Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #68 – Warchild by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#47

Warchild

By Andrew Cartmel

Good heavens, is that a rainbow?  The birds are singing, I can hear people bursting into song too, and – yes!  Now it’s raining gumdrops!  This can only be a novel by Andrew Cartmel, full of his characteristic vim and cheer!

Oh all right, fine.  Despite his knack for clever prose that keeps you reading at a quick pace, Cartmel is narratively known for crossing his arms and huffing until the party comes to an awkward halt.  Warhead was the first really dark New Adventure, followed by Warlock which was even more determined to leave a mark – preferably a bruise.  Cartmel’s world contains wonders and traumas, and he favours the latter.  He likes to keep the Doctor and co. in the wings, just in case you were getting too comfortable, and that has never been more apparent than in Warchild, where they barely guest star in the action.  The War Trilogy has long since gathered a principal cast of its own and they’re the ones who push the story forward.  When it deigns to move.

I’m at odds with some readers on this one, and apparently Cartmel himself.  Going by this illuminating interview from NZDWFC he wasn’t impressed with Warhead, feeling that the plot wasn’t really there and was too fragmented.  He thought Warlock was better in general, more focussed and story-driven.  It’s been almost three years since I read it (!), but I remember Warhead’s pieces falling nicely into place, whereas Warlock moved a couple of chess pieces very slowly and not far.  It also made its moral points with the finesse of a frustrated dog owner coming home to a puddle.  Warchild is mostly concerned with the middle instalment, and quite frankly, if you haven’t read it then this is not for you.  Cartmel’s second and third books seem to occupy not only the House at Allen Road, but also the odd assumption that these are the only books in the New Adventures series.  (Indeed, he’s completely forgotten the futuristic setting of Warhead, which was relatively decades ago.  Maybe all the effort to fix the environment, which was then almost beyond repair, led to them ditching hover-cars and the like?  Let’s go with that.)

Following the harrowing events of Warlock, Justine and Creed have raised three children including her son from her first husband, the psychically-empowered Vincent.  Creed still works for a shadowy government agency and while at the office he fends off his attraction to a co-worker, Amy.  Back at home he isn’t getting along with Ricky, his stepson.  Ricky is developing strange talents as he moves from school to school and is desperate to stay out of trouble.  Shadowy forces would rather he fell right into it.  Meanwhile a mysterious plague of violent dogs is tearing London apart, and Mrs Woodcott – the strange figure who showed up intermittently in Warlock, I’m still not sure who she is – “recruits” people to fight them, i.e. plucks them out of an airport if they remotely look like they can deal with the situation.  Roz is one such recruit, Creed soon joins her.  At the House in Allen Road the Doctor seems to be growing a dead(ish) Warlock character in a test tube while Bernice looks on.

I believe we were saying something about plots being too fragmented?  Warchild pulls its threads together, but even then it’s difficult to shake the randomness of a dog revolution, despite its roots being established in Warlock.  (One of the characters, Jack, literally lost his mind and it ended up in a dog.)  Cartmel takes the no-watershed-no-problem approach of the New Adventures to extremes with Roz and her new colleagues battling a never-ending onslaught of bloodthirsty animals.  It’s a curious follow-up to the intensely animal rights driven Warlock, killing as many dogs as possible; I wondered if it was meant to signal some kind of tragic retribution for how they’ve been treated, but it’s really all to get the Doctor’s attention, or it’s part of an evil scheme.  (Not massively clear which.)  And it feeds the book’s central idea of using influence to control crowds, specifically with alphas, which is Ricky’s special power.

Sure, it’s themed, but things in Dog-Land get thoroughly weird as they’re all driven by one ancient dog who occasionally stands like a person; a few others fool a motion sensor by standing on top of one another, Muppet-man-style, except with more bloodied footholds.  I’m not making this up.  Roz and her crew keep circling back to the house of a devastated flight attendant whose fiancé has been mauled, and it becomes their de facto base.  Considering this is a state of emergency it doesn’t seem to affect more than a few square miles of London, which makes Mrs Woodcott’s “conscriptions” seem even weirder.  I wanted the action to spread out a bit, but much of it takes place virtually in real time.  But then, does it, with Creed having time to do all his stuff, then get over here from the US?

