Doctor Who: The BBC Books #105 – Mad Dogs And Englishmen by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#52

Mad Dogs And Englishmen

By Paul Magrs

If I had a nickel for every time BBC Books followed a Heavy And Important Lawrence Miles book with something frothy by Paul Magrs, I would have two nickels. And so on. But whereas The Blue Angel had the burden of sending a new TARDIS team on their maiden voyage – and more or less ducked it, but never mind – Mad Dogs And Englishmen finds literary Doctor Who in a more stable place. We already know these characters. Yes, very big things happened to them in the last book, but the Doctor, Fitz and Anji all seemed okay with that in the end, thus you can dive into Magrs’s latest without much concern for continuity. This is good news as he is, as always, in the mood for a lark.

 

Mad Dogs And Englishmen continues Magrs’s fascination with fantasy. His is a Doctor Who that incorporates ideas more fluidly: it’s altogether less bothered about the explanations or what’s going to end up on TARDIS Wiki, which fits nicely with the more magical bent of the series in early 2002. Nevertheless, we get a more controlled sort of chaos from Magrs than we did in The Blue Angel, or even Verdigris. Mad Dogs actually wraps up (most of) its loose ends, which is doubly satisfying where the book takes so many big, gleeful swings.

 

As the front cover makes very clear – possibly even when viewed from orbit – this one concerns poodles with hands. These are the denizens of dogworld, a mostly civilised place where humans are the pets, if seen at all. The bloody history of their royal family is having an impact on Earth – specifically on the literary endeavours of one Reg Tyler, whose book The True History Of Planets has suddenly shifted from a Lord Of The Rings-ian tome about fantasy archetypes to a revolutionary history of dogworld. The Doctor clocks this and sets off to investigate the resulting ripples in history, and finds a load more while he’s at it, including literary characters come to life, movie props seemingly self-animated and a strange woman with a time travelling bus. (Is that a spoiler? Could it possibly be a spoiler?)

 

Magrs’s fourth Who novel is at an unusual crossroads between being just exactly what you’d expect from him, and something completely barking. (Ahem.) The prose is deliciously silly at all times, refusing to defer to the kind of reverential seriousness that tends to be a fan’s initial understanding of the show. Describing Tyler, the famous writer: “He was, in short, a brilliant, inventive person, damaged by war and destined to write a biggie.” Describing his work: “Had someone tampered with the final result? Had someone been secretly buggering him about?” Describing some fancy dogs: “They were beribboned and titivated.” Describing said dogs again, but more from their point of view: “Enid was back then, carrying a tea tray. She had brought the dog a bone. She presented it to him as if he ought to be pleased. The chief archivist of the dogstation stared at the grisly remnant, appalled.” Envisaging dogworld: essentially Whitby, with more poodles. And here’s a climactic scene where a character faces certain death from a horde of movie props: “‘Oh,’ said Fuchas, Oscar nominee. ‘Shittitty doo dah.’”

 

Mad Dogs in short has that peculiar rhythm that marks out Magrs from other Who writers – many of whom, to be fair, also have their own strange rhythms – only for once it’s tied to a fairly tight plot as well. It’s even neatly structured, with the Doctor, Anji and Fitz each investigating a different timezone, each getting their own chapter until back around we go. I’ve had my ups and downs with his novels in the past (there is no accounting for taste after all) but I bounced through this one.

 

To describe it in detail would essentially mean listing the jokes. Personal highlights include a dog speaking at an inopportune moment (this one happens a few times and it still works) and Nöel Coward organising a human shield around a favourite lounge singer so they can evade assassination in a Las Vegas hotel. (I’m sure some readers made note of the bit where our heroes are all stripped naked and forced to wear dog leashes. No judgement, folks.) However, Mad Dogs also does a surprising amount of due diligence on the character front. Anji has a surprisingly fun time, while squeezing in her obligatory reminiscence about Dave and pondering her current existence in the TARDIS, coming off mostly favourable re the latter. (She calls it “home.”) Magrs/Anji then anticipate what would have been my complaint about the TARDIS somehow managing to land where it needs to, “when it was something [the Doctor] apparently thought important,” but not in the matter of taking her home. (Magrs defers the actual answer to this since Anji lets it lie. We’ll see how other books do. I thought in the interim that Anji not mentioning it showed growth.)

 

Fitz is a natural fit for Magrs’s camp humour – he’s the sort of character you want to throw into the thick of it, and sure enough he gets lumbered with Flossie, an adorable cook from a space hotel who immediately takes to time and space travel, and Brenda Soobie, a lounge singer with a few secrets. Fitz as usual gets into awful messes and just tries to cadge a few cigarettes while he’s at it; Magrs smartly observes that he seems to get the rough end of the deal every time, which perhaps explains why he’s rarely that bothered about any of it.

