#9
The Witch Hunters
By Steve Lyons
Well well, Steve Lyons. You dark horse.
I’ve found him a rather difficult author to pin down. In the course of four Virgin books he executed some near-perfect fannish fun (Conundrum), a somewhat remixed and darker version of that (Head Games), and two grim stories set in the Colin Baker years that really ran with the “video nasty” label (Time Of Your Life and Killing Ground). If I had to say what kind of thing speaks to him as a writer, bearing in mind these very different tones, maybe it’s a kind of era accuracy that borders on pastiche? (Or just pastiche generally, viz Conundrum.)
Now on over to BBC Books and The Murder Game, which almost sent me to sleep with (what felt to me like) accuracy — although to be fair, maybe I just don’t like that kind of Troughton-y adventure. The Witch Hunters is much more my kind of thing. We have the First Doctor, a personal favourite who at last completes our BBC Books roster, alongside his original companions. Plus it’s a historical, which was a particularly strong avenue for Doctor Who in Hartnell’s day. (It has already proved a success in these books; see The Roundheads.) I could have guessed what we were in for just glancing at the cover, but although I would broadly say The Witch Hunters does what you’d expect, which seems Very Steve Lyons to a certain extent, there’s a good deal more to it along the way.
The Doctor and co. find themselves in Salem, 1692, just at the onset of the witch trials. I’m fairly ignorant about all this: never learned about it in detail, never saw The Crucible. But Doctor Who historicals are there, at least on some level, to educate, and I think Lyons does a good job of that here.
The key players are identified and their motivations are made clear. You’ve got to be careful with this sort of thing, fictionalising tragedies with real people and psychoanalysing why they did things, lest you cheapen or trivialise them — but then plenty of academics and writers got there first, not least Arthur Miller. Lyons grounds the deadly accusations in youthful repression, and he credits the accusers with the possibility that their hysterical fits felt largely (or even entirely) unforced, with convincing hallucinations a symptom of their undiagnosed hysteria. These people become even more of a mess in always trying to do the right thing, which often means trying not to get accused or ostracised themselves. There is a real powerlessness to this cycle once it has begun, particularly for the sympathetic Mary, but with the notable exceptions of Samuel Parris, Reverend, who deep down covets control, and his niece Abigail Williams, who feels a power and a pleasure in her actions that she can’t find elsewhere. Even this rather partisan take speaks to a way of life that has already become a powder keg outside of these individuals. (I understand, regardless of not having read up, that it’s not a new take.) It’s still debatable how much these two are in the know.
A grimly fascinating history it may be, but you’ve also got to make it a Doctor Who story. That’s another area where you need to tread carefully — you don’t want to blame the whole thing on aliens. The Hartnell era had a bit more leeway to just let history be history, and use only the science fiction stuff you’ve brought with you. The Witch Hunters is no exception, using the perspective of the time travellers to enrich the events, and inevitably using the TARDIS as a lightning rod. If it’s really about anything besides the history, though, it’s the regular characters’ response to that history.
Susan is the perfect choice for a story about teenagers with unknown potential. The Doctor is never overtly mean about this, but he is a dominant, patriarchal force in her life. There is a parallel. We find Susan in the first scene playing parlour games with the local girls, inviting trouble, telling them too much about herself. The story (some would say, inevitably) takes the line of whether or not history can be changed, whether an awful tragedy can be averted — it’s Susan’s The Aztecs, they very much say so in the text. However she’s more of an instigator than Barbara was in Mexico, with her fledgeling telepathic powers tuning into, and then amplifying the girls’ hallucinations and fits.
Does this take us into “cheapen and trivialise”/“blame it on aliens” territory? I think it squeaks a pass. It’s made clear that what’s happening here is going to happen regardless; there’s just the possibility that Susan has inadvertently accelerated it. Like anything else, I think as long as you use it to enrich the story then it’s probably worth doing, and Susan’s unwitting part in these events helps mark The Witch Hunters out from being quite so transparently “Susan’s The Aztecs”. Her judgement is even more compromised than Barbara’s; at one point she’s so mixed up, she even implicates Barbara. She goes from having an inherently dangerous desire to prevent this from happening to being an unconscious instigator, and then finally being just as accepting as the original accusers, beaten down by the relentless march of history, an awareness of her own part in it, a distinct lack of options to the contrary and simply wanting to survive, as Mary does. Susan’s good intentions and her failure to make good on them create a pretty downbeat story, but they also underline — in a suitably This Is Now A Doctor Who Story way — what many of the girls were going through and what this cycle is about, without (I think) applying too big of a sci-fi lampshade.
