#57
Heritage
By Dale Smith
It’s difficult to talk about this one without spoiling it. Heritage revolves around something bad happening to a friend of the Doctor’s. A third of it goes by without revealing who it is, so it feels a little unsportsmanlike to name them in a review.
On the other hand Heritage isn’t really like Who Killed Kennedy, Eternity Weeps or Bullet Time. Those all featured a familiar character meeting an unhappy end, but it was just one ingredient of the plot, a tragic outcome that carried extra shock points because we knew the victim. Eternity Weeps, for example, had plenty of tragedy going on already; the added death was just a way of telling you that the Doctor isn’t going to wave a magic wand this time.
Heritage takes a more measured approach. There’s been a death on this dusty planet — two, really — and everyone is going to feel it for 280 pages. It’s Doctor Who in the form of a Western, where the characters fill the roles of archetypes. There’s a powerful, malignant man in control of the town. Psychotic killers for hire. Good men rendered apathetic with guilt. A blameless child. A vacuum filled by the innocent dead. And strolling into town, a stranger whom the villains hardly regard at all — but we know to be an “avenging angel, hiding behind the skin of a man.” A Man With No Name.
Perhaps the book was at a disadvantage with me because I already knew who the victim was. (A friend told me years before I had any interest in it.) And yet, all that foreknowledge really does is place the reader in the same position as the Doctor. It’s the Seventh, who after all doesn’t really do “caught by surprise”, who has come to Heritage to confirm a state of affairs he already seems sure of. He’s listless, he’s been putting it off; Ace is worried about him long before she sees a photo of the victim. There is a dread to Heritage that builds and builds. Who can it be? And then eventually — surely it can’t be true? (Or if you’ve been spoiled: please let me have misunderstood!)
There is a simplicity and a focus to it that I couldn’t help appreciating after so many books with subplots and characters galore. Those aren’t bad things but variety is always nice, and Heritage is a change of pace — quite literally, where the plot takes place over a day. The whole thing being absolutely drenched in its theme also felt like something a bit different. You could argue that it’s a bit too drenched and too simple, with the framework clearly recalling films like Once Upon A Time In The West and characters like the rum-soaked Sheriff having only one way they can go. But that didn’t bother me. It just felt like a Doctor Who novel with a clear sense of purpose.
In short, while I am still not a fan of the “kill off an established character” trope Heritage at least does it in a way that I think works. How and why this event came to pass is critical to the story, its characters and its themes. The absence of the dead character is felt at all times. You can’t accuse it of just going for shock value: the Doctor and Ace grow from the experience.
Heritage likely has the New Adventures to thank for some of that. You can easily spot them in references to Adjudicators or a “goddess” instead of “god”, and the heavy emphasis on the Doctor’s otherworldly and unstoppable nature which derives more from the NAs than his telly adventures. But there’s also a sense of the here-and-now with BBC Books, what with a gun-toting Cetacean (dolphin in a walker), and more significantly Dale Smith weaving all this into the ongoing narrative of Mike Tucker’s Prime Time. The Doctor knows that Ace is going to die and he doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I can’t change what I know to have happened. If I see you die, Ace. If I hold your body in my arms…” Because of that we get to see different sides to his character, so not just the dizzying force of nature who barely needs to lift a finger but also a frightened man who can’t bear to wield any power. “Sometimes, all I want to do is play the spoons in a jazz band, and pull ferrets from my trousers to make children smile.”
In a succession of quite chocolate-box PDAs (which is something I like about them!) a character arc feels significant. The Doctor has a good one here, rediscovering a sense of urgency that beats anything like guilt or fear into second place. “He reminded me what evil is, and he reminded me that it has to be fought, no matter what the consequences. Evil cannot prevail.” When we get to see the Doctor at full blast after all that it’s more satisfying than if it had just been his default setting. “‘I see you’ve even got an Emra Cradle — I haven’t seen one of those in centuries. What else is there?’ Wakeling spun back to face the Doctor, and found himself staring down the business end of a ripped and tattered umbrella. The Doctor’s expression was grim, his eyes hooded like a predator’s. Suddenly, they were alone in the universe, eyes in eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ intoned the Doctor, ‘a murderer.’”
Ace has an arc of her own, as the Doctor’s initial lack of interest in getting involved leaves her to pick up the slack, at times angrily. She often considers her roots, what would have become of her if she’d never met him, how far she’s come under his tutelage. “She wanted to lash out at Lee, just to make the feeling go away. To make him realise she wasn’t a little girl any more. That’s what the old Ace would’ve done. Instead she snatched up her rucksack and flung it over her shoulder with slightly more effort than was necessary. Not as satisfying, perhaps, but a whole lot more sociable.”
She and the Doctor are a force to be reckoned with by the end of this, yet they still want to help others — even the irredeemable bad guys. I haven’t checked, but I strongly suspect Heritage was written just for them; it wouldn’t make as much sense with a different Doctor/companion combo. (This is where I find out it was originally meant for the Fifth Doctor and Turlough.) If true, again there’s that sense of purpose, not a book that’s just using whatever was to hand in the toy box. It’s their best writing in the PDAs so far.
The creeping tension followed by swift justice is of course very satisfying — well, it worked for all those Westerns. Dale Smith does wonders with this right from the start, as the guilty denizens regard the Doctor’s incoming shuttle as a new sun growing in size — a sign of impending doom. The plot’s major revelations are held back at just the right length, although eagle eyes might surmise some facts just from a little girl’s hairstyle. The chapter where the truth comes out is a necessity but it’s also an opportunity to get creative, as several characters unburden themselves at once to different audiences, the reader jumping from thread to thread. There are “quotes” at the start of chapters that offer tantalising glimpses of where things are going.
It’s well-written enough that it’s also satisfying just to inhabit, looking at all these characters under a microscope and feeling as trapped in their humdrum world as they are. That sense of crumminess and claustrophobia is of course part of their shameful motive. You’ve also got the adorable robot “Fussies” whizzing around cleaning things — and they also relate to something central to the story, ensuring that although they add to the overall sense of world-building they’re not just cute incidental details. Where, quite simply, has Dale Smith been all this time?
I’m hard pressed to nitpick Heritage, a book with a solid grasp of what each element is doing here. If I absolutely had to then I might say that villains Ed and Christa perhaps take the archetype thing to an extreme, or that I’m reasonably sure Bernard the Cetacean’s final scene is missing. (Did Smith hit the page limit?) At times I didn’t really like Heritage, because I’m sentimental and I don’t want a familiar character to be dead. But I’ve got to appreciate purpose and intention and it has those. Even when it kills off minor characters it is sat with, it is felt. The book honours its departed character well enough that it doesn’t feel like a repeat of “well, no one’s gonna miss Dodo”, but if it’s a dealbreaker for you then it can easily be consigned to the not-canon bin. I think Heritage is worth the gut-wrench.
8/10
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