 

The Doctor is a bit more of an anomaly. Magrs tends to write the swoon-worthy McGann incarnation more unpredictably than other authors anyway. He has somewhat earthier moods in this one than you might expect, such as his sang-froid about potentially crushing an insect-sized man to death with an improper TARDIS landing, and his ease with his fists. Coward observes: “You’re using these strong-arm tactics rather a lot these days”, to which the Doctor says “Yes, I’m not sure what that’s about.” Given Magrs’s command of continuity when the occasion calls for it, I think this safely ties in with the Doctor’s post-amnesia woes, though not so much with the whole “one heart/man of Earth” thing from The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street. A conversation about belonging goes: “‘This isn’t your world.’ ‘No, you’re right. It isn’t’” – hardly the conclusion from the last book. (Although he then says that 20th century Earth is like his own “back yard”.) Hey, it’s a lot of balls to keep up in the air, okay?

 

Speaking of which: Mad Dogs, as aforementioned, does a good job with its plot threads, but a few seemingly still escape. It is just about clear how figures such as Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger can be walking about in 1942. (A certain someone has used their magic pinking shears to wreak havoc on the timelines/reality itself. Is said havoc reversed afterwards? Um.) It is less clear, to thick old me anyway, how the crisis with Tyler’s book was actually averted – although it’s clear enough why the movie ends up not happening. And it’s left seemingly to the will of the gods why a lot of movie props are suddenly marching about and menacing people. As I’m sure Dave Stone would appreciate, it’s pretty much just setup for a joke anyway.

 

I get the impression that Magrs wanted to leave a few things hanging; it would be a bore, perhaps, to explain absolutely everything. That’s fine as long as you’re having a good time – and Mad Dogs accomplishes this admirably, with jokes that run the gamut from silly to bawdy to deliberately and painfully obvious. It’s quite sweet in amongst all of that, too; another Magrs book that revels in its chosen style and identity, and for once I felt like I was on board. Admittedly now that it’s over I find that chunks of it are drifting away, but perhaps that’s to be expected after a meal that is – in the nicest sense, and like many good comic novels – all pudding and no dinner.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #67 – Verdigris by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#30

Verdigris

By Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs returns. Can a time-travelling double decker bus be far behind?

Verdigris continues along similar lines to The Scarlet Empress and The Blue Angel, picking up the thread of meta-textual silliness (not just limited to Doctor Who) and indulging in a more knowing sort of comedy than we’re used to seeing in these books. Magrs is clearly a confident and seasoned writer so, where Verdigris is daft as a brush — which would be pretty much all of it — there is always the sense of a deliberate intention at work.

All of that said, after three of his novels I’m wondering if I’m really a Magrs guy. I found Empress a delight for the most part, but the Arabian Nights/shaggy dog style isn’t my favourite. The Blue Angel was clearly a creative attempt at something, but the actual intention eluded me and in that context Magrs’s inimitable silliness just got on my nerves. Verdigris is at the same time a simpler affair than Angel and a more meta one than Empress. I think my enjoyment also fell somewhere between the two.

Iris Wildthyme is travelling with Tom, a young man from the year 2000, but he just wants to go home. Clinging to the idea of a Doctor/companion relationship Iris instead takes him to see the Doctor in 1973, with the intention of just spending a nice Christmas somewhere. (Naturally she gets the season wrong and it’s actually summer.) A relaxing trip to the Doctor’s cottage soon spirals into an adventure with strange telepathic children, conspiracies, UNIT in disarray, killer robotic sheep, rampaging fictional characters and objects brought to life.

There are a couple of big ideas squirrelled away in there. For starters, the Doctor has homes on Earth — plural! — thanks to “a rather good deal with the British government.” This makes a degree of sense what with him doing a job despite not needing any money, but obviously it’s not something that was ever evidenced on screen. Like the old joke about schoolteachers, I think we all just assumed that the Doctor lives at work. (If push comes to shove he can always sleep in the TARDIS.)

I can just about stretch to the Doctor having homes-away-from-home, including a caravan. (The Seventh Doctor had a House On Allen Road so it’s a bit late to quibble about that now.) I struggle though to believe he’d commission portraits of himself for decoration. I know he’s vain, but really? More significantly, when we find the Doctor all he wants is “to have dinner parties and enlightened conversations. [He’s] going to invite some very interesting people down to stay, and it’s all going to be remarkably civilised.” That kind of domesticity is very rare for him, although it’s at least framed as a way to avoid UNIT for a while. This serves a character point: the Doctor is trapped on Earth, but also (to an extent) trapped as their go-to guy for Earth’s defence. That must be a bit wearying after a while. (The thought however of the Doctor putting his feet up for a night in with some groovy laid-back types is still a stretch.)

