Bishop

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#52

Amorality Tale

By David Bishop

Doctor Who often visits historical periods for its stories. This helps to provide a shorthand for the viewer/reader — see The Aztecs or The Roundheads, interesting tales hung on a familiar framework. Amorality Tale on the other hand is a period or event that you might not know about, and yet also one that’s potentially still in living memory: in 1952, somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people died in the London smog.

Your mileage may vary but — dreadful as that sounds — to me it doesn’t immediately suggest a story about why these things happen. It’s surely more in the line of how our characters will react to an unavoidable tragedy, like The Fires Of Pompeii. David Bishop’s book isn’t really like that, however: although Sarah Jane does at points want the (Third) Doctor to do something about all those deaths, their hearts are really only in it as far as stopping the catastrophe from spreading further afield — and initially not even that, as she’s just trying to get him out of a funk by investigating the “mystery” of the fog instead. (I did sort of wonder what this investigative journalist was expecting to happen in London at a heavily polluted time in its history.)

Wouldn’t you know it, this is in fact Doctor Who and it turns out the historical event has something to do with aliens. (Lucky Sarah.) Your mileage may vary again on whether it is actually the teensiest bit crass to associate real deaths with a sci-fi doodad. As if aware of this, the book has it both ways: the bad guy aliens state that the fog is just “the dominant native species’ own effluvia,” while later the Doctor says “the smog, it’s not natural. The weather is being controlled by the Xhinn.” (Both statements can be true, but without that second qualifier it might at least be ambiguous.) In any case, there really isn’t much for Sarah or the Doctor to investigate until the nastiness kicks off in earnest a good ways in.

Things at least get off to an interesting start with the Doctor and Sarah already installed in the East End when we arrive. I love stories that begin in media res: it’s intriguing to find Sarah holding her own as a barmaid in a rough pub and the Doctor running a watch-mender’s shop. What a pity then that we immediately undercut this by going right back to the scene where they decided to come here. You don’t need both; you could just as easily tease out the information later on in London.

Ah well: Amorality Tale has other things on its mind, namely gang warfare. Underworld bigshot Tommy Ramsey has just got out of prison and he’s putting his manor in order, little realising that a rebellion is brewing in the ranks. Meanwhile a bunch of youths led by the bloodthirsty Callum is looking to muscle in on Ramsey’s turf.

Amorality Tale is, for much of its initial 100 pages, all gangsters and geezers roughing each other up. There’s a good sense of Bishop doing his research here, such as in the central, easy to picture street filled with housewives all cleaning their doorsteps. Bishop gives suitably distinct voices to his various crooks and lowlifes — which helps where at least two of them are called Billy. The book overall has a simple, no muss no fuss writing style that clings comfortably to the setting and characters, often giving way to little nuggets of wit: “Prison seemed to agree with Tommy Ramsey. But then most things did, if they knew what was good for them.” / “The unbelievable high of winning proved far too addictive for Bob Valentine. One way or another, he’d been going to the dogs ever since.” I can see Terrance Dicks enjoying this writing style: it’s uncomplicated and it pushes things along at a lick. (Fair’s fair, there’s also a clever structure at work: Bishop uses days instead of chapters, which apportions the action into logical yet somewhat unusual intervals while also keeping clear the importance of this brief timespan.)

For a while you’d be forgiven for losing track of any alien threat whatsoever, and we’ll get to that, but it’s worth saying that the “gang stuff” in Amorality Tale makes for compelling enough reading in the meantime. The downside to this is the way Bishop presents his underworld. I’m not naive enough to think that a character’s actions are automatically an endorsement, and sure enough Tommy does some awful things here, like executing an unconscious enemy and being convicted (only on a technicality) for having his girlfriend murdered. But Amorality Tale still overall makes him out as a force for good in the neighbourhood, being the de facto law enforcement once the police fall victim to the alien menace; at one point he spares people’s lives because he reckons they’ve been brainwashed. Tommy, like many famous and/or fictional gangsters, also loves his dear old (slightly awful in her own way) mum.

