#31
The Shadows of Avalon
By Paul Cornell
Paul Cornell is back! And he’s in a peculiar mood!
The formative New Adventures author is known for delving deep into the character of the Doctor, often using fan lore to make a serious point about him, but he will sometimes toss in references just to have a good time as well. Famously he pulled back on any such excesses to write Human Nature, an emotional character study of what the Doctor becomes without any of his accoutrements. This was after No Future, which rounded off a few plot arcs in a plethora of jolly meta references. He also launched the Bernice Summerfield range by sending her into a literal pantomime. There seems to be, in Cornell’s Doctor Who writing anyway, a push and pull between introspection and fan service, seriousness and panto.
The Shadows Of Avalon lands somewhat uncertainly between these extremes. As the title suggests, it is fantasy-driven, even more so than Autumn Mist. It takes place mostly in Avalon, a multi-dimensional analogue of Britain that has fairies and dragons. Cornell goes some way towards grounding this by making it a world partially inhabited by Silurians/“Earth Reptiles”, who are known for keeping prehistoric creatures. But then again, Avalon is explicitly a world being dreamed into existence by an ancient king under a castle. But then again again, their whole situation, or at least their recent troubles, are largely down to the interventions of Time Lords. The setup is a bit of sci-fi/fantasy Lazy Susan.
The tone follows suit. Much about The Shadows Of Avalon is serious and contemplative — not to mention explosive as far as the Eighth Doctor Adventures are concerned, we’ll get to it — but there’s a certain flippancy to the fantasy elements. Mab, the leader of the displaced Celt tribe who make up the human population of Avalon, is feisty and somewhat a figure of fun, her dialogue tending towards modern colloquialism in a way that feels deliberately light-hearted. (On meeting the Doctor, one of the famous Time Lords: “And the weight of prophecy that you bring! Something bloody huge is going to happen!”) Her fellow Celts however, particularly the troubled advisor Margwyn, are much more “typical fantasy speak.”
Avalon itself is a somewhat glossed-over concoction, with the realms of Celts and “Fair Folk” (mostly Earth Reptiles, but also fairies?) not hugely differentiated; their uses of magic (or in the case of the Earth Reptiles, telekinesis and magic?) are not terribly detailed either. It feels somewhat like a placeholder, a “this is what you’d expect in a Doctor Who fantasy land” and not much more. This is an issue when the whole story revolves around Avalon, the safety of which is at stake because of a war.
There’s a chance here to contrast Avalon with our version of reality, since London (and presumably the world) is suffering psychedelic ill effects because of the war. However, we hardly visit London, and most of what we do see is limited to a single encounter in an office building. It seems to be roughly the sort of weird malaise suffered by the population in No Future, but since the vast majority of the action takes place on Avalon instead, you’ll need to do most of the imaginative legwork there.
It’s tough to say whether this is all by design or whether it’s simply a consequence of the strict 280 page limit, but either way it all feels a bit thin. The war itself itself isn’t much better, the initial thrill of contrasting modern soldiers with dragons notwithstanding. Autumn Mist already did that, more or less. The definitive “Doctor Who meets fantasy” novel, then, still eludes us. (Unless you count Conundrum.)
But there is that other extreme: the insightful character study. And we have gobs of that, chiefly concerning the Brigadier. You may recall that he was de-aged in Happy Endings (also by Cornell), but if not there’s a decent enough précis here. He has, sadly, lost his second wife Doris in a sailing accident. Clearly he is not coping with this, imagining that Doris is still with him and yet frankly discussing with her that she is no longer here. When a nuclear missile somehow disappears from underneath a Tornado jet he is recruited to investigate, and is only too happy to abandon his therapy and dive into work.