Verdigris seems interested in the Third Doctor’s exile and what that means to him, so perhaps weird little swings like this are to be expected. He more than once laments being stuck on Earth, and naturally his eyes light up at the thought of Iris bringing a functioning TARDIS within reach. However that idea mostly seems to exist in Iris’s imagination, as outside of a slight mood shift early on he really makes no serious effort to high tail it away with the thing.

On a grander note, the entire plot eventually turns on the fact of his exile: a simple misunderstanding on an alien world has led a powerful being to create havoc specifically to encourage the Doctor to be free. It’s a nice idea but it’s a bit difficult to square it with the aforementioned groups of fictional characters — actually an alien race confusedly disguised as people in novels — even though the one idea is responsible for the other. They seem like a very Paul Magrs idea anyway, appealing to storytelling itself for inspiration, but there’s not a lot to them besides the amusing thrill of Miss Havisham making a mad dash through a fun fair. The idea soon retires to the background. The book at times feels like a box of chocolates: varied but all a bit too sweet and disposable.

Sometimes it seems like it’ll do something significant, like disbanding UNIT — sort of. The Brigadier, Benton and Liz Shaw are all out of their minds and running a supermarket instead of an army, while UNIT headquarters has been taken over by, among other things, robot sheep. And Mike Yates has been turned into a piece of paper! If you wade through all the whimsical bells and whistles there’s an interesting idea here about the Doctor and UNIT doing something different for a change — but sadly the UNIT bit of the equation doesn’t occur until very late in the book, and then it’s just for a cutaway gag. What a pity; I might have enjoyed digging into the gang’s ersatz existence.

The state of UNIT Headquarters, meanwhile, is cause for some trippy meta stuff where Jo is (unsuccessfully) convinced that her time here has been a fabrication, that all her colleagues are actors and the monsters are guys in costumes, drawing particular attention to the coloured lines around them in certain shots. All of which is quite jolly and fan-baiting, if rather unlikely to convince Jo or the reader. It’s at least a fun excuse to shift storytelling formats for a bit into annotations of security footage, with Iris’s diary also appearing throughout the book.

That’s the other big idea in Verdigris: Iris for all intents and purposes is the protagonist. We mostly view the Doctor and Jo as side characters; it’s Iris who brings us into the story, Tom who connects us to the weirdly powerful (and strangely attired) Children Of Destiny, and when the penny drops about what’s really going on and whose fault it all is, well… have a guess.

It’s quite a good story for Iris. (Likely the scraggly version we met in Empress, before she regenerated.) Her longing to have a lasting friendship with Tom is not so unlike her apparently one-way attraction to the Doctor; as well as being a source of bawdy fun there’s some real pathos in that, particularly when she pleads with him to recognise that they make a good team. There’s a surprising amount of Iris back story in this, explaining that she was of a lower class than the Doctor on Gallifrey and she rescued her TARDIS in a desert; it turns out her obsolescence to the Time Lords is less a collective memory gap than sheer social embarrassment. (Her very similar Five Doctors-esque adventure was apparently just a coincidence.)

The sheer focus on Iris in a story barely holding itself together logically does sometimes threaten to squeeze it out of Doctor Who altogether — but then there’ll be some incredibly nerdy reference to remind you of Magrs’s pedigree in that area, such as the string of continuity beats that makes Verdigris impossible to place. (It’s after The Sea Devils but before The Curse Of Peladon. Best of luck, list-makers.) There are meta references to the Green Cross Code (aka that advert with Jon Pertwee in it), The Avengers is canon in this universe, and there are even meta references to meta references when it comes to those faux-fictional characters, the point being that you shouldn’t show off like that. (At which point Verdigris threatens to create a paradox involving its head and its bottom.) It’s so busy being clever that little things like trees and unicorns coming to life feel like footnotes. Did I mention that Mike Yates is a piece of paper?

I very much got the impression that Verdigris wasn’t going for anything serious (I’m sure you’re dying to say, “What tipped you off?”) but there are still some moments that matter. The Doctor’s desperation to get away from Earth breaks through occasionally, and pityingly. Iris hints at his bleak retcon-future from Interference (about time someone did!) and she eventually takes pity and assures him that he will leave Earth eventually. Jo has her little reckoning with reality, although it doesn’t define anything about her that didn’t already seem solid. Tom has some pathos, feeling out of his element and hinting at a relationship with one of the Children Of Destiny, while also believing one of them might be his mother from an earlier period in her life. Neither idea comes to much though. (The Children Of Destiny are about three layers of icing too many for this story.) Otherwise when characters get killed, which happens quite a bit, it was a struggle to remember they’d been there.

