Doctor Who: The BBC Books #92 – Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#42

Asylum

By Peter Darvill-Evans

In his afterword Peter Darvill-Evans says he has “tried to write something that is out of the ordinary run of Doctor Who novels.” I’d say that’s a fair assessment of Asylum.

Probably the most obviously unusual thing here is the casting choice of the Fourth Doctor and Nyssa. The continuity-minded among you might scratch your heads at that, since at no point in the run did these two characters travel by themselves. BBC Books were no doubt pleased that they’d already stopped telling readers when each story was set, since they’d need two answers for this one: the Doctor must be between The Deadly Assassin and The Face Of Evil, being on his own and having not met her yet, while Nyssa must be some time after Terminus, having long since left him.

Quite a torturous setup, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong. And for what? Straight away Asylum has almost no scope for interaction between its Doctor and companion. They can’t get to know each other and she can’t tell him anything that will be important later. “So why do it?” is the obvious question. Well, it adds novelty value. It’s a unique dynamic, outside of maybe the Sixth Doctor and Mel. For the vast majority of the (admittedly very short) novel, however, Darvill-Evans takes the path of least resistance and separates them. Which is either the practical thing to do or the final nail in the coffin, depending on your outlook. 

This isn’t the only odd thing about the book. Asylum opens with two prologues. (Not in itself odd, although while we’re here, what is it with Doctor Who novelists and prologues?) The first one introduces a rather good sci-fi idea about non-corporeal aliens stranded in the bodies of medieval Brits. They know the Black Death is coming. To ensure their survival they need to send one of their number back in time to find somebody brilliant to help. They select Roger Bacon, often considered one of the first scientists, who might be able to give them the Elixir of Life and hence allow them to navigate the plague when it arrives.

That’s all in prologue one! Next we find Nyssa in the far future, older, wiser, successful but not happy. A disaster is coming her way too, but she distracts herself by writing a thesis about a fellow scientist, Roger Bacon… until the facts start changing around him. Suddenly the Doctor (well, a Doctor) arrives, hot on the trail of the time anomaly. Once he establishes the likely focal point, as well as his and Nyssa’s awkward relationship, he leaves her to it while he goes off to investigate the historical figure. Except Nyssa has stowed away in the TARDIS.

Asylum is bursting with ideas before we even reach Chapter One. However we still have not reached the odd thing. What Asylum does next is… settle down. History transforming, aliens possessing humans, companions out of time — all quite exciting, only put those things out of your mind, because Asylum is actually a medieval murder mystery. And quite a placid one at that.

I’m guessing this was the novel Darvill-Evans really wanted to write, and the alien stuff was just the springboard. Fair enough. But the disparity between the intriguing setup and the actual matter of the book — which more closely resembles something you’d see on ITV on a Sunday afternoon — takes some getting used to. I kept expecting the alien plot to flare up, or the incongruity of the Doctor and Nyssa to kick off. I was way off: Asylum is a historical novel through and through, with heaps of research behind it (there’s a bibliography) and just as much thought behind the anachronisms of its dialogue and characters (there’s an afterword). Sci-fi-wise, Chekhov’s Gun doesn’t go off, unless you count the neat but rather sad epilogue with the aliens.

I spent a good chunk of Asylum mystified by this, wondering if — like in Independence Day, or my reading of it anyway — Darvill-Evans had failed to join his own dots. Having now finished it, I don’t think so. If nothing else, Asylum seems more deliberate than his earlier novel. True, the aliens never reveal themselves to the Doctor or Nyssa, who finish out the story with no idea what caused all this to happen in the first place. As far as anyone knows, something caused one of the brothers at Roger Bacon’s friary to commit the murders, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Elixir of Life. It doesn’t really matter what, though, since (hardly a spoiler) things are put right in the end anyway.