Crucially he spends a good chunk of the book prodding a would-be romance with Sarah, whose bristly female empowerment excites him. The attraction flutters in both directions, with Sarah at one point considering what they might have been together in another life. (He considers the same.) The writer can turn her around later on and have her call him a small, petty murderer — which she does — but all those moments of domestic closeness have added up by then. See also Brick, aka Alan, Ramsey’s towering enforcer who is also a gentle giant that loves pigeons and hates hitting people. You’d be a bit weird if you came away from the book entirely hating these characters — indeed, Bishop might as well bash you into submission with an actual brick during those pigeon scenes. If Sarah likes somebody, we do too, however bonkers that makes her seem.

And look, it’s okay for characters to have facets or even be quite nice, actually, despite also being appalling. Bunker Soldiers is a fine example of just such a tightrope walk. Amorality Tale, however, is a bit too cute with its cheeky chappies, some of whom seem moments away from departing for Sherwood Forest. Sarah, it must be said, is seeing them on a good day: all their violence is directed at rival gangs, murderous policemen and zombies, with not an innocent bystander in sight. (Well, none that die of criminal violence during the events of the book.) She could still seem a bit less surprised when she weighs it all up and realises that crime does not, in fact, pay.

That’s enough about BBC Books’s answer to Peaky Blinders: show me the aliens! And Amorality Tale does that rather suddenly on page 100, revealing that a gang leader is actually a Xhinn, aka a floating ethereal angel of death. (Bishop forgive me, but I imagined Mr Burns when he’d had too much medication and kept threatening to bring you love.) The book wobbles quite a bit here, having made it significantly far without digging any of the necessary trenches for extra terrestrial bad guys: there’s just a hint of them in the prologue and then later on West Side Story suddenly turns into The War Of The Worlds.

I wish I could say the Xhinn were worth the wait. The Doctor characterises them as “the most petty, vindictive creatures” and he’s not wrong: these awful fellows control and then work people to death, puppeteer them as zombie enforcers, conduct cruel and distinctly Nazi-ish death experiments on them and then to top it off, feed them into horrific (yet nonetheless Penelope Pitstop-esque) conveyer-belts of death. There’s really no coming back from such one note maniacal menaces as these — but Bishop tries, giving the Doctor (and at one point, awkwardly, the prose) some ominous pronouncements about what a famed menace they are throughout the galaxy. The Doctor’s drop-of-a-hat info dumping about the Xhinn is the first time I’ve felt okay about the Eighth Doctor losing his memory; imagine not having to lean on the protagonist to say “Oh, those guys? Hang on, I’ve got it written down somewhere.”

There are a few little wrinkles about them that could be interesting, such as there being three Xhinn that speak almost as one, their method of controlling people without their knowing it, and the way they can create spies in human form. That first one is a damp squib since they don’t say very much of value; the other two really ought to be something, except the spy thing is extremely easy to guess, and the duplicate thing invariably ends in the spy going native, forgetting their roots and then — as if catching an interesting idea on its way out of the window — getting quickly bumped off anyway. The Xhinn’s main contribution, apart from the smog, is an army of brainwashed and/or zombie policemen at the end, but since that’s largely a way into lots and lots of scenes of criminals hacking, slashing and blasting them down, there’s still not a lot to write home about.

This leads to one of Amorality Tale’s little peccadillos: violence. It’s hardly the first BBC Book or Doctor Who novel in general to get nasty, and indeed you should consider yourself forewarned by Bishop’s previous co-written (wink) Who Killed Kennedy, which minced various kindly UNIT chumps and made Dodo extinct. Amorality Tale isn’t entirely gratuitous, but it seems to prioritise actual death rather than triumphs over adversity. There are numerous characters who we follow, get invested in and then place in a cliffhanger-type situation only to — you guessed it — kill ’em anyway. One particularly distraught character decides bluntly “to kill himself when this was over. It was the only way he could ever hope to block out the memories.” You might think that was the beginning of some sort of epiphany but no, eight pages later, off he goes. This kind of all-encompassing horror is perhaps apropos for a book that concerns around 8,000 deaths from the outset, but there comes a point where our noses are simply being rubbed in it. And what’s the takeaway? Violence and death are violent and deadly?

