Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #7 – Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#7
Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark
By Andrew Hunt

As you can tell from Peter Elson's beautiful front cover (and it's obvious from the title), Witch Mark fuses sci-fi and fantasy.  That's not a bad idea in theory, and what with Doctor Who being such a malleable format (or rather one that should be malleable), it was bound to stray into a straight-up fantasy story at some point.  The Mind Robber already dipped a toe in the genre.

I'm not massively keen on fantasy as-in-dragons-and-unicorns, however.  It tends to be treated with a certain dry seriousness, as it always has to feel like a believable historical period but-with-monsters.  (Why does "fantasy" have to mean "bargain bin Tolkein", anyway?)  Sure enough, the portions of Witch Mark spent in Tír na n-Óg, Andrew Hunt's fantasy world du jour, are deathly dull.  The creatures might have different names over there but it's the same old tropes, plus some sci-fi ephemera because hey, it's Doctor Who, and even its "fantasy" stories had better tick that box at some point.  Full of laborious questing hither and thither, bloody battles populated by nothingy characters, and dialogue that wobbles between hokey medieval-isms ("By Dagda's Wheel! ") and feeble banter, the latter stages of Witch Mark are a chore to read.

It's much better early on, where it's set in the Welsh town of Llanfer Ceiriog.  Hunt conjures a satisfying little village here, and there's an enjoyable familiarity for the Doctor as well: it's nice to see places where he feels at home, but we have yet to go.  I could picture the village in all its foggy, early-morning glory.  Even better, it's here that the novel's fantasy ideas mix with reality.  That makes for much more arresting prose: tourists discovering what might be a centaur, and a vet coming across a unicorn's horn are both more interesting than strolling through a world where centaurs and unicorns are commonplace.  (Not to mention how ruddy boring the things turn out to be.)

There's a decent mystery to start us off: a coach loaded with unidentified people crashes, its occupants all carrying suitcases full of cash.  This isn't a mystery novel, however, so Hunt doesn't expend a lot of energy on who they were or where exactly they were going.  We more or less figure it out during the soupy quest narrative, and the explanation isn't altogether uninteresting.  They're fleeing their world and coming to Earth.  Issues of migration are touched on, but naturally push never comes to shove since the Doctor is involved and they can just go somewhere else.  (Having said that, I'm pretty sure there are still some Tír na n-Óg-ians pottering around our world at the end.  There’s also a sub-plot about some feral doubles of the Doctor and Ace which is then entirely forgotten about.  This may have something to do with Andrew Hunt's apparent admission that he didn't have time to finish the book.  Citation needed, I know – but damn, if that doesn't explain a lot.)

Witch Mark never wrings a great deal of drama out of its ideas.  It can be competent and almost enjoyably written – as above, I found the village fairly atmospheric, and some of the early cutaways to Tír na n-Óg are evocative.  But the characters are what really matters, and they're bland and uninteresting.  The two tourists (who discover a centaur and thus become embroiled in the story) have nothing going for them besides being American and seeing a centaur.  (One assumes An American Werewolf In London came to mind.)  The policeman investigating their case, Stevens, is part of a one-man Paranormal Investigative Team, which basically means he's an ineffectual laughing stock.  Any genuine, passionate interest in the supernatural is lost in dry, overwritten exposition:

“'My dear chap,' he said flippantly, 'it's my job to believe in things that other people wouldn't credit. Flying saucers? Of course, they exist. Yeti! Saw them in the London Underground twenty years ago. Ghosts! A headless woman in white with a black dog used to walk through my bedroom at midnight. Mermaids? Grandpa was rescued from the Marie Celeste by one. Vampires? I always wondered where my dad went at night. Telepathy? Right now you're thinking that I'm talking crap. So what can you tell me that I won't believe in?"

Someone should have red-penned about half of that, right?  But they didn't, so towards the end, his half-hearted decision to perform an exorcism makes about as much sense as anything else.  The various fantasy denizens are too trite to dwell on, although it is especially annoying that there is a girl called Bats (short for Bathsheba) and a unicorn called Bat.  As for all the Welsh words acting as fantasy words, they probably mean a great deal to a Welsh-speaker, but they just seemed like random replacement words to me.  They're applied to the same old fantasy tropes.

Hunt's writing of the Doctor and Ace isn't much better.  They're taking time out for the TARDIS to fix itself, owing to the fascinating and not-at-all pointless Cat's Cradle arc.  (We briefly reference Time's Crucible, skip Warhead altogether and then shruggingly conclude this on the final page as essentially, "the TARDIS was feeling a bit funny, it's better now".  If you were expecting an idea they felt important enough to attach to the three book titles to actually go somewhere, well, silly old you!)  The Doctor's familiarity with his surroundings lends a pleasing comfort to some passages – sorry to repeat myself there, it's the only way I can buoy this review – but later on he's got nothing to do but head for the mysterious Goibhnie and hope he can sort out this world's problems.  Cue random assorted perils between A and B, including the decision to ditch Ace as this will be "too dangerous" for her.  You what, Doc?  After what she accomplished in Warhead?  He's blandly Sylvester McCoy-like in the writing, but there's nothing remotely interesting about him.

As for Ace, she's one of Witch Mark's weakest links.  Not for the first time, characterisation lets her down, coming as it does in clumsy blobs of back-story.  We could take her Survival experiences as read and build on them, but no, we'd better recap them first: "It was a look which stirred strange feelings in her because of her experience as one of the hunters on the planet of the Cheetah people."  We could use what she learned in The Curse Of Fenric and incorporate that seamlessly into who she is now, but hey, why not remind us exactly what happened anyway: "As with the faith that has driven back the Haemovores during World War Two..."  It's a bit embarrassing when you can see the joins like that.  There is something new here, at least – a magical connection with a unicorn – but it's treated like another echo of Survival, and it makes no substantial difference to her or the story.  Shrug.

One hopes they'll tone it down as the series progresses, but so far Ace often finds herself drifting between the scant plots of Season 25 and 26, or vaguely railing against her mother and racial intolerance.  Sometimes it feels like there's nothing more to her than the plot points established on TV, which feels like a slap in the face for a format boasting "stories too broad and too deep for the small screen."  Hunt at least tries to delve into Ace's fixation with Nitro-9, only to come up with this hilariously leaden nugget: "It's great when you manage your first truly destructive chemical reaction, but the satisfying moment comes when you create an explosive that does serious damage whilst looking and sounding aesthetically pleasing."  So, the best bit about blowing things up is the blowing things up?  Oh, Ace, tell me more!

(Incidentally, the Doctor isn't free from this Genesys-esque info-dumpery.  There's some dull reminiscence about Block Transfer Computation – don't even ask – and this little doozie that made me laugh out loud: "'Get him to contact UNIT.  They'll help you.'  UNIT was an acronym for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, an international military organisation which the Doctor had once worked for as scientific advisor."  MORE POWER TO THE INFO-DUMPER.)

Hunt's writing oscillates between vague competence and a weird, forced extravagance.  Take this moment when a person's face appears to change: "Suddenly the feelings changed as loving warmth shifted to the sticky coldness of death."  He was warm and now he's icky!  Or this one, when a character sees his planet's sun return to its former strength and feels "the incredibly sensuous, almost sexual thrill that coursed through his old body”.  Um?  Quite often, things are going well enough – albeit never making your pulse race like Warhead, or igniting your imagination like Revelation – and then pow!, it gets weird.  Overall it's an ungainly, undistinguished piece of work, and one that runs out of steam long before it ends.  Perhaps in an attempt to keep things interesting, the action frequently chops between characters.  I was rarely thrilled to see any of them.