Reading this I was occasionally reminded with a bump that Doctor Who is best aimed at kids. I suspect the free flow of ideas in Verdigris works better for them. But the novel also seems aware of the more, shall we say, particular kind of Who fan, not just with those cheeky continuity misdirects but in this oblique comment about time travel: “I don’t think human beings were meant to travel in time. We care too much about the order of things. About being sure of what has really happened and what hasn’t. We get insecure if someone shows us other alternatives.” I mean, now that you mention it…

Like The Blue Angel, Verdigris seems apart from reality, or even just reality as represented in Doctor Who books, and as with Angel it seems to have a more fluid footing than I’m personally used to in books, so I struggled to connect with any of it. Chunks of it are already making their excuses to leave my head early, like the alien delegates who for some reason have been duped into living inside a mountain in Wales, or the weird little Rumplestiltskin figure misleading Jo in UNIT HQ. As that time travel line suggests, some people like to get the measure of a thing, and I couldn’t quite do that with Verdigris, although I had a nice enough time leafing through whatever it was.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #54 – The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#27

The Blue Angel

By Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Huh.

It’s sort of quaint, really, remembering the way Interference made me feel the first time I read it a decade ago. Confused, miserable, the dreaded is-this-even-Doctor Who… but fast forward to now, and I see its value! Hooray! It was doing a thing and I mostly see what that thing was! It’s great when you can learn and grow as an audience and find a new appreciation for art and storytelling. Perhaps there’s hope for every unsatisfying book experience.

You can probably tell where this is going. Which, as we’ll learn, is an unusual phrase to hear in relation to The Blue Angel.

Much to my surprise, and I imagine the surprise of many contemporary readers, BBC Books immediately followed their guns-blazing weirdo of a two-part novel with something even more bizarre. Paul Magrs is back, with assistance from partner Jeremy Hoad, to deliver an adventure that uses much the same scattergun-of-imagination approach as The Scarlet Empress. Only more so. Much more. As in, hit the deck.

We’ve got the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion (hold that thought) in an adventure with some angry Star Trek types and some maybe-or-maybe-not malevolent people made of glass. We’ve got Iris Wildthyme, in her younger form from the end of Empress, in an escapade with a gaggle of older ladies and the currently inexplicable ersatz long lost son of one of them, escaping a shopping centre beset by giant owls. And we’ve got some sort of alternate world going on with another Doctor, Fitz, Compassion and Iris but not quite as we know them, with only the loosest connection to what’s happening in those other strands. These, by the way, include a travelling city made of glass, a universe set apart from our own, a realm that sits between the two, corridors of possibility (or maybe they’re just corridors), various alien races of varying animosity and a megalomaniac who looks like a green elephant with talons and magic powers. You’ve got, in short, lots to be getting on with. A pretty stocked shopping basket for lucky old you.

One of the things I struggled with on my most recent read of The Scarlet Empress (so much for learning and growing as you get older, huh) was its profusion of ideas with not exactly a heck of a lot of connective tissue. The Scarlet Empress, though, was a story about storytelling. I don’t love the lingering impression I got (however projected and erroneous it might be) that all of its ideas are automatically good ones and they will go together as long as you make the point that stories are sometimes messy creatures, but it at least felt like that point was being made. And to be honest, you could and perhaps should enjoy The Scarlet Empress as an adventure apart from any (I would argue rather on-the-nose in this case) meta writing commentary, provided you can (wince) switch off a few pernickety faculties and just let a story be for 280 pages, in whichever direction takes its fancy. I know all of that, but for whatever reason I struggled to get past it as an almost-40-year-old reader in a way that I just didn’t at around 20. There’s something to be said for being a young reader, clearly. I’ll probably read it again some day and I sincerely hope it’ll flip back the other way. I’d love to love it again. The Blue Angel, though, will be a tough one to pick up a second time.

I’ve read, or listened to a good chunk of work by Paul Magrs; enough to not take this book lightly. Okay, perhaps “lightly” is the wrong word — if anything his books are going for “lightly” with gusto, like frilly pink missiles — but what I mean is, I don’t assume there’s no thought behind it. He’s obviously a writer of skill. Even just looking at Empress, his prose had a deliberateness rarely found in the humble annals of Doctor Who fiction. It’s clear you’re in practiced hands; if you don’t get it, well that’s unfortunate, but it seems a safe bet that there is an “it” that you might “get”.