So where does that leave Asylum — a sci-fi story that retroactively McGuffins its own premise, a character study about awkward strangers, and a murder mystery with a motive only the reader knows? Well, it’s certainly different. (Score one to Darvill-Evans.) If you’re going to enjoy it, though, you have to do so on its own level: gently paced past crime. It’s quite good at that. There’s plenty of historical flavour, some of it bracingly unpleasant. (See, the anti-semitism.) The period details can be ingenious, like Darvill-Evans’s answer to a locked room mystery. There are moments of genuine excitement, like an attempted break in and an escape from a burning building. And the basic thrust of what might be the birth of science is quite interesting to behold, with an intriguing and quite elegant counter-argument presented to Nyssa at the end. I’d never heard of Roger Bacon before reading this, and Darvill-Evans does a good job of showing why he’s worthy of note — if not entirely deserving of his plaudits.

There are some decent character moments as well, despite the uphill work created by choosing to write about these characters. The Doctor isn’t quite as effervescent as usual, perhaps because he’s in an awkward spot around this Nyssa person, but he still has moments of Baker-ish non sequitur. “I’ll join you there in a moment, if I may. Someone’s been lurking in the corridor behind us all the time we’ve been walking round and round this delightful cloister — so like my own — and he obviously wants to talk to one of us alone.” / “‘What if the time isn't right?’ the Doctor said. ‘Perhaps all this work, these theories and machines, would be best left here to turn to dust. I just don't know. Will I change the course of events if I save Roger Bacon's most scientifically advanced work? Or will that ensure that events follow the correct course? Can I bear to leave these things here to rot? Can you smell smoke?’” He also manages a compelling enough heart to heart with Nyssa at the end despite, or maybe because of their being ships in the night. He’s unusually pensive in Asylum, but I think this just about convinces as a character choice more than just “getting it wrong.”

Nyssa has a less proactive time. Despite evidently wanting to join the expedition in the first place she chills out in a castle for most of Asylum, barely cognisant of the mystery that brought them here. Instead she makes a friend in the widow Matilda and bats away advances from Richard of Hockley, a nice but thoroughly drippy knight of the realm. You can forgive the Doctor for occasionally remembering, with a start, that what’s-her-name is here as well, somewhere. Still, by the end this becomes a somewhat convincing character arc. Nyssa is still traumatised by TARDIS travel and clearly depressed; she often contemplates coming to live here instead, where it’s (potentially) less hectic, but a quiet rest isn’t enough to fix her problems. She even reaches a point where she’s content to be murdered. (!) Her realisation that she’d rather live on, as well as being a relief in itself, goes some way to justifying her inaction through the rest of the book.

Only some, mind. For all its pastoral mindset and relaxing pace Asylum drifts dangerously close to dull at times — an impressive feat where it needs a chunky afterword to even hit 250 pages. The supporting cast for example have clearly been thought through (again, see afterword), but that doesn’t mean you won’t mix up your friars from time to time. The murder mystery itself can be a teensy bit, who cares? And the book never entirely gets past the sense of a missed opportunity with the Doctor and Nyssa. But despite all that, I found myself on its wavelength in the end. I got into the slower pace and the (very) old-fashioned investigation, and the fact that these characters almost know each other but not quite, these aliens almost change the world but not quite, Nyssa almost considers a life in the past but not quite, and Roger Bacon is almost a pioneer of scientific theory but not quite, in a book that’s almost a massive sci-fi story but not quite… it all gives Asylum a sense of thwarted, missed-the-boat tragedy that arguably justifies its smallness. Almost, etc.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #91 – Eater Of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#45

Eater of Wasps

By Trevor Baxendale

Yuck, obviously.

We’re three novels deep with Trevor Baxendale — at this point you can tell what he likes. Body horror, with an emphasis on degeneration. The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart both concerned worlds in a state of decay, with the inhabitants getting the worst of it. Eater Of Wasps continues that theme but on a much smaller scale: instead of alien planets it’s Earth, and instead of a planet-wide problem it’s a spot of bother in a quaint English village in the 1930s.

