#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
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