Discovering a portal to Avalon, where the missile has gone, he ends up spearheading a military presence there. He allies with the Celts but as a British soldier, not as part of the UN. (He comes up with spurious reasons for this but there aren’t any serious consequences for his quiet betrayal of UNIT.) When Margwyn, for selfless reasons, takes the missing nuke over to the Fair Folk there suddenly exists a nuclear deterrent and an excuse for war. The Brig ignores the Doctor’s protestations and insists on a fight to stabilise Avalon. This goes on for months. (Exact passage of time is another niggly thing that could be clearer.)
Through all of that the Brigadier yearns to die and, if not see Doris again, at least place himself at her imagined mercy for, as he perceives himself to have done, letting her down. It’s a grim situation for the beloved character — especially once he is led to believe that the Doctor has died, and truly loses all hope (a plot point I felt was a little fuzzy) — but it’s handled with sensitivity, as he continues to weigh his desire to pay for his failure against his need to help others. His reliance on the spirit of Doris eventually comes into question, and it’s the very job he’s trying to get himself killed at that eventually brings him around.
The character is allowed to make selfish and self-hating mistakes here, but is written with such fondness that it doesn’t seem like trauma for the sake of drama. He grows out of all of this. His relationship with the Doctor (he’s desperate to tell him about Doris but keeps missing his chance) is also central to what’s happening here, the Doctor essentially being his conscience, and that too is very effectively written. Their eventual hug is a joy to witness, particularly the Brig’s protestations followed by a slight smile. The Brigadier is the source of the best Mab writing here, with the Celt leader impressed by and eventually besotted with him, though on the advice of others she allows him space to work through his grief before any serious wooing. Mab, as well as the ersatz Doris, shows us a more raw and emotional side to this character than we’ve had before.
Similarly explosive stuff is happening to the EDA regulars, although the book is unquestionably The Brigadier Show for the most part. Elsewhere, the Doctor has lost the TARDIS — it’s blown up, kaput, gone! — because of the inter-dimensional nature of Avalon and the Time Lords’ schemes. This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently, and Cornell suggests that many of those earlier encounters were in anticipation of this. I sort of agree: it was established that the TARDIS was behaving and landing erratically because of something in its future, but the fact of meeting similarly destructive fates in Dominion and Unnatural History appears to have been a coincidence.
This is a shame, as the events of Dominion — referenced here, albeit as a joke — do seem to contradict The Shadows Of Avalon. There, the TARDIS was “dead” but recuperating, and the jolt caused the Doctor to lose his TV Movie clairvoyance. Here, the TARDIS is definitively pushing up daisies but he just as definitively still knows people’s futures. That lapse made me wonder if everything was truly as it seemed, and I was surprised to learn that it actually was.
Losing or destroying the TARDIS is, in my view, a bit of a Hail Mary: we know it’s going to be undone some time, and if not, wasn’t it worthy of more comment than it receives here? The Doctor is sad, sure, but he keeps on keeping on. Dominion, again, made a big point of this. Perhaps the simple fact that we’ve done it before means it’s wrong to write it that way again — but then the question surely becomes, so why do it again then?
All will, no doubt, be revealed. There’s plenty of other stuff here that sets up future storytelling. I was completely surprised by the TARDIS death, which is good going when you’re reading 25-year-old books; I was sadly less able to avoid spoilers about Compassion’s fate (if you really don’t want to know then skip to the end of the review), although the stuff surrounding it had also escaped my notice, for better and worse.
Compassion has been going through changes. A changeable character by nature — one of the Remote, a people dependant on external signals with little moral compass of their own — she joined the TARDIS crew (off screen, grr) and has been helping out ever since. Often this is in a typical “complete the mission” capacity, particularly in Frontier Worlds and Parallel 59. But she remains impersonal and standoffish. Granted, Fitz tends to bring that out of people, but the Doctor has displayed an interest in making sure she is happy — cloaking, not very well, an interest in her becoming definitively a person in her own right, aka a real human and not a Remote impression of one.