Well, I got nothin’ this time. The Blue Angel starts with an eerie sense of the uncanny with its surely-that-can’t-be-right alternate TARDIS team living in domestic normalcy, but it’s weird even to the point that I couldn’t tell who (out of the oddly phoney characters) was narrating at times. This is the first chapter. Then we’re off to visit a gaggle of ladies on a Christmas shopping trip, trying to ignore the (green) elephant in the room that is the miraculously returned son of Maddie, who is clearly not really her son Ian but is just as clearly intent on letting people think he is. This stuff is easier to get a grip on, at least.

Then we’re off to see the “proper” Doctor and co. in the midst of adventuring, but there’s a new elephant in the room in the form of a new companion — Compassion, one of the Remote from Interference, who we must assume at some point asked to join the Doctor and Fitz on their travels, or was asked to do so? That moment isn’t in Interference and it’s not here either. Should I miss it? Is something going on there? I know stuff is going on with Compassion, that much is made clear later on when she displays a weird aptitude for piloting TARDISes, but how much of what’s not here is important and how much is just because it was not of interest to Magrs and Hoad? I’m aware that I might just have New Series Brain when it comes to companion intros — Fitz also did the official “hey come and join us” scene when we weren’t looking — but I feel like even Classic Who bothered to at least state it.

There’s a sense of disorientation from the off, a sense that it’s not clear how things are connected (that’s hardly a crime) or how much we should invest in the characters we’re seeing (maybe a bit of a crime). No doubt it’s personal taste but starting the book with ersatz protagonists cut me adrift straight away: now I’m thinking, how many fakes are floating about? Since we’ve skipped what would obviously be a critical moment for any Doctor Who companion, can any of this be trusted? Are legs being pulled in all directions? That stuff with the owls is a bit silly isn’t it — but is it fun silly or “I’m Doing A Thing” silly? I know on some level this is down to me as a reader, but I was sat there asking these rather dull questions instead of simply enjoying myself. I never rowed back to the centre of the book after that uncanny opening; it resisted all attempts to get into it, not least because it was always hot-footing it over to another story strand.

That’s not to say The Blue Angel isn’t fun. Oh, it’s got whimsy and frippery for days! What else do you expect with the involvement of Iris Wildthyme, with her funny bus and her crazy outfits? That evil elephant is funny even just to look at. (Well, to imagine at least.) A carful of mildly acerbic older women is sure to be a source of mirth; there’s plenty of inherent whimsy in being on the run from massive owls, and then escaping in a double decker time-and-space bus. And did I mention the Star Trek thing? There’s a spaceship full of awful simplistic people (the captain is called “Blandish”) who check how much every action is going to cost them and otherwise shoot first and ask questions later, then barely progress as three-dimensional characters. It’s satire, Jim, but not etc.

I’m sorry. It’s difficult not to sound like a grumpy old sod when you’ve struggled with a book this badly, but struggle I did, and all of that Magrs (and apparently, Hoad) whimsy just didn’t wash with me this time. I fundamentally didn’t connect with the story (really, stories) unfolding all over the place here, which eventually started to pile up next to each other with various parties encountering various alien species who have hang-on-what names like Sahmbekarts and Steigertrude, all using various space-time conveyances to get from one to the other. Following it from page to page was something of a headache, and cheerily lampshading that with an “I don’t understand any of what’s going on” or an “everything has been brought here from somewhere, from some time. But it’s all without rhyme or reason” or a “call me prissy, pedantic if you like, but I do like to know where I am” or a “my concentration has been all over the place” or a yes-we-are-doing-this-again “learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can’t contradict each other because, in the end, they’re all made up” does not actually help. A story that’s hard to follow and harder to care about on purpose risks being just as troubled as one that did it by accident.

The Blue Angel obviously is rewarding for a lot of people. I know I’m in the minority here — hell, I’d politely concede that I’m flat out wrong if you told me so — because I’ve seen the positive reviews. Even they seem more or less to agree though that the book doesn’t worry itself about an ending or tying anything up or making much sense in the first place, which frankly makes me wonder what the cheat code is for enjoying this thing because good grief all of that sounds iffy to me. I know it’s different strokes; clearly I’m someone who needs to feel a certain degree of understanding or I just feel as though I’ve wasted my time. Clearly I can’t benefit that much doubt. That doesn’t make it invalid to write a weird story, but it does freeze me out somewhat.

