#41
Father Time
By Lance Parkin
Gosh. This is an "oh you're reading that one” kind of a Doctor Who book. But in a good way.
Lance Parkin tends to command a lot of respect from Who fans, and although I haven't personally loved every one of his books it's not hard to see why they feel that way. Right from his debut in Just War it's been clear that he is an assured writer, confident enough to tell a smart and emotional story while still allowing room for a bit of geekery on the side. Father Time brings him into the "Eighth Doctor stuck on Earth" arc, and right away that affords opportunities for an unusual sort of Doctor Who book. Parkin takes almost all of those opportunities, and happily it's one of those Lance Parkin books that I did love.
The Doctor is still waiting to meet Fitz — whoever that is — in St. Louis in 2001. Rather inconveniently it is still the 1980s, so we find him pootling about in the Midlands, renting a cottage and fiddling about with sonic technology. One night he crosses paths with Debbie Castle (née Gordon), an unhappily married schoolteacher who hits a UFO spotter with her car. The Doctor and Debbie become fast friends and he soon comes into contact with a strange girl in her class named Miranda. Like the Doctor she is lightning smart, can regulate her body temperature, can do without sleep and ah yes, that other little detail: she has two hearts.
Father Time never outright says "Miranda is a Time Lord" because it would be useless to bandy that term around while the Doctor doesn't remember it. I think we can infer though that she is from a future where a Time Lord began a brutal Empire to control what was left of the universe. His dynasty was hunted down and killed and only one family member is left. Miranda was spirited away to Earth at such a young age that she doesn't remember any of this, but she is still the target of mercenaries and her father's enemies. The Doctor is in all likelihood all that's stopping them from killing her.
I love a complex and satisfying plot, but I'm just as happy to read a book with a simple through-line, and they don't come much simpler than this: a small group of people with a clear reason to want Miranda dead. The rest of the novel is about the Doctor's attempts to keep her safe. Of course the delightful thing about small plots (when they're done right) is the room they leave for character development, and Father Time has plenty of that.
We're five books into the Earth arc and there are certain ideas the authors have all returned to. The Doctor (sans memories) is still capable of the same heroic feats, but he has a greater ease with darkness and violence. Sometimes this is unspoken and almost primordial, like the murder at the end of The Burning, or the off-screen dispatch of the villain in Casualties Of War; sometimes it's more complex, like his almost willing susceptibility to propaganda in The Turing Test and what that allows to happen; and sometimes it's just The Bourne Identity again, like in Endgame. Parkin hews closest to Paul Leonard's approach, providing an emotional reason for the Doctor to lower his pacifist standards: when it comes to protecting Miranda, he'll do anything.
In the course of Father Time he inadvertently gets a guard shot to death, reverses a mind probe to stop a cruel interrogator's heart, uses a villain's bomb to blow them up instead and rigs a transmogrification machine to turn a dozen armed guards into flowers. (It is made very clear that this means death.) He does at least feel guilty about most of this — at one point he's "disgusted" with himself — and he is horrified when the time finally comes for Miranda to choose whether or not to use lethal force and she shows no apparent remorse for doing the former. He can't quite articulate why he must adhere to these standards, he just knows that there is that baseline. (Both the Doctor and Miranda intuitively notice that the villains are "cruel and cowardly," for instance.)
In many ways the Doctor here is as close to "normal" as he's been in this arc. He's capable of quietly remarkable feats like deliberately "losing" a snooker match by potting every single ball on his first shot, or walking across a very frosty car park without any risk of slipping. He's effortlessly able to pick-pocket an alien as they pick-pocket him, and deliberately planting the bomb they left for him on their own spaceship without anyone noticing. When the time comes to go into hiding with Miranda he's able to "incredibly easily" retrain as a business consultant and make heaps of money advising firms of better ways to do things. (This is so he can provide safety for Miranda. He’s not an aspiring yuppie.) When things get so desperate that he might need to steal aboard a space shuttle, not to put too fine a point on it, but he does so. Some of these things don't feel exactly like normal Doctor behaviour because normally he would have other tools at his disposal — however, they ring true.