The spot of bother is, to be fair, revolting. Local wasps have somehow become intertwined with an alien artefact, causing them to swarm into people’s mouths and noses with the aim of controlling them. (We don’t go into that much detail but suffice to say it’s a “gestalt intelligence that causes genetic mutation” kind of arrangement, not “wasps driving people around like in Ratatouille”. Sadly.) This gradually causes human bodies to disintegrate, leaving a bizarre new life form in their place. If the Doctor doesn’t stop it then it will take over and/or kill everyone on Earth.

The difference in scale is a bit disorienting. Eater Of Wasps more closely resembles a nightmare version of Agatha Christie than Baxendale’s usual brand of sci-fi. This at least makes for a fun juxtaposition, and he accelerates the plot in a way you couldn’t do in a true period piece. Horrible wasp deaths occur early and more or less in plain view, the alien intelligence apparently having no truck with subtlety. Okay, it’s trying to take people over one at a time, and it successfully creates at least one spy, but otherwise it’s not doing a very good job of staying out of the papers. There is a “man vs wasp monster” set piece on top of a moving train at one point.

The downside to the smaller scale is a corresponding lack of plot. There’s no great mystery to unravel in Eater Of Wasps. There’s an alien weapon causing all the ruckus, but the people responsible for it are dead before we even get started. All that’s left is to stop the main host, Charles Rigby, before he starts sharing the love outside the village. (Once he goes “full monster” he ceases to be interesting. We are talking “calls the Doctor Doc-torrr.”) There is a secondary threat at least, a team of time agents sent to retrieve the weapon before it takes effect, or destroy the entire town to ensure it never does. This creates a bit of tension with the TARDIS crew and it eventually adds a ticking clock in the finale, but there’s nothing really to unpack there either; it’s not as if it’s very surprising, for instance, that the possibility of a bomb going off becomes a race to defuse it in time. They’re quite mysterious as a group, which at least creates the possibility of following that up in later books.

Is it so terrible for a book to skimp on the plot? Well, no: excitement is its own reward, and there’s a good amount of that here. The aforementioned train sequence might be a transparent effort to get us that bit closer to 280 pages but it’s still a good bit. (Equally obvious but less good is the bit where the Doctor and co. get arrested.) There’s not a huge amount here besides the plot, though. The denizens of Marpling have a certain degree of colour and back story, such as a local rogue and a young boy with questionable parentage, but most of it fails to ignite. There’s a critical relationship for example between Rigby and the boy: it’s enough that the wasp-addled man is still on some level trying to protect his friend. But what’s actually so important there that it transcends species? It’s not made clear, especially where young Liam is terrified into silence for most of it. (And no, Rigby is not his secret dad — but wouldn’t that have been an idea?)

The future people aren’t much better. Kala is sufficiently dimensional that she considers asking the Doctor for help rather than just going through with her contingency plan. By the end of the book she’s flirting with the possibility of joining him in the TARDIS, and it doesn’t sound all that implausible. (Hell, he must have said yes to Compassion.) The other two are for various reasons less interesting, and their modus operandi is a bit hard to fathom. Sorry, I know they’re from thousands of years in the future and time travellers be aloof and all that, but nuking Britain in 1933 is going to have big enough consequences that they might feel it too, despite their casual attitude here. Presumably they have ancestors who would be better off without any radioactive fallout? Or suddenly not existing at all due to the paradox? (The whole nuclear bomb threat feels like an easy reach for extra peril. And why does it have to be a nuke?)

