#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
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