It’s not a plot-heavy book, but it sure takes its time.  And that’s not to say it’s a slow read, as once again Cartmel’s prose is evocative but expedient, and the thing rollicks along.  We feel things when the characters do, including myriad unpleasant secrets, and moments of action (such as a stalled plane engine) come with absolute clarity.  It came as no surprise reading in that interview that Cartmel is a fan of Stephen King, as his writing has the same pulp pace and satisfying rush of detail, and sure enough, the same lopsidedly male-centric sexuality.  Years after rescuing Justine from a forced abortion and a life of sex slavery (“Hey kids, I got you that Doctor Who book you wanted!”), then immediately sleeping with her and ending her marriage, Creed can’t quite ignore his gorgeous co-worker or women in general.  (On a cranky parent at his son’s school: “the finest pair of firm tanned breasts that rich widowhood and elective surgery could provide.”)  His marriage is difficult – almost as if the whole thing started in the aftermath of a nightmarish ordeal when neither of them was thinking straight – but he still has time to admire Justine: “Even after all these years of snot, diapers, madness and children she still turned him on.”  /  “...Creed deliberately dropping back for a moment so he could watch her sweet ass in those black culottes...”  (The latter is followed by the slightly hmm observation that their older daughter now has the same walk.)  Even the narrative, Creed-less, takes a moment to admire a neighbour’s “spectacular breasts”.  It’s odd squaring all this with Andrew Cartmel, who has been fiercely interested in writing strong women, crafting Ace into someone with depth who can more than take care of herself.  Sex in these books is always a little conspicuous, but in Warlock and Warchild it’s frankly a bit creepy.

At least he doesn’t let anybody get away with the last-minute liaison in Warlock.  The wisdom of that decision has been in question ever since, at least somewhere in Creed’s mind, and it’s an instigator for the plot – in case you were wondering where Vincent has got to, he was devastated after those events and he’s the villain now, hoping to craft Ricky into a political weapon.  It’s not much more complicated than that, and neither is the writing, which reduces a once main character to a sneering spurned lover / bad guy stereotype, complete with monologue.  I already felt sorry for Vincent in Warlock, but the kid in Warhead deserved a more gradual finale.  In any case, it seems the jury is still out on random dangerous-situation hook ups after all, as the distraught stewardess is probably going to sleep with one of Roz’s crew, because “they’re both extremely vulnerable.  They need each other at this point and if they can help each other heal their wounds then that’s good.”  Full disclosure, her boyfriend was gored to death by the family pet, hours after proposing to her; the other guy peed himself, after what seemed like sheer pages of conversation about needing to go.  Yes, those things seem equal and this all makes sense.  Sex approved!

The book seems most centred when it’s following Ricky at school, where his bullies have the unmistakeable ring of Stephen King, complete with harrowing home lives.  (One of which comes to fruition courtesy of the ringleader’s deranged father.)  Those events are only tenuously related to the Doctor and co., with Chris posing as a Buddhist teacher and inciting trouble for Ricky just by being there, whilst also keeping an eye on him.  (This would seem a deliciously Doctorly contradiction if both those things were entirely the Doctor’s idea.)  The book builds and builds to something involving Ricky, but he’s so determined to avoid his destiny that he almost succeeds.  A scene at a train station makes creative use of his powers, as he tries to flee to a new life, relaxes for the first time in ages and sends everybody in the surrounding area to sleep.  A tense stand-off between Roz and one of Creed’s co-workers, which more or less gives us the arresting front cover, comes and goes without a lot of fuss.  The final confrontation with Vincent is left so late, and is so hasty in general, it’s like Cartmel considered not including it at all.  Things end, need you ask, with very few happy campers.

The overall feeling is that Cartmel has this cast of characters who need to progress to the next stage in their story, and oh all right, if you absolutely insist, the Doctor can be in it as well.  The Doctor claims a degree of responsibility for how it all plays out – the dog situation is about him by proxy, but then some of it’s Vincent? – but he spends a fair amount of time just pottering about in Allen Road.  Roz’s ease with violence can be said to follow her behaviour in Just War, but then it’s pretty much indistinguishable from post-Deceit Ace.  Chris hides in plain sight for much of the novel, and after two books Bernice somehow continues to evade Cartmel’s interest altogether.

It’s not an especially enjoyable experience for anybody involved, and I don’t want to sound like any sad or unpleasant story is an automatic fail with me; you can’t have light without dark.  But there’s predominantly one mood in Cartmel’s Doctor Who books – two if you include “make it as little to do with Doctor Who as possible”, or so it seems by now – and that’s grim.  This approach worked best for me the first time, when he had (for my money, if not everybody’s) a decent plot to ladle it over.  Warchild is more like a collection of surly new bits than a new story, and as such it doesn’t leave me with much to think about, or apparently to say.  It’s less of a drag than Warlock.  I’d rather read Warhead again.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #41 – Warlock by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#34
Warlock
By Andrew Cartmel

Certain authors have reputations among fandom, perhaps for their use of continuity (Gary Russell), their mostly comic work (Gareth Roberts), or for advancing the range and what it can do (Paul Cornell).  If I had to pin something on Andrew Cartmel’s work, besides his obvious depth of interest in the Doctor and Ace (based on his years of experience with the TV show), it would be a kind of vivid unpleasantness.  Warhead was the first New Adventure to really embrace the darker aspects of Doctor Who, pushing the show away from kids and towards the forward-thinking, rebellious young adults Cartmel wanted to encourage to begin with.  It embraced cyberpunk and environmental issues in a well-plotted, exciting story, and I wasn’t really sure why some people had a problem with it; Cartmel’s prose was evocative, his world was engrossing, he understood his characters and the thing moved at a pace.  Yes, there was the odd disturbing dream sequence, certainly a few deaths, and the world he had constructed was utterly downbeat, but it was never excessive.  There was hope and there was victory.

But now I’ve read Warlock, which is presumably the one they were talking about.  You thought Warhead was unpleasant?  Bless.  Warhead is Cartmel delivering Christmas presents in full Santa outfit compared to this.  Warlock is a novel so determined to push boundaries of taste that at one point (if you’ve read it, perhaps you can guess) I wanted to throw the thing across the room.

On some level, it’s my fault.  I’ve decided to read all the New and Missing Adventures, the good, the bad and that other one, to get the full experience. And I will, but that means I will come across books which, in the ordinary run of things, I’d simply stop reading.  I’ve come close a few times due to sheer incomprehensible prose (Time’s Crucible, Strange England), and goodness knows these books can be boring and/or pointless, but – and I accept this is sheer personal taste – Warlock was too miserable for me.  I’m pretty sure some of it was utterly gratuitous as well.

Like Warhead, Warlock is ostensibly a soapbox.  That’s not to say it doesn’t have a plot, or that you should roll your eyes at its message, but it is about the message.  We’ve done the environment; now we’re onto the war on drugs, and clinical trials on animals.  These issues aren’t unrelated, since pharmaceuticals are a major reason for animal testing, but it still felt like Warlock was fighting two slightly random battles at once.

The title refers to a new drug on the market which causes some forms of telepathy.  (It does a few other things as the plot requires.)  You can probably guess why the Doctor is investigating it – and you will have to, as he doesn’t say so until the last 20 pages.  He dispatches Bernice to infiltrate IDEA, an American anti-drugs organisation.  Meanwhile Ace has fallen in with a couple of animal rights activists, Jack and Shell, both habitual warlock users, who are intent on taking down a local animal testing facility.  Some of the tests involve warlock.