A small village with fantasy accoutrements is an idea after my own heart, but Witch Mark considerably fails to make the most of it.  What we get is a drab sci-fi/fantasy mash-up that you'll forget as soon as it's over.  Pretty cover, though.

4/10

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

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #5 – Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible by Marc Platt

Please excuse the poor quality Google image.

As for why I don't have the book any more,

and hence can't photograph it... um...

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#5
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
By Marc Platt

There are currently three Amazon reviews for Time's Crucible, and at least two describe it as "fast-paced".  Ahem, no.  If this is fast-paced then so, surely, is The Web Planet.  (Aka The Two And Half Hour One With Space Butterflies And Villain Fungus.)  If we're prepared to stretch the definition that far, we can probably apply it to Andy Warhol's Sleep, an experimental 5-hour film in which nothing occurs but a friend of Warhol's, sleeping.

Time's Crucible is not fast-paced.

I knew little about it going in other than it was written by Marc Platt, esteemed author of some of my favourite Doctor Who stories.  The dazzling, often misunderstood Ghost Light; the mercurial "What if the Doctor never left Gallifrey?" tale that is Auld Mortality; the greatest Cyberman story ever told, Spare Parts, which finally made those semi-ridiculous Dalek knock-offs as tragic and scary as they're supposed to be.  And of course, he wrote Lungbarrow: that grand and most famous of New Adventures, full of such world-building mythos that its echoes ripple still.  (Only, like, 90 books to go...)  In short, I was optimistic.  "Marc Platt," I would have said a few weeks (months? Years?) ago before I started reading this, "now there's a writer who knows his onions."

From the outset this is the sort of book that is not going to appeal to everybody.  Doctor Who is sci-fi, sure, but it's rarely the sort of hard sci-fi you might struggle to understand or read.  Doctor Who is such a malleable format that it usually melds with something else anyway: the TARDIS can literally drop you into other genres, after all.  So if I don't like Time's Crucible, it doesn't mean nobody will.

But here we are: I hated it.  I have rarely, if ever, been as bored and irritated as I was reading this book.  Time's Crucible is 275 pages of punishing, crushing tedium the likes of which I would never have dreamed possible.  ("Dreams?" cry Statler and Waldorf in the still-recovering depths of my brain.  "Those were nightmares!")  I thought Genesys was bad, but I'd read that book again – brainless, godawful typo-ridden dreck that it was – before reappraising this festering, unholy quagmire.

What's so bad about it?  Simple: there's no story.  Not a bad story, not a dull story, just no damn story at all.

Here's what happens: the TARDIS collides with an ancient Gallifreyan time ship.  A nightmarish city is created, and the time ship's bewildered crew, as well as Ace and the Doctor (in that order) mill around trying to make sense of multiple time zones.  A gigantic monomaniacal lamprey with a mouth at both ends (or rather, an arse for a face) rules over them all, except one of their number, Vael, who may or may not have plans of his own.  The Doctor, presumed dead and maybe or maybe not amnesiac, looks on.

Or in a slightly smaller nutshell: Ace and a bunch of bland Gallifreyan nobodies stumble around a grey wasteland for 200 pages accomplishing nothing while a big worm talks to itself.  Eventually the TARDIS stops playing silly buggers and normal service resumes.  Insert abstract imagery, flashbacks to old Gallifrey and a cat, and be prepared to smash your head against the nearest wall.

This is stifling, needlessly obtuse literature.  At the start, the "story" bounces between the Doctor and Ace suffering a Dali-esque crisis in Perivale, and ancient Gallifrey.  Talk about easing us into things!  The language struggles to convey impossible concepts, and it's just damn unreadable at times.  I kept re-reading sentences in desperation.

"The thought core of the crew, bound and woven by three years of training, virtually eliminated the necessity for a reality. "

"The molecular haze swirled around him in a chromatic maelstrom."

"The air was getting hazy again in a fresh drift of molecules."

