#32
Heart of TARDIS
By Dave Stone
Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.
Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.
I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)
Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.
If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.
We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)
None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.
There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.
The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.
Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.
Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.
I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)
It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.
Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.
Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.
Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.
As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)
I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.
It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment