Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #94 – The Room With No Doors by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#59

The Room With No Doors

By Kate Orman

It’s almost the end. The moment is being prepared for.

The Doctor has regeneration on the brain. He knows it’s coming; chances are, the reader watched it happen months before this book came out. So we find the New Adventures in the bittersweet phase of winding down, knowing that the new Doctor is a concern for somebody else* but also that they have just enough time to go out on their own terms. That pregnant pause is the essence of The Room With No Doors. How does the Doctor feel about his impending change? What will he leave behind? I love character-driven stories, and Room is definitely in that vein, with one of Kate Orman’s helter-skelter plots playing second fiddle to the real, smaller material.

Things are strained between the Doctor and Chris. A combination of disasters – the loss of Roz, the recent loss of Liz**, the overall absence of Bernice – underpin the basic awkwardness of these two being alone together, which let’s face it isn’t the ideal outcome for either of them. One of my favourite observations in Bad Therapy was that they were like an estranged father making time for his kid, and that’s a real problem the books have had to work on. Eternity Weeps was more trauma for the pile. The Room With No Doors is an answer to all that. But first we find the two of them in the TARDIS, awkwardly writing goodbye letters to one another, both unable to finish. It’s a really well orchestrated bit of writing in a book that hums with them.

An unusual time trace in sixteenth-century Japan is as good a distraction as any: a mysterious pod is causing prosperous harvests and (more low-key than you’d think) the resurrection of the dead. Two already warring armies get wind of this and both want to take possession. An alien figure knows what the thing is and isn’t telling; a band of large anthropomorphic birds feels similarly. Into this arrives not just the Doctor and Chris but a Victorian time-traveller named Penelope Gate and Joel Mintz, one of the Doctor’s fanboys from Return Of The Living Dad, who has his own schemes afoot.

Busy, isn’t it? And yet, the Japanese armies don’t even know what they’re fighting to possess, lending their quest an almost going-through-the-motions quality. The alien and the giant birds are so reticent it almost becomes irrelevant what they’re actually arguing about. Underneath, ticking away, are the Doctor and Chris. The Doctor is training him more and more it seems, which isn’t helping his own feelings of helplessness about Roz and Liz. He eventually realises this might be a way for this Doctor to leave something behind. After causing his own earlier self to regenerate simply because he wasn’t able to get things done – or so he believes – he’s about to find the shoe on the other foot. I went back and forth over what would be a more cruelly ironic fate: being out-manipulated by his future self, or the master manipulator getting killed at random. We all know which one it was, and to some extent he comes to terms with that as well. Chris is manipulated by him a little, but not so much that he’s mad about it – “Chris suddenly felt terribly sorry for the old bastard” – and hey, what’s one more for the road?

Kate Orman gets a lot of mileage out of the Doctor’s dilemma, even going so far as a bit of first person writing when he finds himself buried alive and debating whether he deserves to die. He and Chris have frequent conversations about regeneration, as Chris wonders more and more about his own death and then worries about losing the Doctor. It’s fascinating to have the Doctor be so frank about all this – frankly, it’s now or never – and the concept of change and renewal dovetails so neatly with Virgin losing the Who license that it could all have been orchestrated. This change is inevitable – it literally already happened, we’re just counting down now. The Doctor has no control over it: Virgin didn’t write his demise and someone else will write the new Doctor afterwards. The only option left is to stop worrying and live until there isn’t any life left, and that’s his journey here. Rather beautifully, the Doctor of the New Adventures becomes the New Adventures. And it’s nearly time to go. By the end the Doctor and Chris are on stable terms, happy to continue together for years, aware that they probably won’t.

The book makes no bones about its plot being “less” than you might expect. “‘This is all a bit small-scale for you, isn’t it? The Earth’s not going to blow up or anything...’ ‘Oh yes,” said the Doctor. ‘This is just an adventure. A bit of swordplay, a few jokes, nothing worth taking very seriously.’” / “The world wasn’t going to end – nothing important was happening to [Chris] or the Doctor.” The pod makes as good a contrivance as any, and it’s fair that all this chaos can come about without anyone wanting to take over all of time and space, or have any specific ambition at all. Warriors find out about a powerful thing and they want it. Joel’s nefarious scheme (it’s not that nefarious, mostly ill-considered) is just opportunism. The giant birds and the alien (they’re amusing; she’s not) have their own power struggle, though no one seems terribly interested. It’s all good, but it’s a deliberate kind of muchness to make the character stuff stand out, and stand out it adorably does. (“Whenever Chris lives through a fifth of September, he just counted it as another birthday. He’d had five in the last two years. He suspected that the Doctor tried to land in September whenever he thought Chris needed cheering up.”) Just to be boringly pragmatic though, it is a little difficult to take to all the characters buzzing around – there are a lot and it’s not that long a book. Orman’s writing, much like Paul Cornell’s when he gets near a finale, has a certain sugar rush quality where lots of undeniably really good ideas get piled on top of each other fast. You miss bits.