The closest the book gets to Doing A Thing (character-wise) is with the Doctor, specifically the callous way he is sometimes perceived, especially by Anji. “‘Pity about the plants.’ ‘Oh yeah.’ Fitz nodded sardonically. ‘Terrible shame.’ He couldn’t remember the Doctor even passing comment about the death of Tom Colton.” / “‘Anji’ll be wondering where the hell we’ve got to.’ The Doctor just glanced at Fitz for a moment, almost as if he was trying to remember who Anji was.” / “No wonder you were so keen for us to go! You were worried about the flipping fragment, not me!” / “[Gleave] found the Doctor’s clinical detachment rather disconcerting; he couldn’t detect even a shred of sympathy.” / “He doesn’t care, though, Fitz. He does the things he does simply because he can, not because he really cares. It’s just something for him to do. Like a distraction, or a game.” / “All that sympathy for a few crushed wasps, and not one mention of Hilary Pink. Taking care not to risk harming the monster that Charles Rigby had become, but allowing him to keep Liam Jarrow hostage.” / “I just wish you’d get a bit more involved sometimes.”

Anji, and the various other characters in the mix there are not exactly wrong: the Doctor can appear flippant. He can be very interested in mint humbugs but not all that bothered about a dead man. The thing is though, it’s not exactly a fresh take on the character — and Eater Of Wasps barely does anything with it anyway. So he’s a bit aloof. So what? There’s an autopsy scene in this, and the mortician is aloof too. Besides, the Doctor clearly does care about stopping Rigby from doing more harm, or from becoming a monster with no way back. Anji gets a few opportunities to grouse about this but, like Liam, she also spends a chunk of the story as a mute hostage — not exactly time well spent. Then when she puts him on the spot at the end it’s easily dismissed: despite complaining that he misled the alien intelligence that was trying to kill them all (oh, what a bounder!) she is able to live with it after all and so nips off for a bath. It’s a bit of a nil-nil draw, characterisation-wise.

Plot and character are pretty threadbare, then. (I’ve barely even mentioned Fitz. Reader, he puts in the legal definition of an appearance.) What Eater Of Wasps does unequivocally have going for it is of course that Baxendale standard, the yuck: people falling apart, nasty things happening to them. He’s clearly landed on something good (I use the term advisedly) with the invasive wasps. It’s an arresting and unpleasant image, no doubt… but that’s sort of it. Not only is the horror of wasps-in-your-mouth repeated so often that it threatens to become normal, it doesn’t then speak to anything else, since the wasps are technically benign and they don’t have much of a plan. They don’t feel representative of something. And it never evolves into something greater or more horrible, apart from Rigby turning into your standard monster-man at the end. I frequently had the image of Baxendale spotting a wasp crawl into someone’s mouth and trying to spin a whole novel out of just that. The relative complexity or world-building of The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart is missed.

I’m aware that expectations such as complex plotting, thoughtful character work or identifiable themes are relative to the reader and potentially quite unfair, since most readers aren’t in the silly position of reading all the books in order, or even just reading lots of Doctor Who. They might not want or need that much variety, a bit of grisly fun like this might hit the spot just fine for a casual reader — it wouldn’t be the first time that they’ve aimed to produce just that. Eater Of Wasps has a similar skill for pacing to something like Vanishing Point, and it would make another decent showcase for Doctor Who stories that deal with monsters and whip along in good order. I enjoyed it in the moment. It’s just that, since we’re bringing it up, Vanishing Point also had unrealised potential. Eater Of Wasps has an icky front cover and novelises it.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #90 – The Shadow In The Glass by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#41

The Shadow in the Glass

By Justin Richards and Stephen Cole

NB: I read the 2015 reprint for this, titled Shadow In The Glass (no “The”) by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards (in that order). Were those deliberate changes or did somebody jot it down wrong? I don’t know, so I’ll stick with the original title and order of authors.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: when a novel didn’t quite come together as planned, BBC Books were left with a gap to fill at short notice. Looking at you Millennium Shock, The Banquo Legacy and (I’m pretty sure) Grave Matter. This time Justin Richards — for it is usually he — also enlisted Stephen Cole, late of this parish, perhaps feeling that another editor (and fellow what-do-we-do-now sufferer) would speed things up. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to do another one of these by himself.

