#59
Camera Obscura
By Lloyd Rose
Sabbath. His continual manipulations. The Doctor’s lost heart, and his diminished state. Fitz and Anji’s stress about all of the above. Lloyd Rose isn’t mucking about: Camera Obscura addresses all of it.
Not that we’re done here. Sabbath is still out there at the end, and the Doctor’s return to a more stable place is still ongoing. But Camera Obscura is a very satisfying update in the meantime.
Probably my favourite thing about it is the way the characters seem annoyed or frustrated by the same stuff that’s been bothering me. The Doctor has absolutely had it with Sabbath’s 4D chess moves, and tells him so: “Why don’t we just take it as read, and I’ll go off and do a lot of work and then you can come in at the end and tell me it was all your idea.” Sabbath has seemed one step ahead for a while now and that’s very much paused this week, as the Doctor gets in his face and goads him: “[He] suddenly stretched out across [Sabbath’s papers] like a cat taking over a computer keyboard.” / “I just came to get on your nerves. They are your nerves, aren’t they? Haven’t borrowed them as well?”
There’s nothing wrong per se with having a weakened Doctor and using an apparently superior foe to drive that home, but this is still Doctor Who and if he’s going to be ineffectual all the time then eventually it will become something else. Camera Obscura lets him get his groove back, and the resulting Doctor/Sabbath dynamic is thrilling. I’ve never seen the Eighth Doctor this furious, or Sabbath this on edge. That’s not to say the Doctor cows him into submission completely: Sabbath is still a powerful and self-righteous figure who (inadvertently, then deliberately) saves the Doctor’s life. But the playing field is more level now, as it should be.
The redressed characterisation goes both ways. Rose is clear about Sabbath’s pragmatism and the lack of a figurative moustache to twirl; he believes in what he’s doing. The two clash over their outlooks on time which helpfully lays out their conflict: “‘You think it’s either your kind of order or else it’s chaos. Why shouldn’t time be like music?’ ‘Very pretty. And what if you’re wrong, and every trip you so blithely take pulls out another thread in time’s warp?’ ‘And what if you’re wrong, and in paring down time’s possibilities you strangle reality?’” / “[Sabbath] seems to have the strangest ideas about how time works. I don’t think he’s got it right at all.”
Rose also highlights the physiological bond between the two, aka the stolen heart. This pays huge dividends for the plot, as we find out that the Doctor — while effectively mortal — is kept from dying thanks to his second heart living in Sabbath. I definitely let out an “oh no, not again” when he nearly got himself killed in this, as it’s definitely become a trope in the post-Adventuress era, but it’s a lightning rod for the two ersatz Time Lords in this as it pushes them both along as characters. The Doctor knows this keeps happening to him — you might say he’s had it with that, too — and is testing the boundaries of life and death, but he’s also unstable and doubtless still has some self-loathing going on. Sabbath is intrigued by the link at first, but for one thing it means he’ll have to see more of the Doctor, and for another he’s increasingly disgusted by what this otherworldly nuisance represents. In the end he gives up the heart, killing it at last — which looks to be the very thing that will let the Doctor recover. Progress! Movement! An underlining of who these people are and what they want! It’s like being back in the Blum and Orman glory days.
And speaking of the Sam team, Rose is great with the companions in this. The Doctor-Anji-Fitz dynamic is once again at its peak (it was also great in History 101), in particular Anji’s attitude of an infuriated older sister. She’s quick to call the Doctor an idiot for getting himself in danger, and she makes him painfully aware that he doesn’t know what it’s like to sit around hoping he’ll recover. At one point she tells herself that she will absolutely go home after all this if the Doctor survives — a moment of total vulnerability. But her indignation can be up there with the Doctor’s at times, as she brutally rips strips off his would-be assassin near the end, and Sabbath too, which was so satisfying to read. (Sabbath also gets some good old fashioned shade off her. “And that name! ‘Sabbath.’ Like a comic book villain. He probably thought that sounded cool too. I’ll bet his real name’s Melvin or something.” Yeah, get him!)
Fitz, good old reliable pal that he is, seems to be experiencing his own growing pains. He’s aware of not fitting into Victorian London in a way that suggests his usual bag of tricks might be running low; given the opportunity to attend a lecture about other forms of exploration, completely separate to the plot, he strongly considers it. But his loyalty is still there in spades, as he faces down an apparently homicidal Doctor urging him to leave him alone. I got the sense that Fitz, like the Doctor, was testing his boundaries here.
There’s heaps of character stuff in Camera Obscura and it’s all excellent. The plot is a different beast. Continuing a theme from The City Of The Dead, Rose has written another story that isn’t your typical A-to-B science fiction work, although it’s notably more sci-fi and less magic than her last one. The Doctor has detected a time disturbance in Victorian London. So has Sabbath. Both of them are investigating weird goings on that might be related to it. And that’s it for a while: there’s lots of atmosphere and oddity but not a lot of direction. There’s a curiously successful spirit medium with multiple personalities, and a magician with an impossible trick. What could be the link? And what do either of these things really matter?
Rose gets a lot out of the macabre trappings, such as an incredible technology that’s somehow reliant on mirrors, and a magician whose grand finale recalls Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. (The movie wasn’t out yet.) The weird goings on all trace back to the time disturbance, but you get the overall sense that Rose is exploring each weird idea in its own way; they seem only loosely connected at times. It doesn’t feel like a typical Doctor Who story in that way, but then as with a few recent books (including Rose’s last) that fits with the overall shape of the Eighth Doctor range at this time, more holistic and less rigid. The trade-off is an arguable lack of page-turning plot, but oh well: the Doctor’s various near-misses provide the missing jeopardy, and the damaged people he meets are all reflections of what he’s going through — there’s even a recurring theme of people being split into eighths. It all serves a purpose.
Style is a very memorable part of Camera Obscura, with Rose pushing it to some warped places that recall the New Adventures. There’s some body horror involving monstrous limbs and a toaster once the villain is revealed, and a sequence where Death is personified; this, as well as a subsequent scene needles at the Doctor’s past in ways that he no longer understands but we do, including some mental cameos from former Doctors. All of that recalls Virgin, which feels appropriate in a meta way when he’s casting about for his identity. In amongst all that though, there are moments of sudden violence and horror that stand out all the more for their conciseness, such as the Doctor helping the Angel Maker to complete her grim task, the private life of Octave, and the eventual fate of Dr Chiltern. Rose displays great range here.
Despite being a macabre story full of heavy introspection, pulse-racing indignation and varying shades of gothic horror it’s somehow lots of fun as well. The Doctor’s impish mischief-making against Sabbath is like letting the air back into the room after several standoffish books, and Rose is quick to underline the TARDIS team’s serious traumas with their playful brand of sibling warmth. The Doctor is in a better place at the end of this, seemingly recapturing the unusual magic of the Time Lords right up to the final page and echoing, very neatly, the obsession with his lone heartbeat at the start. Apart from the odd nagging typo (will we never be rid of them?) it’s a book of tremendous poise and intent which extends, I think, to its fairly minimal plot. It’s a pity Lloyd Rose didn’t write any more EDAs after this one, but Camera Obscura is a good note to end on: one of those load-bearing entries like Alien Bodies or Unnatural History that manages to be a good time as well. I hope the other writers take the right lessons from it.
9/10
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