Still, all the business has its own positive effect: a feeling of things going on that we aren’t privy to, such as a previous encounter with a “vampire” that earned the Doctor the nickname “snowman”, Penelope’s first encounter with Joel and their adventures on the way here, and Joel meeting the Eighth Doctor during a crisis in his own time. Penelope herself is a higgledy-piggledy mirror of the Doctor, a suggestion that these conflagrations of eccentricity and brilliance do happen outside the TARDIS and result in their own time travels. (Paul Magrs would no doubt agree.) All that’s got to be deliberate what with the Doctor, and this whole series hurtling towards a close. I kind of see it like Her Majesty on Abbey Road: lost little fragments that tell you not to worry, it isn’t really over, it will just carry on somewhere else.

You could easily keep digging into what this all means – for instance the Room With No Doors, which is an idea up there with Cornell’s Pertwee-decade-of-death – but Orman’s books rarely come across as serious thought pieces. For all the academic good stuff she sprinkles in there, she seems more concerned that you’re going to enjoy yourself. The writing has an almost casual brilliance that is worth going back and re-reading. Take the Doctor and Chris’s interrogation at the hands of a couple of samurai, which – just to make things interesting – happens mostly in reverse order. Or the way she gently italicises futuristic words Penelope isn’t familiar with, without ever drawing attention to that. Or simple subtlety like: “‘Call me Isha,’ said the little man. Now that Aoi was closer, he could see just how strange this ‘Doctor’ looked.” Or the terrifying image of a flock of drone “heads” observing the characters, then “drifting away like neglected balloons.” Or the nostalgic good humour of the Seventh Doctor, like “All those with psychokinesis, raise my hand”, and the way his deadly serious ultimatum to Joel crumbles under the same human foibles that made him give Bernice a surprising kiss goodbye. Or the fact that she can write him as adorable and wonderful, but then have him carry a dead child to make a point. The birds are funny, too.

It’s little, and it’s a lot. They still have some way to go, but it’s an ending. The Doctor and Chris needed this and so did we.

8/10

* Wink.

** At the risk of being a broken record... I still hate the Liz thing. It’s Liz because there’s audience recognition of the character and we’ll be more sad when she dies. But she’s in the book so little, and Chris knows so little about her, and the Doctor is so unaware of what’s going on, that it feels token. “Ah,” you might well add, “that’s the tragedy, and therefore the point!” To which I say, poo with knobs on. It’s cheap, unintentionally or otherwise, and it will probably endure as one of the things I like least about the NAs. Bah!

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #93 – Burning Heart by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#30

Burning Heart

By Dave Stone

A Missing Adventure by Dave Stone? This should be interesting. And it is, but mainly because Burning Heart is not so much a Missing Adventure as a New Adventure cosplaying as one.

The Habitat is a messy, barely civilised outpost in humanity’s distant future. Adjudicators rule with blunt force, but tensions are palpable between the resident humans and aliens. Into this sweeps a random, unearthly element of violence, and lurking beneath the central fabric of the Habitat itself is a sinister intelligence.

This isn’t just set in the aftermath of the well-known NA, Original Sin – it pretty much is the setting for Original Sin. Then there’s the tone. The foulness of life in the Habitat is a lot like Transit, cheerfully highlighting violent crime and body horror in a very un-Classic Who way. If that wasn’t enough, the story ends up leaning into the theme of emergent life, which is even more like Transit. As for the language, the New Adventures’ favourite swearword (cruk) gets a resurgence, plus we bandy around another one (Sheol) that may or may not be new to the books. As well as Adjudicators there’s a supporting character called Kane who, being in a book by Dave Stone, just might be related to someone from the New Adventures.

Now there’s an argument to be made that much of this (the violence, the futurism) makes sense in the Colin Baker era, especially after the satirically violent Vengeance On Varos, so it should work as a Missing Adventure. But you’re reading this years later and potentially alongside the other books published around then, so it unavoidably rings different bells. Even the front cover, which infamously gives us Adjudicators ala Judge Dredd, sends NA signals: my housemate, who doesn’t read these books but has heard me go on about them, took one look and said “That looks like one of the other lot.”

Getting back on track to what Burning Heart is rather than what it is like, the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on relatively rough terms. I don’t recall Varos ending on a sour note for these two, and I’d suggest that this kind of characterisation might work better coming right after she meets an unpredictable Sixie in The Twin Dilemma. She doesn’t mince words (or thoughts) here: “One again – yet again – Peri felt that edgy mix of disappointment and annoyance. Once again, on some deep emotional level, she had expected to turn and see the friendly and engaging, utterly decent and trustworthy man she had once known – only to find that it was, well, him. The Doctor. It always slightly disorientated her, kept her on the wrong foot. The fact that she had now known this version of the Time Lord longer than the original seemed to make it all the worse. Now he looked at her with that little supercilious sneer she had come to know and loathe.” / “The real Doctor must still be in there somewhere. That was the only reason why anyone would stay with him and put up with him. At least, any other reasons for staying with him were just too horrible to contemplate.” Ouch.