Okay, think positive. Praise has been levelled at Compassion in this. I’m so weirded out by the lack of a proper segway into full time adventuring that I don’t know what to make of her, though. (Or of BBC Books taking this particular swing — although to be clear, I am pro taking-swings.) She’s presented as a cold fish who fails to endear herself to new people (“And who did you say you were, dear? Contrition or something, wasn’t it?”) or people she already knows (“You could never have a really good argument with Compassion. You couldn’t wind her up”). Of course it’s early days but she’s not particularly impressive at the companion lark either (“‘[Compassion’s] a good person to have around in an emergency.’ Actually, [Iris] was thinking the exact opposite”), even getting lightly character-assassinated in the third person prose (“She was one of the least companionable of [the Doctor’s] many assistants”). We are presumably meant to get something out of her involvement here, but it’s hard to see what. She’s fully rebuked by the Doctor at one point — a moment I’ve seen held in good regard, but which flopped for me as a character beat, partly because I can’t quite picture the Eighth Doctor saying “You, madam, are stepping out of line” (not his only weirdly anachronistic line, see also “villainous scum”) but mostly because I don’t know this person and I don’t know that the Doctor knows this person and if she’s such an arse, well, why did you bring her along, then?

Fitz keeps his Interference continuity in check — both he and the Doctor highlight the rather odd rebirth he’s had recently — whilst also getting back to some good old fashioned horniness, as he hangs around with an aesthetically pleasing Iris and briefly considers a) leaving the TARDIS for the big red bus and b) whether she’d shag him. There isn’t a great deal else for him to do with his plotline (Iris, owls, horses at one point) being one of many that seem to have gone into a blender, but I liked the brief recognition that he’d never got a chance to say goodbye to Sam. I can, like most reviewers, see why Iris won him over so fast.

It’s… a story for the Doctor. I would hesitate to say it’s a good one because I don’t think he really rings true a lot here, even when he’s the “real” one, flying off the handle so much more than usual, but there’s clearly a lot of significance to him as a character throughout these events. Look at all that alt-universe stuff, with its suggestive oddities and its other Doctors squirrelled away in minor roles; the implicit importance of all this to him and Iris. Again though, we’re back to that sense of significance where I wish I could find the actual significance. At least the writers meant to do that?

The Doctor’s (spoiler) failure to make events turn out any better because that’s how Iris wants to do things is a serious fork in the road between them, and surely a statement about his interaction with the universe around him and how much he can really achieve there. Things are being said, definitely, I can see that — but when the events themselves are such a quasi-fantastical mishmash (I would summarise further but I really can’t be bothered) and the villain is such an overall silly goose, it feels a bit like firing a blank to posit them as relevant to an overall arc, especially when we run away from it all as fast as we do here. The crisis of another universe impinging on, and going to war with ours is huge. It should feel momentous. It doesn’t, with this kind of crazy pace and this much of a frivolous tone. I felt told about the Enclave (and much more so, the Obverse) more than I ever felt that I truly saw or understood it. When it all concludes, did those events suddenly end like that because something-something-the-Doctor or is that just the kind of adventure we were having this week? I bet I know what the answer is, but I don’t quite believe it. Even the gang of older ladies — surely the earthy heart of this novel — get bundled out of the story in a) a fantastical payoff for two of them that doesn’t stop to examine how they feel about it and b) y’know what I can’t remember where the other one went. The whole thing about the son didn’t seem to add up to much either.

Attaching a lot of its significance to Iris feels at least a bit overblown, even if the version of Iris in most of The Blue Angel is a much more competent one than we met the first time. She knows more than we do — must be nice. There’s something of an explanation for her and her weird relation to the Doctor’s history, but it’s moved on from just as quick as the main action. I don’t think I’m as invested in Iris generally as a lot of readers; her brand of randy nonsense ought to have been a tonic for all the confusion I felt reading this, but here it just added irritation to obscurity. I’m sorry, Iris. Maybe next time.

I made a lot of notes on this one, because there’s loads of stuff to pick up on — nudge-nudge plot arc stuff about the TARDIS, picking up the change to Planet Of The Spiders from Interference, fun little references to things like Looms and in one paragraph “new adventures” and a “virgin”; there’s plenty of imagery, some of it quite striking, like the weirdly Dalek-ish glass people and their whole society, plus all that suggestive alt-universe weirdness. And if you haven’t inadvertently made yourself cross and got a headache — ahem — there’s the sense of fun that always comes with Paul Magrs.

I just wish any of it helped. Sorry, Paul. Don’t mind me, people who love this one regardless. Despite everything I found The Blue Angel as impenetrable and insufferable as the bad old days of Virgin first-time novels, and the almost certain knowledge that I’m missing something thought-provoking here didn’t help in the slightest.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #30 – The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#15
The Scarlet Empress
By Paul Magrs

Magrs attacks! After popping up in the first Short Trips collection, Paul Magrs — already a seasoned author — makes a splashier landing in The Scarlet Empress. It’s his first Doctor Who book of many.

You know his style when you see it. Imagination, colour, sheer abandon and a good degree of camp are never far away. He also has a fondness for shaggy dog stories, evidenced in the later audio series Hornets’ Nest (where the Fourth Doctor tells Mike Yates one yarn after another), but also back here in The Scarlet Empress, which owes some of its inspiration to Arabian Nights.