I’m probably missing the wood for the trees here: it’s amoral, after all. But I don’t think it really is on a character level, what with those overall quite personable criminals who have, when all’s said and done, a code of sorts. If the only amoral thing here is the aliens, that doesn’t tell us anything much deeper or more meaningful than, avoid these aliens.

It’s a good thing Amorality Tale is so readable — and it really is. Granted, it’s easy to pick on simpler writing styles like this one, and I’ll own up here and say that there are a few clunkers and redundancies in Amorality Tale. (“The heavy key rattled as it turned, opening the lock on the small door.” / “‘Where’s it coming from?’ Tommy asked. The smog deadened sound, making it difficult to determine from which direction it was emanating.”) I don’t love some of those all-too-neat criminal characterisations, and I wasn’t bowled over by the Doctor and Sarah — the latter runs out of journalistic steam almost immediately, the former tinkers on the sidelines for most of the book until he effortlessly conjures a kill-o-majig for the finale, pausing only to impart useful lore. It’s a violent book without much to say about mass death, but it occasionally finds space to make its impact felt (even, incredibly, letting a few of them survive) and it builds a real sense of escalating disaster as it chunters along. Like some of Uncle Terry’s questionable novel assignments, you can let yourself ease into this one and enjoy the somewhat corny characters and the helpfully A-to-B action that comes in handy chunks. If nothing else, there’s plenty of atmosphere. Smog will do that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #74 – Who Killed Kennedy by James Stevens and David Bishop

NB: Since its original release, Who Killed Kennedy has been somewhat rewritten by David Bishop as he wasn’t happy with the ending.  It’s kindly available for free here, along with generous author’s notes.  I got the original book before I knew all that, however, so I might as well read that first.  I’ll give the new version a look at some point.

Who Killed Kennedy

By James Stevens and David Bishop

I suspect most Doctor Who fans have a love-hate thing with continuity.  It’s nice to be reminded of something from long ago, and done well it can put the present into context.  (There’s a lot to be said for emotional continuity in particular, since life revolves around that.)  But you can have too much of a nice thing, and this one quickly becomes just a meaningless pat on the back.  Hey look, it’s that thing from Doctor Who!  Both you and I recognise it!  Aren’t we experts!  Well, sure, but you’re here to make something new, not win a quiz.  That’s the feeling I often get from reference-fests, the absolute bottom rung of fiction based on a famous property.

Who Killed Kennedy is full of continuity.  It’s practically made of it.  We’re talking an absolutely obsessed, all-aboard-the-continuity-train trek through Doctor Who history: the more of it you recognise, the better.  But this is no lazy remembrance.  20 years before Love And Monsters, David Bishop (and uh, James Stevens – wink) gave us a view from the trenches of aliens running amok on Earth.  As with that underrated episode, it’s a bloody good idea.

Doctor Who being the plot-driven monster-of-the-week show it is (or we can hope, was?), not a lot of effort was made to show real life and how it was affected by monsters and aliens.  The decision to maroon the Doctor on Earth necessitated all the threats hitting us at home, which made for some compelling scary stuff; Jon Pertwee famously thought that was how you made good Doctor Who, and many agreed.  The problem is that a bizarre number of invasions and disasters had to happen in quick succession.  Well, you’d notice, wouldn’t you?  You can’t write everything off as a gas leak or a mass hallucination.  London had already endured mass panic in The War Machines, The Web Of Fear and The Invasion before we even got here, but there was a degree of safety in zooming off to other times and places afterwards, and betting the audience wasn’t keeping score.  The Pertwee era changed that.

Who Killed Kennedy puts a journalist in that time – dated sensibly around when those episodes were transmitted, because who needs the UNIT Dating headache.  He gradually joins the dots between these monstrous threats, the shadowy UNIT organisation and a series of agents called the Doctor.  The book makes the quite valid point that while all this is (to us) clearly a struggle between good and evil, it would look like a terrifying mess to anyone else.  The political climate gets steadily and understandably worse, as the government is obviously failing to repel these seemingly random attacks and various efforts at world peace have gone awry.  (Because nothing says “high stakes” like “Generically-Named World Peace Conference.”)  UNIT are doing their bit, but in secret, and with no qualms about rebuffing any investigations into the truth.  Again this is for obvious reasons, but how would that look?  Probably less like Doctor Who and more like The X-Files.  James Stevens is understandably dubious about what’s really going on.

