#46
The Year of Intelligent Tigers
By Kate Orman
She’s back! And — all together now — it’s about time.
Kate Orman has a habit of jumping into the EDAs, picking up threads and running with them. Together with Jon Blum, who somewhat co-wrote The Year Of Intelligent Tigers (but has opted to be a silent partner), she’s responsible for the best aspects of Sam Jones. She skipped the Compassion run entirely — draw your own conclusions, or perhaps she was just busy — but now that we’ve got Anji and a newly rejuvenated Eighth Doctor there’s plenty for any passing Kate Ormans to play with.
I’m willing to bet that the Doctor, in his post-exile form, is what intrigued Orman the most. The Year Of Intelligent Tigers starts off as a “holiday” story, with the gang enjoying themselves on the music-mad island paradise of Hitchemus. The Doctor is already realising his dream of joining an orchestra. It’s going well, although he struggles to contain his more virtuosic tendencies, playing solos well beyond other people’s patience. (A few interludes set during his exile — written by Blum — tie this to his now uncertain identity.)
Hitchemus is a world shared by people and, you guessed it, large cats. The people are in charge, until the tigers turn out to be a lot smarter than anyone realised — and just as organised. They take over and make their demands: they want to learn music. So they kidnap the music teachers. (It’s worth stressing that they have opposable digits, so instruments can be played.)
On the one hand this is a wild and creative idea. An attacking force that values, well, creativity above all else is not something I’ve seen before. On the other hand, it also makes things more difficult for the Doctor, at least if you take the view that this is an alien or a monster menace to be repelled: straight away he has something in common with them, a love of music.
The question of his loyalty to the tigers vs his loyalty to the humans is one that runs through the book. It’s perhaps most obviously paralleled in Doctor Who And The Silurians, another story about two forces with claims to a planet where one predates the other. As we’re doing this one in space however there is less of a bias from the audience and perhaps less of a forgone conclusion in the story. The Doctor isn’t exiled to Hitchemus so there is no assumed fealty to the people there; indeed, his sympathies lie mostly with the tigers. He notices after all that their intelligence, which comes and goes over generations, robs them of a clear history: “You don’t have a past, you don’t know your future.” Who could that remind him of?
The Doctor goes with the tigers, ostensibly to negotiate, but he soon goes native enough to learn their language. As in The Silurians his efforts are still not enough to convince all of them that he means well — just as there are humans convinced that he’s sold them out. He is an unknown quantity, furiously interested in peace but just as interested in finding out the secrets of Hitchemus. (And if you like, vicariously solving his own memory problems — although given that he at one point bellows “I hope I never remember! That’ll show them all!”, perhaps not.)
This comes to a head when a supporting character is killed by a tiger. The Doctor is not visibly moved, or at least not enough for Anji: “‘I’m so sorry —’ ‘Don’t give me that!’ she yelled into his face. He was shocked backwards, letting go of her. ‘It’s not good enough. You can’t put on the sad face — oh-I’m-so-sorry after the fact. You had a moment to be human and you stepped right past it.’” (Note that “human” is what she wants him to be — but he can’t do that, can he?) This causes Anji, already somewhat spiralling, to side wholly with the humans, potentially to the Doctor’s peril. “‘What if the Doctor happens to be in the storehouse when you blow it up?’ ‘He’s been warned,’ she said sourly.”
Orman seizes on the open wound of Anji’s situation, her displacement: “I’m a trader. What am I doing out here? I’m not supposed to do any of this!” It’s a good enough reason to make her frightened and even downright unlikeable as things escalate. As well as casually plotting the Doctor’s maybe-death, at one point she finds him broken beside a dead young tiger whom we’ve grown to like, and says miserably: “You’re crying for it?” Not loving the “it,” Anji.
She’s perhaps the face of the dilemma here — one that is presented more to the audience than to the Doctor, who after all just wants peace. Our dilemma: who should we sympathise with? We know humans and we like Anji, at least until she starts giving in to her insecurities. But the tigers, despite some Young Silurian-esque bad apples (“We own this planet. We don’t have to share it with the humans” is almost verbatim Mac Hulke) are a playful and interesting race, capable of the same artistic longings as us. They do have the prior claim, and man has subjugated them during their less intelligent generations… but then again, the humans didn’t know they had this much intelligence, and didn’t mistreat them particularly back when they were “animals”. They just didn’t grant them equal status.