The Doctor and Sam are already running for their lives on the eccentric planet Hyspero when they encounter rambunctious lady Time Lord Iris Wildthyme; she’s on a quest which scoops them up as well. They must find and reunite the four members of a mercenary team and bring them to the Empress of the title. And… that’s sort of it for the overall plot, though there’s plenty of other stuff happening along the way.

You can tell Magrs is excited to explore every avenue — he said on Pieces Of Eighth that he put everything in here in case this proved to be his only go at it — from the fluid way The Scarlet Empress moves from one set piece to another. There’s a bus crash that leads to an encounter with a djinn; there’s a buttoned-up town that descends into madness every so often, like in Return Of The Archons or The Purge; there’s a society of shaved bears that all work for a blind bearded lady, above whom a society of birds live and obsess over stories; there’s a giant spider who guards an ancient passage and is crippled by loneliness; and there’s a battle on a pirate ship that ends only when a giant fish swallows some characters whole, leaving them marooned Jonah-style in its stomach.

The storytelling itself is rather fluid, showing us home video footage of characters larking about out of sequence, then slipping between narrators — occasionally working together to assemble the same story. Even on a prose level The Scarlet Empress barely contains its excitement, sometimes having character B react to a line from character A in a paragraph containing more “A” dialogue, so it reads momentarily like character A reacting to themselves. At every juncture the thing is bursting, perhaps even stumbling to express ideas.

All of this, of course, in a story featuring Iris Wildthyme: galactic adventurer and very probably world-class liar. Introduced in his Short Trip Old Flames (but actually before that as a non-Time Lord in one of his early novels), Iris is a cheery, working class Gallifreyan ragamuffin who chronicles her adventures — only most of those appear to be find-and-replace versions of the Doctor’s travels. This infuriates the Doctor no end, and the explanation seems to wobble somewhere between Iris being his unofficial biographer (since he never writes things down and, for the purposes of this book anyway, he tends to forget them) and those events maybe having been Iris all along, somehow. I’m guessing it would spoil things to be definitive about this. For good measure, the Doctor also gets hold of an ancient book called the Aja’ib which contains excerpts from his life, presumably with the names changed, and he never seems to notice. (I wondered if Magrs was Doing A Thing here and the book was leeching away his experiences, but as far as I can tell, no. Weird coincidence or all part of a rich themed tapestry? Probably the latter.)

Iris is surely the highlight of the book, evidenced by her continued existence in Doctor Who. (Some of it unofficial. There is no way that River Song doesn’t owe some of her boisterous, Doctor-infatuated history to the mad lady with the double decker bus.) Iris, and the proximity to her necessary in a quest story mostly taking place in her TARDIS/bus, provides an amusing flip side to the Doctor. Her attitude is different; she seems more down to Earth, which is perhaps why she seems less reliant on companions. She’s a love her or hate her sort of a character. I bought into the novel’s eventual investment in her safety above everything else.

The Doctor becomes more relatable and ordinary in her presence, even by simple virtue of being in a domestic setting, making breakfast and cups of tea for everybody, and occasionally driving the bus. He seems at once more irritable and more comfortable in his own skin than usual in The Scarlet Empress. He even takes over narrator duties several times, in a way that seems pointedly less momentous than when he did it in Eye Of Heaven. (Again with that narrative fluidity: narrators simply come and go here. If you ask why or to whom they’re even narrating, you are probably considered a party pooper.) He is given frequent cause to marvel at his surroundings in this, and just as frequently share moments of heroism with his colleagues on the quest, seeming like a more ordinary (but no less remarkable) character, only — in my opinion — coming unstuck from his character in a moment where he rambles on about how it’s his job is to avoid “tidy plots” and stay in more loosey-goosey genres, which feels more like the author on a meta soapbox.

It feels de rigueur to check in on Sam, so then: she’s good in this too, sharing in the Doctor’s wonderment while also making it clear inwardly where she stands with her travelling companion these days. (Caring about, not fancying; she sees herself as “his only link with the world of common sense.”) The rigours of the plot occasionally leave us scrambling to spin all the plates, with Sam and grouchy alligator man Gila over here, the Doctor and Iris over there, and moments of high drama (such as Sam thinking the Doctor and Iris are dead, eaten by the giant fish mentioned earlier) don’t really land. There are plenty of big moments that do that, such as the fate of the Duchess (last seen “heading for home” — is she dead?) and the confrontation with the, oh right, Scarlet Empress, which seems over in a ludicrous flash after all the build up. (I never quite shook the absurdity that the Empress is expending effort to capture Iris and friends even though they are expressly on their way to meet her.) But anyway, Sam acquits herself well, adding another layer of context to the absurd meta textual games of the Doctor and Iris.