In the long run, Burning Heart has an excuse for Peri’s instant loathing of him, and Dave Stone comes up with another one up front: seeing Peri’s reaction to the appalling conditions of the Habitat, and acknowledging that they can't be changed, “the anger [the Doctor] had instilled in her had countered and overridden the severe culture shock that might well have threatened to tear her mind apart. Hopefully, it would protect her for a while yet.” I’m not sure culture shock is that likely after the spate of aggressive and weird aliens she’s encountered already – she’s met killer androids, megalomaniac slugs, Cybermen, a smaller and more perverted slug, she’s been turned into a bird – but it’s a nice piece of character work for the apparently thoughtless Sixth Doctor, who elsewhere is “someone who, [Peri] sometimes felt, could not honestly care less if she lived or died.”

The overriding problem for me is that Peri and the Doctor spend the next 200 pages apart. They’re in something like three scenes together, so if Burning Heart is intended to be the great “Peri accepts Sixie” book, it lacks the material to qualify. Meanwhile, the Doctor runs afoul of the Adjudicators and spends most of his time meeting other alien undesirables in their holding cells, while he (all too slowly) begins to suspect that something is wrong here. Peri falls in with a violent faction called Human First, which she improbably believes is just this harmless bunch of guys, y’know? (Perhaps 2019’s depressing political atmosphere has made the red flag easier to spot.) The aforementioned excuse for Peri’s bad mood also covers her sudden interest in species-ist uprisings, but then Stone’s bets are hedged with the idea that this dangerous anger was already a part of her. Burning Heart doesn’t really go into or justify that, although her state of undress (taking a moment to examine her bruised, naked body) and her luck with outfits might go some way to explaining a burning rage within: her Human First uniform “mostly came from a supplier for the underground fetish clubs”, and “had also been carefully tailored to enhance certain bits and pieces into what a realtor would probably call a spectacular development of frontage ... She felt like a cross between a peroxide rock chick and the wet dream of a gentleman of a certain age.” I see what you did there, but... can you really be said to be commenting on a thing, if you’re just doing it anyway?

As well as separating them, the book doesn’t seem all that interested in them. The mysterious Kane buzzes around Peri, maybe-or-maybe-not working for Human First, and generally driving the action more than she does. He has an attachment to an Adjudicator named Chong, who works with the somewhat blinkered cop Craator, who seems to impact the plot more (or at least more often) than the Doctor. His boss is the religious zealot Garon (oh good, a religious zealot), while Peri and Kane have to contend with the equally zealous Jelks. Both leaders are getting people killed for their rather vague causes, but neither develops any depth. Same goes for most of the in-between characters, many of whom don’t even get names – it’s just group descriptors like Hand Of God, White Fire and so on. Things in the Habitat get worse until they explode into violence, but unfortunately Burning Heart hasn’t installed enough rounded characters for us to invest in its decline. The Habitat is also such a hot mess to start with that it doesn’t feel at all momentous when it gets worse. It just feels like Tuesday.

Maybe some of this is just the nagging sense that Dave Stone is playing in the New Adventures sandbox, and we’ve heard all this before. I’d also raise an eyebrow at the revelation that (spoiler) people are behaving the way they are because of an outside influence which is (in its own way) benevolent, meaning the violence is incidental. I certainly suspected some mind control with Peri – and got increasingly worried as the book went on and nothing was said about it, in case Stone had simply decided that Peri Loves Terrorism this week – but as well as being yet another accidental (?) yoink from Transit, this also allows Burning Heart to completely shrug off the two-dimensional characterisation of Garon and Jelks. It’s just, well, of course they’re dull fundamentalists. That’s the point! Urgh. Really?

Some arguably interesting things are happening here, such as the pulsing alien Node that hangs monolith-like over the Habitat and causes some of the random craziness below. (Such as deadly hallucinations, psychic murders, angel-like visions that kill and just all sorts of other random yuckness.) There is also OBERON, the computer / intelligence that Garon and the Adjudicators are slave to. Both of these are revealed as emergent lifeforms quite near the end, but it’s more of an info-dump than a drip-fed mystery; the book has by this point shown so little concrete interest in the Node that I was worried he’d forgotten about it. The revelation is like the Sixth Doctor himself, dropping hints and waiting for you to get it, then saying in his most irritating tone, “Well? Give up?” (He tells Peri “Telling is for people without the wit to see”, which is a bit bloody rich.) On the way here, all you can do is wade through Burning Heart, bouncing from one group of characters whom the narrative may or may not be writing with a deliberate lack of detail to another. It felt like 250 pages going on a million.