"As she watched, [the walls] dissolved into a slow-churning ferment of dimensional dementia."

And then there's this beauty, ostensibly from Ace's POV:

"The flow of people and time on Ealing Broadway had settled into a smooth drift that was slower than was natural, but it intensified Ace's vision too. She was aware of matter shifting under the force of time's currents, little swirls of microscopic particles that eddied away from so-called solid or animate objects, much as mud slowly shifts in the flow of a river. Ace could have stopped to watch the diaphanous colours of the molecules around her for ever."

Everyone writes differently, but there are certain concepts – and yes, rules – that hold true no matter who you are.  One is that narrative tends to conform to a main character.  In other words, phrases like "so-called solid or animate objects" and "diaphanous colours of the molecules" are not going to occur to Ace, so why put those words, by implication, in her mouth?  It doesn't ring true and it's complete zarking gibbertwaddle to boot, and for god's sake, it's just too soon in the book to ask your reader to do these sorts of cartwheels to make sense of things.

Later, there's a line that typifies the approach I'm talking about.  "It was exactly the sort of thing she had wanted the Doctor to show her. Well cosmic."  See?  It's a little naff, but that's Ace.  For good measure, there are a few dollops of psychoanalysis involving Ace's mother and a couple of characters we saw in the TV run, because well, that's what you do with Ace, innit?  Only it doesn't come close to advancing her as a character and it doesn't have any impact.  It's just, oh look: it's Ace's mum / Ace talking about her mum, as you do.  Shrug.  Paul Cornell did this sort of thing with considerable flair, but if you're not careful it can just feel like items on a list.

Platt goes out of his way to describe things that are as abstract and baffling as he can make them.  It's where almost all his effort goes, while little things like characters who have goals, conflicts that can be resolved, and story fall into the abyss.  You would think that setting a novel in the twisted depths of the TARDIS would be a gift that kept on giving, but no, even that can't save Time's Crucible.  The mad world this story inhabits is as barren and dull as the average Doctor Who quarry, only there are three or four of them jumbled together.  Yippee.

Incidentally, the "it turns out they're really in the TARDIS" bit is supposed to be a twist, much like the true identity of the mysterious "guards" who assist the giant schizophrenic (but oddly harmless) worm.  (He just keeps bumbling around asking if anybody has seen the future.  No, you befuddled boob.  Please stop asking.)  Both developments are obvious from the outset, and bungled in their execution.  At every juncture the drama fizzles, but hey, at least it's weird.

By the end, I had the uncomfortable suspicion that Platt wrote this whole thing just so he could fling a few ideas about Gallifrey into the published world.  Alas, "Babies aren't born on Gallifrey" doesn't exactly fill the required word-count, so the dramatic anathema of The Process, aka the big worm, was added.  (And terrifying he is, too.)  Towards the end, themes not unlike those in Ghost Light finally reveal themselves: the great worm is resistant to change, just as Light was.  But I really don't want to compare the two stories, in case I suddenly lose my love for the other one, or worse, see it for the garbled and dull mess it may have been all along.  Some fans certainly view it that way.  Stay back, Time's Crucible! You will not take Ghost Light from me!

I like new things, and with a range like the New Adventures, I'm certainly open to change.  Isn't that the point?  I've already complained about writers churning out overly familiar stories, because we don't need any more of those.  But for me, you do need to keep at least one foot on the ground, and Time's Crucible is somewhere in the stratosphere, eyes lolling, tongue out and dribbling.

At times I felt unpleasantly like Dave Bowman in the star tunnel of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But the book obviously has its fans – it would, I suspect, be fair to call it a love-it-or-hate-it affair.  "But Time's Crucible gave us X and Y!" is a popular rejoinder, but then ideas and new bits of canon don't make a book, as far as I'm concerned.  I can only wish its fans well and salute their patience, while I regather my shattered senses and read something that won't make me want to poke my eyes out with the nearest dull implement.

2/10