The novel hops between the two stories, but only for a short time between Bernice and Ace.  Benny witnesses a drug bust gone awry, carried out in spectacular, if slightly protracted style by Cartmel.  (There’s a moment where the “spirit of warlock”, i.e. a sort of wind that is generated by its users, travels around the room searching for a narc.  If you can forgive me being mindful of the book’s length, this goes on a bit.)  Afterwards she’s only there to gather information on warlock, but IDEA suss her out almost immediately, rendering her useless.  Luckily she escapes back to the Doctor’s HQ, the infamous House On Allen Road.  Incredibly, this no doubt exciting sequence occurs between chapters.  And that’s basically it for Bernice.  Cartmel writes her well, but plot-wise, she’s phoning it in.  After her contribution the IDEA portion of Warlock follows Creed, a burnt-out cop working for them.

Ace has more to do, or at least a higher page-count.  Unwittingly captured by the people running the tests, Ace and her new friends find themselves victims of a warlock drug trial.  Their pets – notably Chick, a cat the Doctor delivered – are swept up as well, so they can be experimented on.  And it’s around here that you can probably guess why I had a hard time with it.  Am I against animal testing?  You bet.  So is Cartmel, or he wouldn’t devote so much energy to the suffering of animals, and the deliberate cruelty of their torturers.  (One of them, Tommy, is inevitably a psychopath.  There are probably a fair few in the trade.)  I’m 100% with the message he’s sending out here, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit through pages and pages of unspeakable things happening to animals.  If anything, I didn’t need it to be spelled out.

Animal cruelty was used as a random, clumsy signifier in St. Anthony’s Fire, whereas at least it’s making a point here, but wading through it is no easier for that.  It’s just morbid to linger on it, but it ought to at least warrant some poetic justice for the bad guys.  And yet, while Tommy and his equally awful sister do get offed, it’s curiously quick and/or off-screen.  Like Bernice’s escape from New York, it’s odd that the book chooses to skip its heroism and (however violent) closure, leaving its misery largely untouched.

To redress the balance, Cartmel’s prose is once again excellent and evocative.  He even shifts to the animals’ perspective, firstly to heighten the emotion of murdering them, and secondly to lay a bit of groundwork for one of warlock’s unexpected side-effects: Ace and co. escape their confines by transferring their minds to the animals.  Which would be a great, if somewhat twee way for the novel to go, if the animals then escaped.  Surprise, it’s no help at all.  One by one, it’s torture time, just the same as if they were being vivisected themselves.  Offing Tommy only makes it worse.

This is one of the reasons I got so mad at the book: it is utterly miserable, mixed with a sense of complete hopelessness.  It’s everywhere.  Bernice is off to investigate warlock with the Americans?  They will suss her out and assume she’s a traitor.  Ace is nipping off to help some new friends?  They will all be captured, including the pets, and quite possibly all of the above will die.  Vincent and Justine, characters from Warhead, come looking for the Doctor for help?  They’ll be captured by IDEA.  Justine goes on the run afterwards?  Oh, she’ll get randomly scooped up by a prostitution ring.  Why not?  And hey, since she’s pregnant, let’s have a crime boss immediately try to kill her baby.  Creed rescues her, so naturally, cherry on the top, she’ll be so grateful that she’ll chuck her marriage away on the spur of the moment and shag him.  Any more for any more?  (Since you ask, there’s a rape back-story in there, and yep, Chick gets killed.  That one seems inevitable given the book’s subject matter and the fact that they introduce Chick at all, but even so, god damn it.)

I read Warlock pretty quickly, and Andrew Cartmel’s rich writing is largely the reason for that, painting the emotions and back-stories of everyone here in a way that adds to the story.  But the main thrust of it for me was just trying to power through the really horrible stuff.  Since there is no let up, I read more than half of it in a day.  I just wanted it done.