Much of this sounds crazy, to me anyway, coming from Dave Stone. Sky Pirates! is as jolly, fun and mad as its title suggests. Death And Diplomacy is a jaunty, if somewhat patchier romantic comedy. Such sustained futurism and misery is a funny fit for him, but there is the occasional concession to what, at this point, we can probably call Dave Stone-ness. There are plenty of witty observations, like a tangent on alien religions that includes The Rite Of Exterminating Everything That Isn’t a Dalek. Stone has (inevitable) fun with the Sixth Doctor’s verbosity, leaving other characters bored or irritated in exchanges such as: “Indeed, as the Doctor had said once, if it wasn’t for all these thinking, walking lumps of organised meat, these automemes in organic machines bucking local entropy all the time, the Universe would be in a hell of a state. And Peri had said, ‘What?’” And just when you think Stone has found the ultimate vessel for his obsession with long or obscure words in Sixie, he introduces the Doctor to someone worse: an enormous centipede called Queegvogel with a malfunctioning, psychotically verbose translation box. (I’m not even typing it up, just trust me.) He peppers the book with words like “bathetic” and “geodesic” that we both know aren’t part of everyday conversations over the counter at Tesco, and I may have needed to Google afterwards. He can turn a lovely phrase, like the Doctor’s summing up of what it means to impact other people’s lives even a little, or the coda that follows it.

But here we are. Burning Heart is still a dull, derivative wander through the wrong book range. You’re right, the Habitat sucks. Get me out of here.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #92 – Eternity Weeps by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#58

Eternity Weeps

By Jim Mortimore

First-person Bernice? Shut up and take my money. Chopping back and forth with first-person Jason? I could be persuaded to read it, I suppose. By Jim Mortimore? Heck, he’s always great value. Let’s see, a Bernice and Jason story by Jim Mortimore... why does that strike me as an odd prospect?

Ah yes. Happy Endings, and Sir Not Appearing In This Chapter – if memory serves, because he wasn’t too keen on the Bernice and Jason relationship. Even if you didn’t know, you can probably guess where this is going.

It makes a kind of sense to hand their breakup to one of their critics. And it makes sense to break them up, especially if you’re going to write a series of solo Bernice novels which were peeking over the horizon at this point. Even without those the relationship has been a hard sell, frogmarching Bernice and Jason through a romance in Death And Diplomacy to their wedding in the next book, and on to relative retirement away from scrutiny. We got a little camaraderie in Return Of The Living Dad and a (now rather apocryphal) slice of domestic normalcy in So Vile A Sin, but of substance the twosome had little. There hasn’t been time; there’s about as much evidence. The only real question is, how was this ever supposed to work?

We know Bernice back to front. We know Jason was hurt by his dad and shags about, 50% of which is just a less charming version of Chris. Mortimore giving him half a book to speak for himself is an absolute boon but, whether by accident or design, Jason still can’t escape the binary stars of his family abuse and wandering libido. So it’s not really revelatory to say his marriage is in trouble because he can’t keep his eyes off other women, or that his actions are driven by the trauma of his past, but these are the main Jason lessons I took from Eternity Weeps. That and he means well, as evidenced by a disastrous attempt to alter the past and a moment when he realises he loves his wife because she’s in mortal peril. The big, uh, softie?

Bernice naturally comes out of this better as we know her better, but she starts the book furious and upset and her mood doesn’t really improve. The funk is quite justified, what with the almost constant procession of killings that escalate into a grisly global pandemic. I remember thinking Damaged Goods was senselessly over the top with its kill count. Bless! There is a thrilling and horrifying moment here when Bernice, moments from certain death, escapes only by plunging a paintbrush through her attacker’s eye. This is followed by a reaction of, firstly, wow, and then thank goodness THAT’s over. Oh, honey.

For a while it’s quite jaunty, all things considered: it starts more or less as a travelogue with an odd fixation on warm cans of Pepsi. An expedition to Turkey in search of Noah’s Ark is manna for Benny, who is smarting from an apparently disastrous honeymoon. (I am struggling to square the dates with other books.) Jason arrives, unwelcome, and coincidentally the expedition is split in two to search different mountains. By this point the narrative has already made clear that most of the (numerous) archaeologists will not be coming back, and I think I responded to this by not getting attached. There are two psychotic military commanders, one to attack each group, believing that the Ark is actually a repository of uranium. The jumps from Bernice to Jason are like frying pan and fire.

It’s around here you start to notice the Doctor’s absence. There’s a practical purpose to this, with Eternity Weeps being a backdoor pilot for the Benny New Adventures. And it’s functionally a good one, showing that you can tell a compelling story without him, or without much of him. Bernice is certainly strong enough to shoulder a book. But bad things happen in the Doctor’s absence. Good grief, do they ever.

If I seem a little punch drunk about it, well, that’s Eternity Weeps. The pace of this thing is furious and most of the things happening very fast are horrible. Occasionally, bizarrely, they are also light-hearted. Jason’s aforementioned trip through time is to see the Cthalctose, an ancient sea-dwelling race who scratch a little of Mortimore’s world-building itch. (And are responsible for the whole mess.) While Jason is in their past, pleading with them not to doom Earth in his present, the tone becomes rather jaunty. The Astronomer Royal is a grand, pompous figure who mistakes Jason for a fan, then flies into a rage at the thought of his plagiarising the work. (Think the Maitre’d in The Crystal Bucephalus, or anyone from a Gareth Roberts book.) Jason promptly spends a thousand years incarcerated and semi-aware as the race considers methods of avoiding extinction, only to comically end up back at the Earthy-doomy one anyway. All of this quite enjoyably silly stuff happens after the many murders in Turkey and the outbreak of Agent Yellow, which causes bodily fluids to turn to acid. The whole time travelling jaunt is a bit of a side-note and it’s over quick smart. Huh? It’s one thing to be all but hurled through a story by your ankles – which believe me, is still preferable to struggling to turn the pages – but it’s another to find yourself constantly going, hang on, sorry, what?