At the start of The Shadows Of Avalon Compassion is finishing up six weeks in Bristol, having worked through the Doctor’s list of eight things that will in some way enrich her. (Live among humans. Make friends. Get a job. Eat chips. Write poetry. Kiss someone (properly). Get a cat. Fall in love.) She’s done it, but all the same she doesn’t seem like a changed person at the end of it. A looming physical change then haunts her throughout the book, finally showing itself towards the end and revealing that it was the Time Lords’ primary interest all along: she has become a living TARDIS, the kind we first saw in Alien Bodies. The Time Lords want her to support their war against the Enemy. (As well as, thrillingly, their conflict with the People over in Virgin Books. All friends here!) The Doctor knows this will mean suffering for her, so he and Fitz elude the Time Lords and throw established timelines into chaos by escaping in Compassion, setting up an intriguing new status quo of being pursued across different novels by his own people, in a TARDIS shaped like his friend.
The denouement and new status quo are very exciting. The way Compassion is written around this stuff is also very good — she’s understandably resistant to letting go of what little personhood she has, but then she rejoices in the expanded form she takes. I think there’s something to be said about them writing a deliberately difficult character in the first place just so they can loosen her up almost unrecognisably later on, it seems a bit like cheating — and perhaps there’s something to be said for selling out poor pre-transformation Compassion, who also existed in her own right. But really all of that is for future books to figure out.
I will say though that for the most part The Shadows Of Avalon doesn’t feel like a definitive Compassion novel. She and Fitz end up separated from the Doctor very early on, following Margwyn’s somewhat misguided crusade instead. As I said above, the book’s heart is mostly in the Brigadier stuff, with a good amount of Doctorly heroism on the side. (All the more heroic without a TARDIS, I suppose. There’s a very good bit where he gets airlifted onto a helicopter from a London tour bus.) This leaves Compassion and Fitz mostly waiting around in a castle for something to do. At least Compassion has that ending going for her; Fitz is fine, characterisation-wise, with some refreshing reminders of his love for Filippa in Parallel 59, but if he were any more obviously surplus to requirements he might as well have been blown up alongside the TARDIS.
The villains get about as much time as the companions, and they arguably make less of an impression. Our main malefactors are two Time Lord “Interventionists” (think Faction Paradox, but working for the other lot) dispatched by a regenerated and distinctly less personable President Romana, who is willing to do anything to win the war. Cavis and Gandar, a romantic couple, lurk in disguise among the Fair Folk and Celts and they generally nudge the action towards peril. Cornell clearly thinks they’re hilarious, giving them even more colloquial dialogue than Mab and some absurd little moments such as one of them doing a “Stayin’ Alive” pose when they’re happy, or saying “Exit Cavis and Gandar, stage left” to no one in particular. There are also some perhaps-trying-a-teensy-bit-too-hard gags like Gandar threatening the Doctor with the Gallifreyan “Other” expletive “Let’s just kill the Otherf-”. It’s all a bit, “You think you know fantasy and science fiction? THINK AGAIN.”
It’s interesting, I suppose, to present us with such obviously antithetical “Time Lords”, but in practice they’re a couple of self-satisfied, self-amused student types and I mostly just wondered if Romana had run out of better applicants. The grand lore-y idea of the Interventionists doesn’t get far off the ground; in their hands it’s a pale anti-Faction Paradox, if that. Numerous dramatic moments in the book hinge on Cavis and Gandar, in all their slightly embarrassing glory, rendering the tone of The Shadows Of Avalon just a little bit more fractured than it already was. For good measure, the epilogue restores some dignity to one of the pair, but it’s a little too late by then.
The Shadows Of Avalon perhaps bites off more ideas than it can chew. There’s a nuanced and moving character study in here, nestled amongst a huge fantasy story that can’t seem to stop and feel its way around, and occasionally gets a bit silly with it too. The TARDIS crew wait patiently for what is a genuinely exciting change of pace at the end, but how much all of that’s going to mean is for next time. I enjoyed the more sensitive and thoughtful moments. I was entertained by the big shocking bits. I think there probably is a clever and exciting story in the rest of it, but 280 pages doesn’t seem like enough to really get at it.
6/10
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