And oh, what games. If you like references to things then you’ll be overjoyed with The Scarlet Empress, which is just as engrossed in colourful yarns as it is in cheekily referencing the plot of The Time Monster, companions from comic strips, Lungbarrow, unseen events in earlier Eighth Doctor Adventures and the fact that the Death Zone on Gallifrey looks suspiciously like North Wales. It’s fannish on deeper levels too, offering its own twisted alternative to Paul Cornell’s “Doctor afterlife” where they all live on in the current Doctor’s head — in this one, they perhaps do the same thing as heads on spikes. See also the rather spirited idea that Sam might be able to communicate with the Doctor across time. Or not. (Did that really happen? Fluidity again/god knows.)

I first read The Scarlet Empress years ago, long before any interest in marathons, and I loved it. I’m clearly a bit more lukewarm on it now. Mind you, I think I’ve changed somewhat as a reader. I like a sprawling bit of adventure fun as much as the next guy — just look at Sky Pirates! — but it seems there’s a certain amount of story-point juggling that starts to lose me, and Empress exceeded it, leaving me drifting in and out of the tale. It’s still a huge, colourful, joyful jaunt, and Magrs is still undoubtedly a welcome addition to the ranks. I suspect I’m just keener nowadays on stories themselves rather than the loosey goosey world of storytelling they inhabit.

7/10

The Bookcase Of Fear #2: Paul Magrs' Never The Bride

Never The Bride
By Paul Magrs

I have a fraught relationship with this book.  I nearly read it half a dozen years ago, but one glance at the blurb made me put it down.  This is not because it sounded bad.

Quite the opposite.

Throughout college, I found that every time I had a good idea for a story, Terry Pratchett had managed to do it first.  I don't know what methods of eavesdroppng and time travel the man employs, but he is RELENTLESS and he is EVIL.  I ended up calling it Pratchett's Law: whatever great idea you've had, you're too late, Terry Pratchett did it.  And at one point, I had the idea to write a novel about a mysterious seaside town filled with monsters and oddity.  Then I saw Never The Bride by Paul Magrs, who wrote a really excellent Doctor Who book called The Scarlett Empress.  (It's really good, like a proper book, with characters and everything!)  One glance at the blurb reveals that Never The Bride is about a seaside town containing monsters and oddity.  Oh, joy!  And it's covered in critics' praise for how original it is.  Joy-filled happycakes!

Years later, I got the book for my birthday.  I guess it's time to set aside sulking and my own stupid laziness for not writing the damn story already, and see what Paul Magrs did with a similar concept.  And the answer is... something fun, but not quite world-beating.  (I'm not crazy about the title, either: friends and co-workers insisted that I must be reading "a girlie book".  Well, yes, there are women in it I suppose, but... shut up!  It's about monsters!  The Princess Bride must have enjoyed similar cultural misunderstandings.)

Never The Bride consists of five long-ish chapters about Brenda, a mysterious woman running a Bed & Breakfast, and her best friend Effie, a (very) amateur witch who runs the junk shop next door.  They live in Whitby, a sleepy seaside town (grrr!) where little happens.  Each chapter is more like a short story than a piece of the whole; I occasionally wondered if Magrs had begun by writing brief tales about Brenda and Effie, and had been convinced to call the end result a novel.  The constant re-setting of story is a little disquieting, as it means the book never builds very much momentum, and seems at all times to be in a hurry.  This isn't all bad – it ensures that Never The Bride races along, and it's always encouraging to find yourself devouring a book at speed.  But it does mean that when the book ends, it really just stops, after an alarmingly sudden ten-page finale that sets up future books in the series.

I wanted more.  More depth for Effie in particular, who loses out to our first person narrator and is, quite frankly, not likeable for the most part.  Brenda is at least a fantastic character: mysterous and remarkable, reassuringly imperfect, she retained my sympathy throughout.  She has a secret, of course, and I regrettably learned it before picking up the book.  If you're thinking of reading this, and you should, then I implore you – do not read Paul Magrs's Wikipedia page!  It contains a whacking great spoiler about Never The Bride and its sequels that I wish I'd missed.  Some things you're better off finding out at the right time.

It's hard to discuss the story events without giving away the book's surprises, so suffice to say, Never The Bride is a charming tribute to various oft-told stories, and it puts a new spin on all of them.  It's fun and it's worth reading, although it won't take very long and you might wonder if there could have been a longer, more substantially tied-together version at some stage.

Fortunately for me, it's not that close to what I had in mind, so now that I've faced my demons – which turned out to be Paul Magrs – I suppose I ought to get on with it...