And what better reaction to the return of Liz Shaw. How do I not spoil what happens here? Typical of the book’s whirligig pace, Liz is unexpectedly found by Bernice working on an alien installation on the moon. She’s working with Silurians, which is a nice nod to Blood Heat and also, harmlessly and neatly, The Scales Of Injustice. Only then she catches Agent Yellow. And inadvertently helps spread it on Earth. And then proceeds to die, slowly and agonisingly, after what looks like a reprieve. (Nope, she dead; afterwards the site is nuked.) Jason’s trip back is logically doomed from the outset, but there’s still something cruel about introducing a potential reset after such a horrible, random tragedy. And what does it add? She’s not in the book long enough (30 pages on the dot) for it to make an emotional difference, although in the end, her knowledge helps. Presumably it’s to signify that all bets are off, but didn’t the random executions in Turkey (and Bernice’s revenge ala paintbrush) already make that clear?

The Doctor is so lite that he never reacts to her loss. After two books (one post-written) poignantly facing the Doctor’s grief, to completely hopscotch over the brutal and surprising death of a friend seems bizarre. The Doctor is just his usual cheerful, busy self on the periphery, at best so distracted by the scale of danger that he hasn’t time to notice. (To be fair, a tenth of Earth’s population does die as well. A gay old time, is this one.) And it’s wrong. Sorry. I’m not normally one to argue with author intent or label things canon and not canon, and obviously this is just my experience and you’re welcome to your own. But, up with this I will not put. Liz didn’t deserve this abrupt, busy death or the Doctor’s lack of a reaction to it. Not canon, get in the bin.

(Seriously, what is with the Virgin books and old companions? First Dodo and now this? Plus Mel hating the Doctor in Head Games, and Peri venting at him in Bad Therapy. What next? Is Leela going to make a surprise novel appearance and commit seppuku?)

The book’s horrors might not seem so arbitrary if the pace wasn’t such a flighty rampage. I don’t know why it’s written that way. It’s tempting to think the removal of the license was an incentive, but that doesn’t explain the odd, almost Russell T Davies-esque juxtaposition of brutality and whimsy here. Perhaps making it first person(s) naturally gave it an anecdotal air. I’m not saying I’d rather Eternity Weeps was even more miseryfying – both narrators are already pissed off for most of it – but when millions of people get killed more or less off-screen, and Bernice and Jason’s divorce gets quickly summarised in the epilogue with only one of their input, it starts to feel like there should simply be more book to cover it all.

In world building terms, the end of the relationship is more important than the appalling body count – which is so high, you’d think the Doctor would know about it from history books. But the break up still seems a little... easy. They’re already fighting and separated when we get here. They spend swathes of the book apart, not talking. Bernice’s thoughts on Jason are constantly, wearyingly negative (“Why the hell had I married this cretin anyway?”) and Jason spends most of his time trying to justify other women being objectively more attractive and interesting to him than Bernice ("Sex with Bernice was boring"), until he just flips the other way. It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to show no apparent evidence of attraction or love, then treat the divorce as inevitable. Based on the evidence, of course it is, but presumably there was more to them or they wouldn’t have got married? I don’t pretend to understand or even like the relationship as it’s been handled so far, and god knows what I’d do if it were me, but the approach here smacks of unfairness. That said, Jason’s been in several books and the prospect of not seeing him again is fine by me. So mission accomplished, I guess.

The Doctor is deliberately kept in the background, but – apart from being so busy he can’t grieve, which don’t even get me started DAMN IT I’M MAD AGAIN – he’s delightful. There’s his memorable introduction, when he stares danger down in a helicopter; there’s his strange knack for pottering in and out of rooms without disturbing things that speaks to the odd intangibility of the Doctor that often crops up in Mortimore’s books; and there’s the whimsical rescue attempt where he enlarges the TARDIS to fit a crashing helicopter inside. Out of context, he’s great – it’s just the violently odd tone mix I don’t care for. (I’m negotiable when he gets lines as good as “‘But paradoxes are impossible.’ ‘I prefer to use the word embarrassing.’”) Chris seems to have relapsed a little on the closure he got in Bad Therapy, which may be down to authors not comparing notes: multiple times he calls people Roz, almost to the point of annoying everyone else. But good prose clings to Bernice like a lovely hug, and as per, her gallows humour is tinged with humanity. See the bit where she deliberately doesn’t get on the Doctor’s helicopter because a young man has been left behind. He’s dead, she quickly realises, but there’s no apparent regret in going back for him. That said, the marital moaning gets a little much even for her.