Cartmel does have some interesting and worthwhile things to say.  I’m not convinced the War On Drugs stuff is exactly subtle: the drug dealers are violent psychopaths, whereas IDEA make no bones about their moral greyness and/or hiring of violent nutters.  Even the police hate them, and there’s a moment near the end where one of their key figures owns up to the whole thing just being a smokescreen to keep drugs illegal; it’s as close as the novel gets to just being a blog post, if it weren’t for said villain having his own Machiavellian reasons for IDEA.  (The drug itself is thoughtfully likened to a tree or a stream – alive, but not culpable.)  Similarly, the characters take down the invalidity of animal testing with aplomb: since an animal’s reactions can only ever give a suggestion of human behaviour, you’re basically torturing and killing them for a bunch of guesswork.  But whereas Warhead tied its ideas about the environment, and mankind’s complicity in its decline to a tight story, Warlock is a lot woollier in its plot work, progressing the story of Ace inches at a time, and keeping important stuff (like what warlock is, or who the shadowy Mrs Woodcott is) to the last minute.  Generous helpings of peril keep it moving, but when you stand back from it there isn't much actual progression in there.

Another obvious comparison to Warhead is the Doctor.  Once again he’s a shadowy figure that causes (sometimes bad) things to happen to achieve results.  The difference is that he’s barely in Warlock.  You might say similar of Warhead, but he was pulling the strings in the previous novel, with all of Ace’s actions coming from him.  His absence suggested influence, whereas he spends fully half of Warlock tinkering with computers at the house on Allen Road, instead of actively helping anybody.  If he’d bothered to help Shell and Jack, well, their story might have gone differently, and he’s got no idea where Ace has gone, just a sinking feeling when she’s been gone for a while.  I won’t know until the next novel, but perhaps this is all character development: his negligence leads her and others to a horrific ordeal, and it’s not her first.  But there’s no evidence of any ill feeling here, what with the time allotted, and he’s simply not in the book enough for it to feel like a big deal is being made.  The Doctor just ducks out of the narrative until it finds a use for him.  It’s a bit disappointing coming from Cartmel, who is justly thought to have a good understanding of these characters and their relationship.

What with keeping the truth about warlock (let me guess, it’s alien?) to a last-minute minimum, and keeping the Doctor and his companions apart, and putting quite a lot of the story on Creed and latterly Justine, I wondered if Warlock was a little too divorced from Doctor Who altogether.  Even with direct (and I admit, pretty neat) ties to a previous novel, and with the Doctor ultimately doing what he’s doing to right a wrong, it feels more like Andrew Cartmel’s Misery Soapbox Drama than actual Doctor Who.  There are still things to like about it, such as those Cartmellian action sequences that really put you in the middle of them, the depth of justifiable rage and argument in his views, and the way he subverts things like pace, so that the Doctor and co. have been staying at Allen Road for a year when we meet them, and Bernice’s drug bust is in full swing before we even know about her joining IDEA.  I’m still not sure the pace works, what with something having to give and that often being the bit I wanted to see.  On the whole, I don’t know why the book is this long.

I’m a bit torn over it.  Warlock is a well-written novel and it makes some good points.  It also tries much too hard to rub the reader’s face in it, and I have to object to that.  It’s not automatically a bad thing if your story is bleak and downbeat, or if bad things happen in it.  Certainly it adds pathos.  Nonetheless, I reserve the right to feel that when investing this much effort in a book, I shouldn’t feel like crap afterwards.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #6 – Cat's Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#6
Cat's Cradle: Warhead
By Andrew Cartmel

Difficult to know where to start with this one.  I didn't make a lot of notes or scribble much of it down, as I was pretty much in its thrall the whole time.  I thought I'd have little more to say about the way it's written than "Yep.  This is good."

Okay, I'll try a bit harder.  Warhead is an urban thriller, which is a potentially hackneyed setting for a sci-fi story and a potentially unsuitable one for Doctor Who.  Andrew Cartmel, the show's Script Editor and lead creative voice in its last years, clearly isn't interested in perpetuating what is usual for Doctor Who.  He relishes the chance to establish a grim future for humanity, taking all opportunities to enrich it and make it feel lived in, put up with.  The people feel utterly real and so does the situation, in no small part because we come to it so late.  This is a future where we're almost at the point of no return.  There are very few people trying to save it – they’re simply trying to get on.  It makes the Doctor all the more necessary.  (It is interesting that the Doctor is aiming to save it now, rather than popping back to avert the whole ugly mess.  Interestingly, I probably wouldn't think to question it if this wasn't set on Earth.)

