#6
The Roundheads
By Mark Gatiss
Historicals are underrated.
A show about time travel automatically gains a license to tell any story it wants — you can go anywhere, have anything happen — yet Doctor Who seemed curiously averse to taking advantage of this. Travelling to the past? Well, you can expect some aliens that are up to no good. It’s practically mandatory, which after a while raises some questions about the Doctor’s choice of landing spots.
All in all the books haven’t been much better about this than the episodes off the telly box, with the vast majority still being of the “something weird from space” variety. (This really ought to be optional since something-weird-from-space appears in every episode, usually accompanied by his companions.) But at least we do get occasional prose adventures in history, such as Sanctuary, The Plotters and oh right, that was it. Well, here comes another one. It’s nice and early in the BBC Books run which hopefully signals that they won’t be quite so shy about the format.
The Roundheads is the third book by Mark Gatiss. I have had mixed feelings about his writing. Nightshade is a hugely evocative horror story but it gets a bit bogged down in executing its central gimmick. St. Anthony’s Fire is a game of two halves, with a rather poignant warzone in space contrasted against some wildly over the top religious satire. This time he’s exploring a known historical event with as much colour as he can muster, and honestly, he’s like a duck to water here.
London in late 1648 presents Gatiss with an opportunity to go on a prose rampage, and he does not disappoint, dirtying up this city in the grip of winter and filling it with memorable and often smelly people. The dialogue is that faux-historical kind that’s slightly gilded, almost corny, but in a way that recalls old adventure novels. People have names like Nathaniel Scrope, and say unironic things like “What next for this benighted land of ours?” So there’s plenty of character and atmosphere even before the TARDIS arrives to deposit its historically deficient quartet.
This feels like a nod to the series’s educational roots: despite their obvious advantages, the Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly seem equally uncertain about the order of events surrounding Oliver Cromwell and the death of Charles I, with Jamie coming in for an amusing amount of stick over it because this should all be recent history to him. (He didn’t spend much time in school.) This gives The Roundheads a decent excuse to help out any readers who don’t recall their school days. The Doctor even goes to retrieve a textbook that might help and, with a quasi-magical bit of help from the TARDIS, he finds Every Boy’s Book of the English Civil Wars: an amusingly simple tome that he’ll eventually regret picking out.
The travellers split up, mostly intent on having a nice time, and you can probably guess how that goes. There’s perhaps something to be said for how incredibly easy it is for Ben to get into hot water over one anachronistic clanger chuckled in a pub, but I think this speaks more to the Doctor (this one in particular) being a messy little imp than it does to any contrivance worth complaining about. Frankly, joining the TARDIS crew ought to come with mandatory lessons in what not to say abroad.
Ben and Polly are assumed to be anti-Royalist conspirators, and though they escape unscathed they are promptly involved in a secondary scathing incident that leaves Polly back with some suspicious characters she met at the inn, and Ben press ganged onto a boat headed for Amsterdam. (There are distant echoes of The Romans here, where Ian ended up rowing with slaves.)
Meanwhile the Doctor and Jamie fall afoul of the law. They soon find themselves in Cromwell’s orbit and the only way to avoid suspicion is to pretend that Jamie can see the future. This leads to some amusing shenanigans (including a very funny use of the old escape-only-to-be-recaptured trope) and some genuinely alarming peril, as that pesky textbook leads to difficult questions from Cromwell’s son Richard, who does not have a very bright future ahead. Forcing the Doctor to walk a tightrope around what he can and can’t reveal about the future feels like the natural place to go when a story involves historical events of this magnitude; this gets interestingly muddy when Gatiss’s plot works around, but not necessarily against the facts in order to keep things unexpected for the reader.
The Roundheads takes a measured view of the whole affair, initially painting the King as somewhat sympathetic and fixating rather strangely on Cromwell’s warts (in particular, a boil on his buttock) as if to clearly denote goodie and baddie at a visual level. Sympathy then leaks into Cromwell, such as a memory of being moved to tears at the sight of Charles reuniting with his children, just as we eventually realise the dangerous zeal of the monarch to continue his reign at any cost. There are prominent people on both sides of the conflict, filling out the various conspiracies swirling all around the Doctor and co. Allegiances distort interestingly as The Roundheads goes along, and in the name of Sydney Newman, you might even learn something along the way.
Of course, the best way into history is through people, and starting out with four protagonists gives us a fairly wide net. The Doctor and Jamie deal with history as facts and information, with the perils that follow all that. Jamie, it must be said, loses out a bit here; Gatiss captures Hines’s eye-rolling annoyance at some of the Doctor’s wheezes, and astutely observes that Jamie feels a step behind the other more experienced companions, at least for now, but there’s not a great deal for him to do once the Doctor sets up their carnival act. The Doctor, more the proverbial organ grinder than the monkey here, gets plenty of good moments. Perhaps the best is when he counsels Richard Cromwell with a wisdom that believably fits his age and experience.
Ben has perhaps the most exciting time of it on a literal pirate ship, swapping one for another once he reaches Amsterdam and making fast friends with Captain Sal Winter, a buxom old menace with more replacement parts than originals. Swashle is most definitely bucked by Ben in this: at one point he fights for his life on a storm-lashed boat, later he cannons over rooftops to seek revenge. It’s this sort of stuff that makes me really content to leave behind monsters and aliens for a bit because honestly, what more do you need?
The emotional heft of all this comes down to Polly, who befriends a young girl with allegiances on both sides, ends up inveigled in a plot to rescue the King and then arguably — a bit — maybe? — falls in love. It’s subtle bordering on transparent, but her attraction to one of the conspirators feels real enough, and is supported by a gentle flash-forward prologue that’s so light-footed I almost forgot about it. (I made myself re-read it afterwards.) Her last scenes in the book somewhat recall the Doctor’s heartbreak in The Aztecs, and nicely underscore the lack of a clear triumph in setting history right. All the same though, the high number of companions does make it difficult to give Polly and her feelings their due. I could imagine a version of this that leaned into it more and was better for it. (But maybe I’m just remembering Sanctuary.)
You can tell Gatiss is enjoying himself, or at least he seems to be (which is just as important) with descriptions like “a skinny, blond young man with the face of a disreputable cherub” (Ben) and “eyes that sparkled blue and green as the sea.” (The Doctor.) Much of The Roundheads reads like an actor’s prose, to be read and savoured over candlelight. It’s often funny, always in ways that ring true of the character, like Jamie’s thinning patience for the Doctor’s plots, or the Doctor’s ability to get hopelessly lost in his own TARDIS. The violence is grim, albeit not to a St. Anthony’s Fire extent; some of the pirate scraps push the, er, boat out as far as it’ll go whilst still being theoretically suitable for younger readers. Well, maybe the grubbier ones. (There are a couple of swear words in here as well but hey, it was a civil war, tensions were high.)
I didn’t make a lot of notes, which tends to be a sign that I’ve been entertainingly swept along, but then it leaves me rather out of puff on the descriptive front. I will say that The Roundheads could arguably be better, but what we’ve got here is still the strongest Mark Gatiss book so far, and comfortably the best Second Doctor novel. What with me always moaning that I don’t know what a good Missing Adventure or Past Doctor Adventure looks like, it seems sensible to conclude that it looks like this.
8/10
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