It sounds like I spent most of Eternity Weeps absolutely raging, but that’s not right. It’s a compelling and fast read, which simply isn’t the case when you hate a book. As ever with Mortimore, it’s colourfully and occasionally beautifully written, and stuffed with ideas. It’s just that, whether he meant to go that way or whether it was mandated, there isn’t time to justify their impact, so it all feels a little disposable. Then again, sometimes life is just one damn thing after another, and you could argue this one is true to that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #91 – The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#25

The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang

By David A. McIntee

NB 1: I’m reading this one out of order. Cold Fusion was published here, but it was set before The Death Of Art and had a small impact on that book, whereas The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang – published there – is a random one-off that could go anywhere. I’m sure Mr Sin won’t mind me swapping them.

NB 2: I also reviewed this years ago, back when I wasn't reading all of these and the reviews weren't quite so exhausting.  If you'd like a shorter version from way back, here you go!

Well, you can’t fault his ambition.

The Virgin novels have kept returning baddies to a minimum, perhaps inspired by the complete unavailability of Daleks. Where we do get sequels they’re offbeat, like The Sands Of Time focusing on a time conundrum instead of on Sutekh, or Twilight Of The Gods largely ignoring the aliens from The Web Planet in favour of even more boring ones.

At several points, David A. McIntee’s latest tries to do things unexpectedly. The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang sequelises probably a Top 5 story for most Who fans, but sets it in a different century (thus ruling out Jago and Litefoot), uses a different location and keeps the titular Chinese false god absent. It’s a sequel in the sense that the earlier story set these events in motion, but the iconography of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang – Victoriana, darkly comic dialogue, Gothic horror – isn’t part of the deal. It’s certainly a clever title, highlighting and possibly begrudging the expectations set by the earlier story. “The Baggage Of Weng-Chiang” would also have worked.

By making his story so different it becomes a bit irrelevant to say, for example, that it’s not as horrifying or as funny as Talons, but nonetheless that’s the case. Shadow ditches horror for pulpy ’30s adventure, with car chases, robberies, international unrest and a vigilante literally inspired by The Shadow. (Oh god, is the title a pun?) That’s not necessarily worse, it’s just different. One of McIntee’s writerly habits is indulging in action and, if you like that, there’s plenty of it here, such as the opening raid on a theatre/museum, a violent robbery ambushed by police, a sneak attack by the villain involving Mr Sin and an air vent, and K9 dangling out of a crashing plane while tied to the Doctor’s scarf. (!)

Speaking of Peking Homunculi, Mr Sin shows up occasionally to cause stabby havoc, mostly in a school uniform. (I take it back, that might be creepier than anything in Talons.) He’s used as a garnish and, frankly, the plot doesn’t need him much. Sin is the only element directly carried over from the previous story; so much of what made it good was atmosphere, there isn’t much else you could re-use without just making more of it. He’s one of those monsters that worked incredibly well (and only appeared) once, but put him in a novel and it quickly becomes apparent that he’s not exactly a gift to writers, being mute and wanting to kill people absolutely 100% of the time. (Because of his pig brain – pigs being notably homicidal?) He at least provides some irony for the villain, Hsien-Ko, who can’t have children but does have a monstrous lackey dressed as one.

She’s a major part of Shadow not quite being what you’d expect. Her link to The Talons Of Weng-Chiang is kept secret for a while, and though it’s fair to assume she’s the antagonist, McIntee keeps her allegiance and feelings towards Weng-Chiang and the Doctor ambiguous. She has nothing much against the Doctor and doesn’t want to kill him; she’d rather have his help. Confronted by his not wanting to do so (because duh), she’s happy enough to dump him on a distant island (using the teleportation of Dragon Paths, a key plot ingredient) and let him make his own way back, knowing he’d be too late by then. Even the Doctor is surprised to be up against a downright amenable bad guy: it “makes a nice change.” Elsewhere she is genuinely disappointed at having to kill someone not necessary to the plan, and a key motivator is her love affair with Kwok, a lieutenant, which in turn makes her sad because a quirk of time means she will far outlive him. Together they occasionally use the Dragon Paths to go to an unspecified tropical paradise just to have a peaceful five minutes – an entirely pragmatic use of teleportation and a humanising one for a “bad guy”. Throughout the book, I was pleasantly surprised by her.

McIntee’s choice of Doctor and companion is slightly unusual, pairing the Fourth Doctor with the first Romana during their search for the Key To Time. That’s not a sequence of stories you could easily cram something else into; he gets away with it by making Hsien-Ko and the Dragon Paths give off a signal that is a lot like the Key To Time. Hsien-Ko is surprised that his companion isn’t Leela. (Given Virgin canon’s almost complete ignorance of the noble savage, I am not. Alas.) Both characters are written fittingly as if they’re being script edited by Douglas Adams, with the Doctor having fits of whimsy and eccentricity like putting his hand up to his eyes and then “realising” that he left his telescope in the TARDIS. There’s some amusing one-upmanship with K9, who has a quiet sense of superiority that’s funny without being implausible. (Yet more subverted expectations come when K9 finally meets Mr Sin. It’s over rather quickly, but by then you’re a bit sick of the stabby git, and K9’s quiet triumph is adorable.)