That’s not to say Lyons lets this play out from A to B, as an authentic historical might have done. We skip right through these events in the first chapter (starting with Susan and the girls in situ), then sidestep to meet another version of Hartnell’s Doctor, this one revisiting the story after he was taken out of time for The Five Doctors. (There’s that Conundrum-ey Steve Lyons!) His purpose becomes clear much later. Which is all a bit different, isn’t it? We then start again, from the beginning this time, as they all arrive and Susan becomes enmeshed — only then the Doctor spirits them away, just barely escaping the wrath of the townsfolk, effectively ending The Witch Hunters with 200 pages to spare. After an ill-advised trip to see The Crucible (in the hopes of providing useful context — whoops), the Doctor simply enrages Susan further, causing her to use the fast return switch to go BACK to Salem. She forces them to take the long road with this problem, at which point I felt completely discombobulated, which is a wonderful place to be when you’re expecting another Murder Game. (Yes, this is altogether more SF than say, Marco Polo, but at least it’s using an SF device set up in a Hartnell story. Lyons even has the Doctor plan to use it himself, now that it’s fixed, which is something you would have thought the original writers might have done. He also disables it at the end, which perhaps explains why he didn’t use it later when it might have come in handy. Looking at you, The Chase.)
The Witch Hunters is perhaps working against set expectations from the reader — especially if said reader knows more American history, or even more theatre than I do. You’ll inevitably expect the “can we change history” debate, and on both scores I think Lyons’s narrative trickery keeps things from getting predictable. With Susan as a vehicle, he manages to retell the story itself, but he also gets to put the Doctor through the wringer over this old point of contention. A key adversary in Barbara’s Aztec plans, he is famous for not wanting history to be changed, but Salem feels so much more cruel an event than the cultural violence of the Aztecs. This naturally throws his statesmanlike indifference into a murkier light, and The Witch Hunters doesn’t much let him get away with it, weighing the events on him until he begins to waver. Rebecca Nurse, a downright saintly member of the accused, somehow gets him to promise he will save her life, something he promptly regrets. He does his best to let her down gently, which plays out somewhat beautifully by the novel’s end when we catch up with that older (wiser?) First Doctor. He still gives Ian both barrels when he pulls stuff like that, but then we all know this Doctor doesn’t practice what he preaches.
Curiously enough, the argument about changing history is not won as decisively as it was against Barbara — something she spots a mile off. Ian causes some small changes, just as Susan has done, albeit both end up contributing to existing history. When the Doctor makes changes, but then panics and makes changes again the other way, it seems more rooted in superstition than science. Is the Doctor in awe of time as if it were a supernatural force? I mean, it might as well be, what with The Reign Of Terror’s jolly supposition that you couldn’t assassinate a historical monster before time without your gun failing. He’s definitely got no concrete answer to Barbara’s brilliant, unmistakably fannish argument here that every TARDIS landing is in someone’s past. The Doctor later says that the hysterical reactions in Salem might as well be magic given their apparent effectiveness; that, and his uncertain faith in time’s rules, serves to make the Doctor sound less certain, less perfect, and somewhat on Salem’s wavelength. Which all adds to the novel’s prickly sense of danger, working against the reader’s expectations.
I think it would be fair to say that Ian and Barbara are supporting roles in this, although Ian (as foretold in The Face Of The Enemy) has a thoroughly awful time in prison. The story is really Susan’s and the Doctor’s, and if I had a criticism, it’s that we could have landed more thoroughly with the former. Susan isn’t herself for some of The Witch Hunters, and by the finale she’s just glad to get out of here — as are we! — with the Doctor, at various points in his life, picking up the conclusions. I don’t know if that’s a flaw, and the story does make something of Susan’s withering agency. Maybe I just found it a shame that it couldn’t decisively be her book, but then at that point maybe I’m just sad that it isn’t a different book.
What we do get in The Witch Hunters is a smart, unpredictable use of Susan, and a quietly deceptive role for the Doctor in a — bleak! — story told about as interestingly as it could have been. Not to keep ragging on The Murder Game, which was fine, honest, but it’s useful to have that comparison so I can say: that is a traditional way of doing things, and this is not. I’m loving that the Past Doctor Adventures, with books like Eye Of Heaven and now The Witch Hunters, have room for both, they can play it straight or play with the running order, and make it fit the period. The overriding feeling of The Witch Hunters is of a compelling trip into a hell made of troubled people and their choices, but I’m very here for the cool stuff as well.
8/10
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