For all my complaints about continuity for the sake of it, there’s a thrill to recognising one disaster after another, and even more so when Bishop cleverly sneaks his character into the stories themselves: Stevens is the bloke on the phone in Spearhead From Space, and even has a bit part in The Mind Of Evil!  We get to revisit those events, not just by lingering on the consequences – such as the political fallout from the plague in Doctor Who And The Silurians – but by meeting the participants.  Stevens interviews some characters from Inferno, meets Liz Shaw after her time with the Doctor, and most pointedly gets to know Dodo, still suffering from her breakdown in The War Machines.  Who Killed Kennedy lingers on consequences in a way you just don’t expect in Doctor Who, which is a pretty unassailable excuse for reminding us about all these old episodes.

The picture it builds is the sort of thing you’d get on a conspiracy nut’s wall: random pictures and scraps of information, sprawled over a huge map and connected by string.  But it makes admirable sense.  You realise The War Machines and The Faceless Ones happened on the same day – so two Doctors were running about at the same time.  The Seventh Doctor’s ruckus in Remembrance Of The Daleks is what led to UNIT happening in the first place.  The leftover technology from The Invasion is what led to Britain making such waves in space in The Ambassadors Of Death.  The peace conference in The Day Of The Daleks was even more necessary after the disasters in The Mind Of Evil, and so on.  It’s compelling stuff, forcing a coincidental string of plots happening by necessity into a coherent shape.  It’s difficult not to feel for Stevens as he stays firmly on the side of UNIT-mandated ignorance.

Of course as impressive as it is, there are limits to what this story can achieve.  At best, Stevens will inevitably learn that UNIT meant well after all, and will probably end up keeping their secrets for them.  That happens – along with him encountering the Doctor, albeit mostly via the phone.  But more antagonism is needed, so we have C19: an even shadowier bunch who give UNIT a worse name, and make Stevens’ life a hell.  It’s difficult to be sure where one ends and the other begins, what with UNIT’s need for secrecy, and David Bishop plays on that uncertainty for much of the book.  (I must admit it’s a bit disappointing that we need to invent an even more sinister back-drop for UNIT who can then take the fall, when the impetus of the book is surely how UNIT and the Doctor looked to a real person at that time.  But as above, I can see why it was done.)

Stevens tells the whole thing in first person, “unashamedly” as per the preface.  It’s a satisfyingly immediate style you don’t see a lot of in Doctor Who fiction (and licensed fiction in general, I’ll bet), and it helps make the world feel more coherent and believable.  All the same, Stevens is not an especially likeable or compelling guy.  He gets married for a green card / to spite his girlfriend’s well-to-do father, cheerfully cheats on her, and then generally prefers his job to everything else.  His personal motto is “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, which gives some indication as to the level of wit in the prose.  Unashamedly nasty C19 thugs say things like “We’re going to have to take care of you – permanently”.  A supportive character lamely finishes their thought with: “Good luck, Mr Stevens.  You’re going to need it!”  Escaping from the very same corrupt institution he’s been trying to track down, The Glasshouse, Stevens returns with a host of TV cameras and is somehow surprised that the place is now completely empty – having apparently never seen a spy movie before.  And shortly before the love of his life is murdered, she poignantly tells him she has some important news, but she’ll tell him later; can it be any surprise at all that she’s a) pregnant and b) dead before she can tell him?  It’s a pulpy, noiry read with Stevens standing in for any number of down-on-their-luck, don’t-give-a-damn PIs with a crummy office, who ultimately you like (if at all) in spite of themselves.  There are few recurring characters and there isn’t much room for character development, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the book is a bit blunt in its approach to people.