Romana is the only part that falls down, not because she’s poorly written or because Mary Tamm didn’t play the character well, but because in one year that version of the character didn’t develop much beyond haughty and smart, and McIntee sticks loyally to that characterisation. Tom and Mary didn’t have much of a rapport at the time – certainly nothing that compares to the Pygmalion quality with Louise Jameson – and the strange absence of something is noticeable here. The Doctor and Romana seem to exist quite independently, as they haven’t got the firey chemistry that came with Lalla Ward; as they’re both superior Time Lords at the peak of their confidence, there’s never any feeling that they’re in peril. When they’re with Hsien-Ko, she’s so accommodating that there isn’t a lot of tension. When they’re taken into police custody, McIntee writes “It was as if [Romana] were going along purely as a favour,” which pretty much describes their entire journey through the novel.

Taken on its own, an indomitable Doctor and/or companion can be a thrilling change of pace. Terrance Dicks wrote the Seventh Doctor that way in Exodus, and it was a tonic. Similarly, writing a villain with technically positive ambitions who really quite likes the Doctor, and will go to some lengths to keep him safe, is a twist on the good guy/bad guy dynamic that is so often easy and stale. I’m all for both of these things, but the combination doesn’t quite work. Shadow has the odd feeling of a bunch of people who can come and go as they like, harmlessly moving from place to place until their plans finally become impassable. Despite McIntee’s signature action, it becomes a chore.

Sadly there are other McIntee habits on display, not all of them good. It wouldn’t be one of his books without a historical setting and attendant rubbing-your-nose-in-it. Writing a story in a historical period? Good, those are fascinating. Providing lots of detail so it sounds authentic? Great. But you can get distracted by that, and he does, often describing locales and objects in nearly tedious detail, pausing the flow of the story to make really super-duper-mega sure you know he knows what he’s talking about. I get it – you do. “The Doctor’s police box stood just inside the gate, on a wide promenade that looked out eastwards over on the vibrant green depressions between the three main peaks and their attendant promontories, all of which had temples or inns built upon them.” Uh huh. Sometimes his embedded enthusiasm sounds like that of a tourism board. “The pine-scented fresh breeze that blew through the gardens would undoubtedly be as refreshing to anyone in the pavilions as would the shade provided by the pointed golden roofs.” Oooh! And sometimes it seems to have little to do with history and more to do with presumably drawing things out first and then wanting to prove it. “The parking area was in front of a large three-storey French-style mansion. The front of the house was graced with a wide patio from which two staircases descended to the gravel.” Fascinating.

It’s becoming clearer with each book that this writer loves detail and information – which isn’t a bad thing, but is perhaps more suited to scriptwriting than prose. There are scenes where characters list different makes and models of weaponry, or recount the complicated political situation of Shanghai at that time, and numerous scenes with an aircraft that refer to it as “the CNAC Stinson Trimotor.” Ohh, that aircraft! Thanks for clarifying!

Even the character writing falls into the too-much-information trap. We learn vital (and to be fair, often interesting) back story about Hsien-Ko, her lover Kwok, the Shadow-inspired Woo who also runs a night club, and cop-with-an-agenda Li by the slightly cumbersome method of them pausing what they’re doing to have a bloody good remember. Sometimes when they’re under attack. There’s a moment when, aptly enough, Romana is observing a landscape and we get this: “Romana had nothing against admiring beautiful scenery, but there was a time for everything.” Too bloody right there is.

Some of the difficulty I had in getting through this one may be that I’ve read it before, as you don’t necessarily have that urge to find out what happens next the second time. Mostly though, I think it’s the writing style. Now, there are some genuinely creative choices made with the characters, the style of “villainy” they’re up against, and the resistance to more obvious call-backs where it’s a sequel. (We still get continuity, some of it quite unexpected and arguably welcome, as it’s from the books: Hsien-Ko’s plan ties into Invasion Of The Cat-People, and there’s a significant cameo by a character from the first Decalog collection, of all things.) There are some random beats include the Doctor comparing somebody to Chow Yun Fat, suggesting he watches a lot of Chinese action movies from the ’90s, and a bizarre conversion with Romana about political correctness, as well as all those odd travel brochure bits where we marvel at the sights. But the book’s problem is more endemic, being so aloof with its heroes and villains and so excited about period detail (and detail in general) that it’s difficult to invest. Once we’re into the climax it just goes on endlessly in an actiony, detaily haze.

I can see why you’d admire The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang, and I like what it tried to do. If you are going to read it, though, I suggest one-and-done.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #90 – Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#57
Bad Therapy
By Matthew Jones

There’s something unfortunate about this one. Bad Therapy is the first post-Roz novel, but thanks to the So Vile A Sin debacle it ended up sort of being her exit as well. It opens with an awkward apology for the inconvenience and contains many references to the Doctor and Chris trying to cope without her, but there’s nothing too specific about what actually happened to her. I suspect it had an unreal quality at the time; if you weren’t clued up you might hope that they were just Doing A Thing and Roz would show up at the end.

