#38
Casualties of War
By Steve Emmerson
This is another of those books that I’ve read before. A few years ago I was kindly asked to talk about it on the We’re All Stories In The End podcast (recommended!) and for reasons that made sense at the time I read it in a day. As that conversation showed, I loved Casualties Of War; I was swept away by its grisly imagery and emotive storytelling.
I think the self-enforced time crunch must have helped, because revisiting it now with no deadline and a much shoddier attention span I’ve spent a lot longer with it and… it’s not great.
I know that’s a very negative way to start a review, and I’m not about to slate the thing, honest — it’s still a pretty good book. It’s just so weird having such a different second opinion. (Sort of wish I’d written a proper review the first time. Ah well.)
Let’s start with the good. It’s another in the amnesiac Doctor arc (“I thought you were starting with the good,” yes, ho ho) and the Eighth Doctor is once again a pronounced and compelling presence. He’s enough of a charisma wizard to enchant everybody he meets, including the villain, despite a back story even flimsier than psychic paper. He still has no idea about his past but little bits squeak through, whether it’s monster encounters or future Earth culture. He once again causes romantic palpitations just by being there, but he maintains a slightly frosty indifference about it (and about everything else) that he picked up in The Burning. He still lacks some of his usual forward planning; while not directly endangering any companions, he lets one of them stray into danger, and while not actively killing the villain during a moment of weakness (otherwise known as murder) he sure seems to terminate the bad guy here.
I noticed similarities with The Burning the first time. (Back then I read The Burning as homework. I know right, what a conscientious podcast guest!) Both novels are set in rural towns in the early 20th century; both open with a mysterious hole in the countryside; both feature a noticeable class gap between a wealthy man and the rest of the townsfolk, and he’s the baddie in both; both feature monsters in human form, often taking the form of the dead; both have the Doctor strolling along and inveigling himself in everybody’s business to surprisingly little pushback. It’s enough to raise an eyebrow at least, especially where Steve Emmerson thanks Justin Richards for his Whovian inspiration in the acknowledgements.
Where Casualties Of War diverges — apart from the amusingly up front identification of the Doctor, no “who’s Who” this time — is its very specific setting. The Great War isn’t exactly present on the page but the absence of fit young men in Hawkswick makes it very clear. There’s a ghost town quality to the place, with a reverend, a farmer and his wife, a widower policeman and a spirited young woman forming practically the whole population. The only other people of note are in Hawkswick Hall, now a recovery centre for the war wounded. (So there’s a good reason, if you need one, for the easy acceptance of the Doctor’s cover story. There simply isn’t enough going on around here for anyone to assume otherwise.)
The war instantly adds meaning to the story. Casualties Of War is all about the horrible lasting effects of trauma, with a few moments directly relating incidents from soldiers’ pasts. There’s a brutality to the novel as a whole, which is never far from a grisly set piece, that speaks to the sort of everyday awfulness witnessed by these men. Whether this strays into bad taste is perhaps up to the reader; personally I enjoyed Emmerson’s horrific gags more as nightmare fodder than as a reflection of any specific nightmares. The “blessing tree,” adorned with the heads of animals and people, is genuinely upsetting, as is the moment when a zombie soldier removes a pitchfork it uncomplainingly finds embedded in its leg only to lick the blood off its prongs.
Perhaps the best evocation of the theme of loss and the secondary effects of war is Mary Minett. Lonely but headstrong, Mary misses her brother (killed in the war) and her father (away on business) but is otherwise a force of nature in the little village. She falls into easy lockstep with the Doctor when he arrives, as well as (you knew this was coming) falling head over heels. The Doctor is a kindred outsider, also touched by war; it doesn’t feel too easy to present him with a could-be love interest like Mary. Their questioning energy really does sync up, with the novel noting that between them is “something of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object”, to such an extent that I could easily imagine her working as a less doe-eyed companion akin to Grace Holloway. Alas, there’s too much feeling on her end for that to ever work, espoused beautifully when we see her goodbye letter at the end, and with a gut-wrenching laugh when his innocent “I think it’s time we went to bed. Don’t you?” is followed moments later with a cheery “Goodnight, then.”