It’s tempting to look for signs of cobbled-togetherness in the finished book, especially when there’s an introduction telling us how it all came about. I think it’s safe to say they didn’t spend too long coming up with ideas: Richards had just read a book about the death of Hitler, turn that around and there’s your central premise. They felt like the Brigadier made sense in that context, so in he went. The Sixth Doctor hadn’t met him properly on screen yet, so he was recruited as well. Throw in a crashed spaceship for added Doctor Who points and you’re nearly all the way to The Shadow In The Glass.

This is not, however, their first rodeo. It has a certain economy of pace, I suspect because of that time-crunch: there are multiple occasions when the Doctor could sort something out just by hopping in the TARDIS, so dammit, that’s what he does, and to hell with the many occasions when only a much more long-winded plan would have done! But Richards and Cole (or Richards, or Cole) make a virtue of this, using the Doctor’s apparently casual time travels to create and solve a puzzle as they go. Similarly the premise is quite a straightforward one: is Hitler back from the dead, and if so, how could that be? But instead of launching into a protracted and noisy modern war with the Nazis the authors dive into the mystery aspect, turning The Shadow In The Glass into a fact-finding mission. There’s a wider sense of economy here, of taking their somewhat meagre grab bag of ingredients and thoroughly tasting each one. Get two editors in a room, I suppose.

It’s a peculiarly light book for something with Hitler in it, or it often felt that way to me. The alien plot has very knowing echoes of The Dæmons, a perennial UNIT Family favourite: there’s even a dangerous heat barrier surrounding a village, watched over by none other than Sgt Osgood! There’s also a suggestion that the Brigadier — retired, getting on a bit, not yet rejuvenated via Happy Endings — just fancies a bit of a lark. “Did some invisible imps near the Dorset coast count as a crisis? The week stretched emptily ahead. The Brigadier decided they did.” And so he gets, haranguing some lowly military men, investigating a crashed spaceship, nipping off to Russia (!) on reconnaissance, and making a few TARDIS trips to meet Hitler, at one point handing him a half-eaten sausage roll. (At another, smirking at the dictator’s historic demise.) The Brigadier is at his most avuncular in this one, not really trying for the action heroics of old. It feels like a mature understanding of where the character and actor were at. However, it’s not entirely Christmassy: when the time comes to fight, the Brigadier does so brutally and without apology. But more on the climax later.

It’s a memorably strong book for the Sixth Doctor as well. Travelling without companions — BBC Books no longer tell us when these are set, but we can easily put this between The Trial Of A Timelord and Business Unusual — he’s also in a gentler mood, albeit still a dizzyingly proactive one, again maybe because the book had one eye on its watch at all times. In need of answers about a wartime Nazi raid on a British town, he elects simply to take part in it, first calling in a favour from Churchill to smuggle him into France, then ingratiating himself with the high command. There are obvious moral questions here, unavoidable when the Germans shoot multiple British soldiers, but on that subject the Doctor takes a pragmatic, and not entirely painless view of history: “Would Churchill have the British reinforcements waiting? Would the raid be repulsed? … There was no sense angonising over what he should and shouldn’t do. Like a sleeping man can cheat an alarm call by incorporating it into his dream, as a fire alarm or a ringing telephone, so Time itself could effortlessly sublimate the tampering of even the most flagrant meddlers, such as himself. There was a simple elegance to the way it responded to such stimulus; efficiently mending its torn web, unthinking, again and again, like a spider.” It’s a useful (if slightly mixed!) panacea to such activities as hobnobbing with Hitler, but it’s one that he’ll come to regret by the end.

I suspect the book is only as light as it is because the threat mostly keeps to the shadows. The monsters, literally so: as the title suggests they live much of their lives in reflections or silhouettes. (This approach is honestly much creepier than having them skulk about in earnest.) Hitler, if it is he, is not yet ready to reveal himself to the world, which saves the writers a lot of fuss. Only a journalist, Claire Aldwych, knows about this; she enlists the Doctor and the Brigadier to help after a fellow reporter is seemingly murdered for his discovery. Since the roof has yet to blow off this situation Richards and Cole can keep the scale relatively small. (I know that sounds wrong in a story with aliens, Hitler and impromptu trips to Russia, but you’d be surprised how much of it happens while Claire is waiting for the kettle to boil.)