Contrary to all that, Parkin underlines the ways in which the Doctor feels out of sorts. During a lovely bit where Debbie notices how unearthly the interior of a spaceship is to her (something we'd normally take for granted since a lot of plastic and metal just looks like BBC set dressing to us — she instinctively knows this wasn't made on her world), we find out that the Doctor feels that way about living on Earth: "I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember. Every morning, when I wake up in a world with buttons, green leaves, paper money and traces of argon in the air I breathe.’” The Doctor, we discover, even thought he was human when he first woke up in that train carriage — "of course I did. I thought I was like everyone else, that everyone else’s life was like mine. I learned that was not the case.” This is also clear in the plot, when the Doctor first encounters some of the hostiles looking for Miranda: "The Doctor frowned. ‘You know me?’ The man hesitated. ‘Of course. You don’t know me?’"
By focusing on the Doctor as off-kilter we get to enjoy a plot without some of the usual safety barriers, i.e. he can't have his normal repartee with the villains and their threats won't mean quite the same thing any more. So maybe they'll just kill him and have done with it. (Of course they don't, and the Doctor has been around for almost a hundred years by now so he's incredibly proficient at lots of things. But the jarring sensation of villains who know him not getting the response they were expecting is a delicious plus, and it's unique to this mini-run of books.)
Some of the best characterisation is unspoken. The Doctor's relationship with Miranda is a way to externalise what he's going through in actions rather than words. Here is another character that shares his unique physical oddities, who even has an analogue for his amnesia since her past is actively the reason people are pursuing her, but she has no access to that past. (Granted, this is because she was a baby at the time and not because of a memory wipe. Go with me here.) The Doctor is determined to let Miranda have a safe and normal life, which is in sharp contrast to his own longing to get away from Earth and the 20th century. (Look at the lengths he went to in The Turing Test.) For Miranda, he’s willing to put all of that on hold and get a job instead. Perhaps, on some level, he just wants one more Time Lord to be alive, knowing the part he played in reducing their numbers. He’s clearly lonely as, with no apparent hesitation, he adopts her.
We never find out how long he would have kept this up. (Would he have said "no thanks" to Fitz and stayed here with Miranda, or taken her aboard? Start your head-canons.) But allowing someone else to live and enjoy what he experiences as disorientation feels like a last attempt to integrate himself into all this, to see what Earth really has to offer — and keep in mind, he’s also keeping Miranda from learning the truth about herself, which might speak to his own ongoing wish to ignore the past. (See Endgame.) Although it feels justified, it’s an unexpected dive towards being human at this point in the run.
The other characters are written with similar interest. Debbie is a quietly fascinating pseudo-companion: it's clear from the outset that she'd rather go and look at other worlds than be married to Barry, who is at best controlling and at worst psychologically abusive. Her attraction to the Doctor is obvious, but quite subtle. We can't help sympathising with her, but there's darkness and weakness there too, such as when she initially lets the villains have Miranda, later identifies where they can find her for fear of being killed, and — after Barry meets an unhappy fate — enjoys seeing him in reduced circumstances... but is nevertheless trapped looking after him, rather than being part of the Doctor-Miranda unit as you might expect. (I couldn't help feeling like this reflected darkly on the Doctor, who surely must know that she needed rescuing in some way too.)
Barry, for his part, is an awful if altogether pedestrian sort of monster, controlling his wife while stepping out on her anyway; nevertheless, he's fully committed to rescuing a young girl the moment he hears that she's in danger. So perhaps he's not all bad? (There's some very neat writing around Debbie's self image which is tied to Barry, who at one point calls her a "stupid fat cow.” When she is able to see herself through the Doctor’s memories, totally separate from Barry's negging, Debbie is “surprised how pretty she looked.")
The villains might have simple goals but they have facets as well. A couple of low rent criminals contribute to the Doctor’s capture at one point, but they’re able to be pragmatic and side with his legal payoff over their boss’s shady riches — they know it will be better for them in the end. There are a couple of creepy mercenaries on the periphery whose primary concern is getting paid, and one of them, an angry (non-copyright-infringing) Transformer who turns into a VW Beetle (!) is an emotional psychotic who blames the Doctor for the death of his wife. (The other two doubt that he was the hero in that scenario: "Anyone who had wiped out Mr Gibson and his entire race couldn’t be all bad.") The Hunters, seeking to eradicate Miranda's family once and for all, have certain standards of combat: "They wouldn’t dishonour the warriors of this time by using weapons a million years more advanced than those of their enemies." (They even offer Barry the chance to get out of here since their fight is not with him.) The Doctor gets a chance to look within Ferran, the young Prefect who is left leading the charge against Miranda, and he determines that: "It’s not your fault you were born when you were, into that family. Since your cradle, since before you can remember, all you’ve been taught is revenge. It’s like an addiction, Ferran. You can help yourself. I know that deep down, below all those layers of hatred that others have filled you with, that you’re a decent man.”