As to the plot, because there must ultimately be one besides a long trip down Continuity Lane, of course it has something to do with the assassination of Kennedy.  The book opens with a highly evocative “What If?” about Kennedy having survived his day in Dallas, and the subsequent rise in world tensions leading to Armageddon.  Who Killed Kennedy eventually boils away to whether or not Stevens believes Kennedy should die to preserve history.  But I don’t think enough work goes into this portion of the story, and Bishop seemed to agree, as it’s the main reason for re-jigging it later.  Like the later Red Dwarf episode, Tikka To Ride, this story hinges on Kennedy’s death being a necessary part of human history, but the book spends so long (entertainingly) piecing together Doctor Who history that this is more or less presented as fact and left at that.  Stevens, of course, knows this stuff inside and out, and even writes a book on it during these events, but we are mostly left out of the loop.  It just seems conspicuous next to the rest of the story.  Case in point, before he goes on his fateful voyage Stevens is so run down that he is ready to take his own life.  Immediately after coming back, he goes right back to holding the revolver to his head.

Even worse is the Master’s plan to reverse all this, which is circuitous and vague even for him.  The Doctor speculates that it’s intended to disrupt his own personal history – since we all know Doctor Who began the day after Kennedy was shot.  But would that really affect Ian and Barbara’s decision to drop by Totters Lane, and the Doctor’s flight from Earth?  (Is it a meta reference to the assassination’s effect on TV scheduling at the time?)  What, otherwise, would the Master have to gain from this, unless he’s able to view another version of history and decided he likes that one better?  Isn’t the whole thing more like the Monk’s MO than his?  The enterprise ultimately plays out like an attempt to make James Stevens conflicted and miserable.  The Master, cheerfully monologuing from afar, hasn’t seemed this petty since he tried to disrupt the Magna Carta for teh lolz.  (This also doesn’t really tie up with the Master’s next TV episode, where the Doctor drops in on his supposed prison.  Yes, the Master has secretly been coming and going at his leisure, but the Doctor clearly doesn’t know that yet.  And his casual insistence over a phone-call that Stevens pop back in time and stop the Master – because for some reason he can’t? – is also weirdly incongruous.  “Cheers, James.  Also, can you get milk?  Sorry I can’t do it, only I’ve got a thing.”)

It still just about holds together, especially with the evocative revelation at the very end.  (Note that the title is a statement, not a question.)  But despite ongoing hints about C19, the alternate-future preface and Kennedy’s death affecting James’ entire life (occurring on his 18^th birthday), it still comes out of left-field.  Ditto, if I’m honest, the Dodo thing.  Who Killed Kennedy is so infamous for what happens to Dodo, as is The Man In The Velvet Mask, I knew about it decades before reading it and knowing nothing else about the book.  Oh, you thought Dodo getting a non-lethal space-STD was bad?  Well, we’re going for broke this time.  She gets murdered, incidentally while pregnant.  And that’s just the bit everybody remembers.  Following The War Machines, Dodo had an even bigger breakdown and wound up with massive memory loss – she doesn’t remember the Doctor and her travels seem like dreams.  She didn’t have anywhere to live and wound up in a cruel mental “hospital” run by the Master.  She was almost raped by an orderly, inadvertently killed him, then wound up destitute.  Her only ray of hope was a chance meeting with James Stevens, whom she feels she can help with information, but it’s unclear how much of that is the Master’s doolally plan.  Either way she gets the most ignominious death of a Doctor Who companion, with the possible exception of Bret Vyon, but even that gave future writers something to work with.

Hey, I get it.  Nobody liked Dodo.  The character as originally written gave us nothing to invest in, and demonstrably little for Jackie Lane to work with.  But it’s just plain poor taste to go after a character like that, especially in subsequent books.  Making life worse for someone you know the audience will side against is a much too easy goal, and it’s the sort of fannish impulse Who Killed Kennedy otherwise (arguably) rises above.  There’s also an uncomfortably sexist air about gleefully doing all this to a young woman.  Yes, it raises the stakes, but the book seems more lurid for going down that route.

So I don’t love all the choices it makes.  There are plenty of moments that work really well, like the gradual descent of a random UNIT officer into mental distress and insanity; another little real world consequence you wouldn’t consider when watching, say, Terror Of The Autons.  I’d say the subversive stuff that works about Who Killed Kennedy largely outweighs the nastily obvious talking point, and the somewhat tacked-on plot.  It’s a strange and interesting companion piece to Doctor Who’s time on Earth, and the sort of experiment licensed fiction could do with more of.

7/10