Claire is a memorable, irreverent presence, clearly filling the space where a companion would otherwise have gone. (I suspect the authors wanted to give the spotlight to the two male characters instead, since they never had one on screen. That or they just couldn’t be arsed writing for Peri or Mel.) Claire is not exactly likeable, or rather she’s goal-oriented to a point where I suspect the Doctor would have refused her coming aboard the TARDIS if she’d asked. Her nose is always pointed at news, even if it’s dangerous and even if it’s found by dishonest means. She also has a few mildly eyebrow-raising moments that I couldn’t help thinking of as blots in her copybook, such as patting the Brigadier on the bum and calling the TARDIS arriving “an awful noise.” (Saints preserve us!) It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the book finds a less than happy ending for Claire — but maybe I’m reading too much into that. Claire is more or less an innocent in the grand scheme of things, and the climax is shocking because of that.

The book doesn’t have much in the way of themes. Be fair, Richards and Cole weren’t trying to win a Booker Prize here — The Shadow In The Glass is mostly aimed at giving you the coffee-at-2am feel of a paranoid conspiracy, probably because that’s how it was written. But there is a tendency towards things not being what they seem. The crashed aliens, the Vvormak, are altogether creepy, and their quest to repair the spacecraft takes several human lives — but they’re still not as evil as they appear. You spend the whole book trying to figure out the crazy Venn diagram of “crashed aliens plus rejuvenated Hitler,” but that ends up not being quite the grand conspiracy it seemed. (Nazis, you would do well to remember, are crazy people. Their plans may contain barking mad assumptions that visiting aliens don’t know about.) The explanation for “Hitler in the modern day” is also a lot simpler than I would have guessed — I was looking in the wrong place entirely, as were the characters.

But then, after a novel that mostly felt like a spirited “what if” that occasionally takes place in a comfy abode, it becomes very serious indeed. It doesn’t feel like cheating to switch up the tone like that: it would have been disingenuous to write a book about that person, treat his being as a somewhat frivolous thought exercise and at no point present the horror of what he was. (Although the book does offer some challenging moments of sympathy too.) The final stretch in Hitler’s bunker, as we settle once and for all what occurred there, kills off multiple characters in very nasty ways. Despite that, there is a grim satisfaction as the puzzle pulls together; at one moment I actually looked up and went “ohhh!” realising a puzzle piece had not yet been accounted for and therefore what it was going to be. A malevolent character says “Perfect” at the possible killing of another, and from a structural point of view he is sadly correct.

I don’t know if it was Richards or Cole driving the time travel shenanigans — it’s too easy to compare it to Richards’ The Sands Of Time, apparently people are always wrongly assuming who wrote what here — but The Shadow In The Glass is definitely at the stronger end of Doctor Who novels using that format. It doesn’t rely on it too much, and then it makes a virtue of it. Time, as the Doctor reflected earlier, will make things fit no matter what; the ending gives a tremendous sense of time as an implacable and amoral force beyond the Doctor’s control. Suddenly you see that it has drawn together inexorably through the whole book, trapping several unwitting characters within. It’s a good way to stamp some meaning onto a satisfying, but otherwise slightly B-Movie endeavour.

And yeah, not to get all dismissive right at the end but The Shadow In The Glass is — like its aliens — a little bit ephemeral. I’m already having trouble remembering some of it. I think that’s just the “get it in before the deadline” of it all. With books like this the authors are probably just hoping to get away with it. While it does occasionally threaten to evaporate — such as the bits that resemble a Dæmons re-run — The Shadow In The Glass still for the most part resembles something they meant to do from the start.

7/10