Cartmel's prose is to-the-point and satisfying, especially after the expressionistic whims of Marc Platt.  This is thriller territory: characters think and feel and you're absolutely in there with them, while the story moves with cinematic clarity.  The writing often slips neatly between forensic detail and emotion, lending refreshing weight to so-called "villainous" characters.  For instance, when a vengeful Kurd meets his doom:

"The uncontrolled laser beam needled out slightly, barely visible in the dusty air of the summer night. It went in through the front of Massoud's eye and into his brain, through the frontal lobe and sweeping into the motor and sensory areas. Massoud saw a brilliant light. It filled his vision. It was the sun over the shoulder of his sister."

...and we're treated to a bit of back-story just as we lose him.  (It continues on for a bit but I don't want to quote too much.  That's why I refrained from writing loads down.  I'd be reproducing pages.)  There's a lot of this stuff, and it works beautifully at mixing action, or more usually death, with insight.  It's a very successful writing style; I was hooked.

It's a very grim story, which is arguably part of the New Adventures remit.  These novels have been sneaking in swearwords, sex and violence (or at any rate, more than you'd expect on telly) since Genesys, and all appear rather more graphically in Warhead, but with (I think) the greatest success so far.  (Though there are moments of eyebrow-raising gratuity, like a hallucination featuring a severed head gargling in a urinal.)  This feels like science fiction for a more mature reader.  But it's not too divorced from Doctor Who as we know it: McCoy and co. were shaking their heads at corrupt, broken-down worlds in Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol.

The approach to the characters is just as bracing as you'd expect from Andrew Cartmel, who knew the Seventh Doctor and Ace better than most.  The relatively cartoonish character traits of the first three Timewyrm books feel like ancient history for Ace, who methodically follows the Doctor's instructions and puts his plan into action.  I've seen her characterisation here referred to in unflattering terms, and I think that's a pity.  Though she does kill, her remorse is obvious and not at all trivialised.  Earlier, she outright refuses to do it.  She's no mindless killing machine.  Also, her relationship with the Doctor is as lived-in and matter-of-fact as Cartmel's horrid future.  The two barely need words any more.

Ah yes, the Doctor: grand chess player, juggling people's lives without flinching.  He's not a very nice Doctor, but I do think he's a very believable one.  This stuff suits him.  (And it's hardly gone away.  I recently heard Big Finish's LIVE 34, which followed a similar pattern of the Doctor and Ace working to save a nearly-doomed society from its corrupt elders, again from the sidelines.  I wonder if James Parsons and Andrew Stirling-Brown read this.)  He's not in the book much, especially the first half, but his influence is there.  I was always keen to find out what he was up to, but I wasn't bored in the interim.

Even so, the pacing can be a little uneven.  You're introduced to quite a few characters near the start, mostly police-types beginning with M, and they go away for most of the novel as we get back to Ace and then the Doctor.  By the time we meet up with them again, there's a small degree of "Who's who?" (call me childish, but did he really need so many M names?), and with the action ratcheted so high for so long, there's no space reserved for an epilogue.  It's over, and hopefully things will get better. Warhead is an appropriate title: we’re here for the explosion, not for the fallout.

(Speaking of resolutions, just what the hell is Cat's Cradle all about?  The cat's briefly in it again – something to do with the TARDIS's warning systems? – but I can't see much else connecting this to Time's Crucible.  As series-plots go, it's almost comically obscure.)

Warhead was a pleasure to read, though of course, it is not a pleasant story.  Dark and violent, but more resoundingly sad, it manages to evoke various sci-fi sources (the choking cityscape of Blade Runner, the eerie deserted countryside of a zombie movie) whilst adding its own authorial stamp.  It's an intelligent way to handle an environmental message: no one likes the problem, there are no easy fixes, hard choices are necessary to make it better.  And it's a fairly bold way to tell a Doctor Who story.  It's one of those that really deserves the "New" caveat, as it pushes confidently at the show's comfort zones.  It's seriously unhappy stuff – I’d have a nice lie down on standby – but I admire it a lot.

8/10