#49
The City of the Dead
By Lloyd Rose
New author! New female author! New female very good author! It’s like several Christmases come at once.
Prior to this I didn’t know anything about Lloyd Rose, but it’s clear that this is not her first rodeo. There’s no awkward first novel vibes: she brings her setting, a particularly dank and magical New Orleans, vividly to life, while the prose and dialogue sparkle confidently. I didn’t jot a lot of it down because I was having a good time, but I took a minute to marvel at this confident piece of repetition: “He was having trouble seeing, as if there was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room. He squinted. There was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room.” Also this tidy observation: “He turned and pushed open the window, as if he needed the common sense of fresh air.” And this epic nugget about the city’s struggle against the elements: “Water and wind and heat would win in the end. The river wanted the land back. In the rain, the old city melted towards death.” Fiendish stuff.
It is also a novel of ideas. Oodles of them in fact — but fair warning, they mostly concern magic, which is an itchy subject matter for Doctor Who. But that’s a sensible enough basis for a story set in New Orleans, and though The City Of The Dead veers unapologetically into that realm — with no “what look like magic creatures are actually Footlejibbets from Arcteriax III” caveats, magic is just magic and you’ll have to lump it — Rose does it with enough conviction to sell it.
Anyway, the magic rites in this rely on elemental beings that aren’t so different from Dæmons or Eternals from Classic Who — they’re inexplicable, yes, but only because the Doctor isn’t trying to explain them. (You know what his memory’s like; he probably can’t do it any more.) Elsewhere there is a genuine ring of sci-fi to a brain-bending artefact that interacts with the Doctor’s timeline out of sequence — Rose singles out The Curse Of Fatal Death in her About The Author bit, and now that you mention it that bit does pong pleasantly of Moffat. On the flip side there’s a sequence of straight up deus ex machina magic to rescue the Doctor from certain doom, but a) it’s a beautifully written, quasi-romantic fantasy interlude, I’m not made of stone, and b) it’s not that much weirder than the New Adventures at their trippiest. I didn’t feel cheated.
Setting, good, ideas, convincing, so far huzzah — but where The City Of The Dead really goes for broke is with its characters. Rose’s New Orleans is a weird little place populated by strange people, running the gamut from the grotesque (awkward artist Teddy Acree and his voluptuous, perhaps too supportive wife) to the ridiculous (Dupre, a buffoonish and self-aggrandising tour guide) to the disarmingly likeable (Rust, a cop who instinctively pals along with the Doctor like Lieutenant Kinderman from The Exorcist), and even the flat out magical (spoilers). They feel like a self-contained eco-system and there is always a strong sense of who’s in the scene.
And the regulars are better. Fitz, just to rip the plaster off, comes in last place just because of how the action is dealt out, but Rose still underlines his absurd “big brother, little brother” relationship with the Doctor, which then highlights the Doctor’s fewer-than-usual number of marbles at this point in the run. Fitz and Anji note that he battles evil but is too fundamentally good to really understand it, which leaves him potentially blind to threats. (Which might come into play later in the book, maybe. Ahem.) Fitz, in all his scruffy glory, isn’t quite so enamoured of strangers, plus he knows the Doctor of old, so (as per books like EarthWorld) he wants to protect him from himself. That’s apt, and it’s also consistent, which is an all too rare treat in these scattershot-author novels. For good measure, Fitz’s cheery and slightly inappropriate sense of humour gets the better of him throughout.
Anji feels like she’s finding her place here. Rose is smart enough to let modern day Earth hit the displaced companion hard, and wily enough to let Anji wriggle out of simply catching a flight home from here — Anji reasons that it’s a year or so after she left, so better luck next time I guess, which feels like very quietly protesting too much. Her concern for the Doctor’s wellbeing gets more obvious as the book progresses, just as her attempt to let him worry about himself for a while quickly falls apart; you can feel her starting to belong in the team. Even her banter with Fitz, well, fits; the two give as good as they get, particularly when the Doctor sends them on a fact finding mission that quickly spirals into grave-robbing. (She really cares about Fitz too, as she demonstrates when she suggests he stop smoking out of genuine concern that he’s assuming the TARDIS will fix lung cancer.) Anji also, saints be praised, considers a romantic dalliance in a post-Dave world, although this only amounts to a few lovely dinners and a bit of snogging. We skip the aftermath, which as it turns out would have been worth talking about, but perhaps that’s also a sign that she’s toughening up.
Saving the best for last: the Doctor. The much-repeated reason for giving him amnesia (again) was to make him easier to write for. I don’t know if that was crucial to Rose’s understanding of the character, although it is crucial to his journey in the book, but however she got there The City Of The Dead is one of the most compelling depictions of the character yet.
The Doctor in this is more recognisably a person in his own right, not so much a mythical being who can do anything. When we first see him he is unusually vulnerable: in bed, at least partially naked, having nightmares. That thread continues throughout, with references to him being “off his game” as he misreads situations and — without getting too into spoilers — gets captured and tortured more than usual. He has that innocence that sets Fitz and Anji’s minds worrying, but perhaps less of it than they imagine, as e.g. he finds Dupre loathsome and is repelled by Teddy’s offers to paint him alongside his wife. He’s diplomatic but also capable of putting that up as a front — he’s not necessarily that nice underneath.
And speaking of what’s underneath, he’s not okay. The City Of The Dead focuses on his amnesia, or specifically the sense of what he has lost and what he thinks it might be, more convincingly than any other book post-Ancestor Cell. There are several references to forgotten misdeeds not being in any real sense gone or forgiven, or so he thinks, as well as some typically well-put moments where he is able to repeat information that he no longer understands, like Artron energy being a thing. There’s a terrific dream sequence that suggests his past selves are complicit in his amnesia, and by the time we hit the climax it’s clear that the Doctor’s guilt has been a major factor in his nightmares and his actions. It’s also rather neatly expressed in the villain plot, which handily is about reconciling the past and putting demons to rest, coincidentally in a novel set in New Orleans surrounded by graves. I mean, come on, that’s good.
By rights this should be one of my favourite BBC Books, and I think it’s up there, but I can’t claim it’s perfect. The plot doesn’t have much forward motion, being propelled mainly by a murder investigation that nobody seems to care about. Characters investigate things more or less on the off chance that they’re related to something else, and otherwise they tend to go on dates or, for example, get kidnapped by (possibly unrelated) nutters. There’s a genuinely good surprise near the end that knocked me for six, but I wonder how much of that was the lack of real detective work to lead us to it. The “Thanks” bit at the end suggests that a lot of work went into making this even resemble a plot, and I don’t think it’s too cheeky to suggest that this is still the author’s weak point. I’m fairly bad at maintaining concentration sometimes, so maybe it was just that — we’ve lived through less distracting times — but the loose plotting, combined with Rose’s sometimes intangible ideas, can make The City Of The Dead a slow read. And on intangibility: there is a fair bit of meta-magical “huh?”ery in this, which I don’t exactly mind — I’ve already defended one of the novel’s biggest diversions — but there were moments where I simply wasn’t sure what just happened.
There’s room for improvement, then. (Arguably, as I’m sure some readers loved all the weird stuff without caveats.) Nevertheless, the good bulldozes the bad. I’ve not even mentioned the keenly female perspective on things like dating, and the Doctor in particular; Rose, like Kate Orman before her, highlights his inherent sensuality (shall we say, the Paul McGann Effect) more convincingly than her male peers. If you’re going to hire different authors then you ought to find different perspectives too, and we have that here, whilst also staying on target with the series and its ideas. I’m glad they recognised a good thing and got her back for more books. Now find more good authors.
8/10