As much as I like Mary — and I do, she’s the highlight of the book — I can’t help feeling that the effects of war should be demonstrated more strongly elsewhere. Hawkswick Hall and its patients form the obvious outlet for all this, with the seemingly squeaky-clean Dr Banham encouraging a unique form of clay therapy to get the aggression and trauma out of these men. There are certainly poignant moments to be found, such as the prologue which does a fine job of making us care about two men before killing them, and the aforementioned war flashbacks. But when it comes to the actual soldiers and what they’re going through, Casualties Of War overall defers to being a monster story.
The monsters are a bunch of mud soldiers going around committing mostly random acts of violence. They’re clearly an outlet for the psychic trauma at the Hall, but whose outlet exactly? Several soldiers are murdered in the course of the book; when the finale arrives they don’t even take part, the action shifting instead to a New Adventures-y mind battle/trench warfare recreation with non-human soldiers blowing each other up around the Doctor, Mary and the constable. Poignant imagery, yes, but it feels a bit more like a gnarly action sequence, especially in a denouement that zig-zags back and forth to a farmer battling zombies in his somehow-exploded-several-times barn.
None of this is helped by Dr Banham, the man at the centre of things whose evil plan turns out to be… not entirely articulated, actually, but the gist of it is using a magic book he got from somewhere (?) to elicit psychic energy from men with shell shock to give himself telekinesis, second sight and a mud monster army. Bonzer. All of this we find out right at the end, after he’s been a much more intriguing character early on, at points breaking down both mentally and physically into a sort of Clayface monster. We otherwise don’t delve into Banham’s emotional stake in all this, or how (if at all) he feels about his horrifying mistreatment of his patients. By the time his cards are on the table he’s stopped behaving like a character at all: after a brief bit of moustache twirling he barely has a say in the grand climax, dying more or less off screen as a sort of secondhand trauma-fuelled Mr Blobby. (So, a regular Mr Blobby, then.) On second reading I just couldn’t help wishing the story had pivoted around one of the soldiers instead.
A clunky finale and some debatable horror impulses are unfortunately not the only issues. The writing is also quite variable. Plenty of it is enjoyable. Pretty much all of Mary’s dialogue zings against the Doctor’s; his quixotic nature is on full display and all of that rings true, even without his memories. Some of those horror shots hit their grisly targets, but there are subtler moments too, like this description of undead soldiers that jabs you at the end: “No fidgeting, no gestures, no smokes, no jokes to pass the time. No motion. No boredom. No breathing.” Emmerson nicely juggles his themes with the ongoing arc by showing the Doctor intrigued by Hawkswick Hall. The observation that he longs to believe damaged men can return to their former selves makes a virtue of his arc without making a big deal out of it. Mary’s loneliness also feels real and not gone on about. It’s a small point but her dad doesn’t return from wherever he is at the end, which would have been a nice (but obvious) button on things.
The wonky stuff is mostly towards the end. Emmerson has a fine (and foul) imagination, but some turns of phrase err on the downright strange side, such as “The canopy opened and splattered the dead men with grotesque splashes of moonlight” and “Then there was the flight. The last response of the human mammal.” Dialogue is one of the book’s stronger suits, but some characters are lumbered with a strenuous country dialect, leading to awkward lines like “I did see one o’ these before” and “Ey, where yer goin’ now?” The aforementioned finale goes overboard on the dun-dun-DUNNN scene breaks, which is made more apparent by some unfortunate last-line repetitions that could have been caught in editing: “He landed with a crash and darkness zoomed in.” / “Darkness came.” / “Blackness rushed in and there was nothing at all.” The plot lacks complexity, relying on action and horror beats; there’s a lot of traipsing back and forth to Hawkswick Hall, Banham telling them to go away with increasing exasperation, interspersed with mud soldiers jamming guns against people’s necks or lurking or rampaging or attacking the proto-TARDIS for no reason until the book finally feels like exposing the truth. And we all know how that went.
It’s hardly a write-off. With a vivid imagination, in short bursts anyway, and a knack for character writing (for Mary and the Doctor) that makes you genuinely look forward to scenes, Casualties Of War really works at points. There is clear promise here and I’m keen to read Steve Emmerson’s next book. But I just can’t go home again to my initial enthusiasm. This one’s rough around the edges and it could have sharpened its focus and themes into more than a way into the Grand Guignol. I want to love it, but like the Doctor at this point in the run, I lack a time machine.
6/10