Sadly the jury is still out on Ferran at that point, although he does wobble back and forth once he has the opportunity to kill Miranda. It's here that we get to the weaker end of the book, aka the wrap-up.
Let’s back up. I've not discussed the structure for Father Time. This was deliberate because it's quite interesting, and you should probably just go and read the book and enjoy it for yourself — but I will say that the book has an unusual structure, and there are time jumps. There's a fundamental uncertainty to Father Time where it concerns a character of obvious importance to the Doctor, who (equally obviously) won't be around for future books. (I don't think you need to be revisiting these a quarter of a century later to have sussed that.) So, what's going to happen to Miranda? Parkin keeps this question up in the air. It’s not clear how far anyone in this situation will go, so he can get away with things like suddenly pushing the story forward a few years and recontextualising the characters as they continue trying to evade certain doom.
He tantalises the reader brilliantly when Ferran gets close to Miranda, who at this point is living as a relatively normal teenage girl with the problems that come at her age. (Her awkwardness about "normal" teenage activity is beautifully expressed. She doesn't feel like a parody of a teenager, or like a robot. She's just an unusual person who has grown up with the Doctor as her role model.) Ferran's will-he-won't-he is some of the most tense stuff in the book.
But you'll have noticed at that point that there's still almost a hundred pages to go — and you do have to settle on something eventually. Father Time's final third is a bit more explosive, which is saying something since the first third includes sword-welding assassins on flying discs and an angry Transformer. By the end, Ferran has solved his moral quandary and brought a giant spaceship full of slaves to get Miranda once and for all. Up until now we’ve enjoyed some ambiguity about Miranda’s heritage, and whether Ferran has some justification for his plan after all. By the end though, he surely doesn’t: his “racially pure” society is built on slaves and it is obviously repeating the mistakes of before. He’s just a very bad egg. Disappointing. But then we’re asked to believe that he has reformed — again, for those keeping score. Now, I love a bit of ambiguity, but this is ping-pong. Why should we believe it will stick this time?
The Doctor pushes the “how far will he go to protect Miranda” button quite hard in that final stretch, stealing aboard a US space shuttle in the attempt. This is not outside the realm of possibility for the Doctor, let’s face it, but I couldn’t help feeling that as we literally left orbit to explore a slave uprising on a spaceship, which upturns an entire society in an afternoon, that we had left a beautifully observed novel about lonely people in winter and strange family units quite far behind. The eventual payoff also doesn’t feel equivalent to that early stuff: how Miranda would depart after making such an impression on the Doctor, and how he would react to that are driving forces behind Father Time, and I didn’t feel like either was resounding enough.
Long story short, after something quite trailblazing in terms of an Eighth Doctor Adventure we suddenly get a burst of very normal Doctor Who, where the stakes are all about sci-fi and the characters are all a bit archetypal. (Including the shuttle crew, who simply don’t have the page-count to treat the Doctor and Debbie with the suspicion they’re due.) I probably tricked myself into expecting either a beautiful or a devastating conclusion and the one we get is fine… but it’s neither of those things, instead packing Miranda off to an entirely anodyne SF destiny and having the Doctor wish her toodle-pipski like she hasn’t been his actual daughter for the best part of a decade. He felt more of a wrench leaving Cameca behind in The Aztecs, and he’d only known her for a few days.
I don’t think a damp ending ought to ruin the whole novel though. Father Time is quite obviously above par for these books. Parkin explores the Doctor’s difficulties with life on Earth and he finds a reason to counter-balance them. He supplies interesting and challenging supporting characters, both good and bad. (Although now that you mention it he does drop the ball with Debbie, who deserved better than to feel like a spare toy packed away in a hurry.) He gets in quite a bit of geekery for the list-makers among us, including lines like “Not even the sonic suitcase can get us out of this one,” some references to the New Adventures and a scene with several direct nods to upcoming books, as well as some of Parkin’s previous ones. The prose is typically thoughtful, at times addressing the reader like a storybook in a way that somehow doesn’t feel out of place. And it all feels so fresh, daring to throw the Doctor into a directly familial relationship — something the series seems designed to avoid altogether — in a way that instantly works. I’ve got my reservations about it, but I’m not surprised that people love this one and return to it. What it gets right is worth some imperfections.
8/10
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