I know that’s a very shaky defence. There are clear parallels with colonialism here, including the racist idea of not even considering the intelligence of the oppressed. But then to make things even more complicated — I hope I’m not reading too much into this — Anji isn’t white, nor is Quick the resistance leader, nor is Grieve the tiger expert who didn’t notice what was happening under her nose. So we’re denied even the easy visual language of the oppressive (white) humans and the long-suffering (other) indigenous population. Both sides know something about oppression, and both have good people and instigators. It refuses to be easy — a fact Orman seems well aware of with lines like “Maybe everyone else had killed one another. That would make things a lot simpler, wouldn’t it?” (Chef’s kiss, by the way, for this line: “The colony has been invaded by indigenous life forms.” That’s the whole thing in a nutshell!)
One of the few marks against this book is that I’m not totally convinced by Anji’s journey. She perhaps levels out too easily after her sudden ironic lack of humanity. Like Fitz, who feels an inevitable pull towards the music of Hitchemus and becomes a loveable hero in amongst the chaos, she considers staying here but ultimately goes with the Doctor instead — there were points earlier on where I struggled to believe that would make sense any more. Anji is perhaps won over by the Doctor’s final decision and his climactic, shock-and-awe display of power: a very Orman, almost New Adventures-y move that proves to the humans and tigers his commitment to non-partisan peace. It’s enough to win all of them over, I suppose, so why not her. (But still, Anji said some pretty nasty things there, so she’d better watch it is all I’m saying.)
Characterisation is otherwise a strong point — as you would expect from the author(s). The supporting characters of either species have their interesting ups, downs and parallels. The incongruity of the chatty, musical, thumb-having tigers quickly stops seeming absurd and becomes believable, especially where Orman throws out expressive sentences like “Bounce could taste hurricane[l” and “Lightning coiled across the sky like a map of hot blue rivers” to suggest their perspective. Longbody, an antagonistic tiger who murders a “friend” human from before the uprising, apparently without batting an eye, says: “She never even recognised me.” So maybe she felt something after all. Then shortly afterwards Karl, a prominent music teacher and prisoner, is “startled to recognise several of his [tiger] students. When had he learned to tell one tiger from another?” So maybe that isn’t so far out of reach.
Karl is worth discussing all by himself: someone swept away by the Doctor’s charms and eccentricities, clearly in love with him and, according to Orman, at it like rabbits. I’m not sure I buy that in the confines of this story, but the attraction is apparent from his end, and the Doctor’s reaction is just the same (i.e. as much or as little as you read into it) as if Karl were a woman. It’s a terrific little gender-swapped grace note that we ought to see more of, complicated marvellously when Karl makes a very unfortunate choice which cancels any tenuous future they had.
It’s the Doctor’s novel, though. Orman finds him yearning for something, a way to express himself, a need to belong somewhere, which puts him uniquely in the middle of this conflict and at odds with his friends as well as with everyone else. In the end he’s not much like any of them, but he seems to revel in that, with Anji noticing: “he wasn’t possessed, he wasn’t transformed. He was, at last, absolutely himself.” It feels like a definitive step, if not away from the amnesia thing then at least owning it. Which gives us yet another example of Orman (and to an extent Blum) confidently restating the positions of the characters and the series, putting subsequent books on a stronger footing. It’s good work, as usual. Wish they’d pestered her more often.
It’s been one of those reviews where I disappear down a theme-and-character hole, so let’s simplify it a bit: The Year Of Intelligent Tigers is a clever take on the old “whose planet is it anyway” problem, and it has a level of confidence that even bleeds into the formatting, chopping up chapters or mashing them together, giving us human perspectives and tiger ones. It’s one of those books where the writer absolutely knows what they’re doing. Despite a general avuncular coolness in the world-building, which feels like another New Adventures holdover — everyone feels loosely like a student — there are moments of darkness and some valid enough reasons not to like the Doctor or Anji, although Orman can’t bring herself to take anything away from Fitz, who is reassuringly wonderful throughout. At times I thought it could have been a longer book with more detail on the power struggles and what Hitchemus was like before the tiger uprising; the focus seems so weighted towards the tigers that I didn’t feel I knew the humans in as much depth. But I guess you can’t have everything in 280 pages. As ever with Orman, it’s a happy enough occasion to have her back, once again refusing to rest on her laurels.
8/10
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