If you were reading the New Adventures as they came out then this one followed Damaged Goods. That almost seems deliberate, as Bad Therapy inhabits a similar urban space. Set in London, 1958 – a slightly unconventional/unfamous period to visit, as was 1987 – it opens with a young gay man encountering what appears to be racial violence and intervening to help someone. He then finds himself facing the TARDIS (which blocks his escape) and pleads for help from the police, but no one’s home, and he gets mortally wounded. Later his boyfriend, Jack, is hounded by a blackmailer over his relationship. Private sexualities, urban crime and the fallibility of the Doctor were fodder for Russell T Davies. Matthew Jones explores similar territory here.

There’s something sadly apt about the team’s failure to be there for Eddy, almost as if the absence of Roz takes a vital cog out of the machine. (The Doctor finds Eddy and takes him to a hospital, but it’s still not enough to save him.) Things definitely aren’t okay between the time travellers, who spend most of the book apart. The Doctor and Chris have been travelling but hardly communicating: “Over the last month they had fallen into the habit of leaving messages taped to the control console. Sometimes it was easier than talking.” / “[It was] like an estranged father weekending with his son.”

I was concerned about the choice of a first time novelist for this particular book – not because first time novelists are automatically bad (see Damaged Goods) or because Matthew Jones isn’t good (see his Decalog 2 story), but because it’s so crucial to understand these characters and where they’re at right now that you might expect it to go to an old hand instead. Happily Matthew Jones was a good fit, especially when it comes to the character writing. The Doctor has changed a lot over these books, earning a rep as a morally grey game player but latterly becoming more relatable and sympathetic. After the loss of Roz it makes sense to lean into the more vulnerable, human side of him, which Bad Therapy does with aplomb. “Roz used to say that the Doctor was a one-thousand-year-old toddler. Constantly enchanted and surprised by the universe as he encountered it. Despite being envious of such an innocent view of the world, they both knew that this was only half the picture. The other half was only rarely glimpsed and, like a mountain seen through mist, could never be wholly comprehended.” / “He was a gentler man now, softer, more… human.”

Jones has a knack for the Doctor’s fun peculiarities as well, which reminded me of Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane. “The Doctor leapt to his feet and hurried over, stopping only to throw the book into a nearby dustbin and tuck the apple core carefully away into his pocket.” / “The Doctor was in the passenger seat wrestling with an Ordnance Survey map, which flapped wildly around him, like a panic-stricken swan. For some inexplicable reason, his hat appeared to be entirely wind-resistant.” / “…rolling his R’s with more enthusiasm than skill.” His ease at making new friends is firmly on display when he bonds with Jack Bartlett, who the book goes to some lengths to suggest as a possible companion, starting with saving the Doctor’s life. He also gradually wins over Chief Inspector Harris, a policeman with good reason to suspect the Doctor of being up to no good.

More heartening though is the Doctor’s sense of justice, which gets plenty of exercise in an atmosphere of ’50s homophobia. One quintessentially Seventh Doctor scene has him rebutting a gangster’s vision of Britain: “England for the English. Until all the faces are white and there’s no one different from you at all. No queers, no yids, no darkies.’ The Doctor seemed to consider Gordy’s dream for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’” (This scene is only slightly ruined by the exchange “‘You gonna stop me?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘You and who’s army?’ ‘That’s right.’” Cringe – it’s even spelled wrong to make the gag work!) Not all of the Doctor’s decisions ring true exactly, which we’ll get to; good as the writing is, the book is imperfect.

Chris is on a more pronounced journey here, since of the two TARDIS travellers he’s less used to losing people. He misses Roz deeply and a new relationship, Patsy, allows him to revive his complicated feelings for her. I was impressed to see the romantic overture from Return Of The Living Dad brought up again – making it less of a random blip, if nothing else – but this, and some of Chris’s general feelings about Roz, isn’t always handled with subtlety. (For instance it’s a bit sad, if probably accurate, that “closure” for Chris means being able to have sex again without feeling weird about it. Oh woe is him, it’s been weeks.) Chris, along with other characters, has a tendency to pause what he’s doing and reminisce; not all of it is as rich as the stuff about the Doctor. (“...playing wide-eyed rookie to her cynical street cop”, well, ya think?) Chris also suffers from the dreaded telling-rather-than-showing. “I feel so... so humiliated.” / “I don’t want your support, thank you very much. I’m too angry with you for that.” There’s probably a decent joke about projecting your feelings in a book about therapy lifeforms that literally do that for you, but I guess it’s not that kind of book.

Which brings us to the plot (and it’s a good sign when you can witter on about the writing before even getting to that). The murders are targeting a group of escaped something-or-others from a mental hospital in Healey. Chris suspects, or is lead to believe that they are aliens, and Jones plays with that assumption, tossing in a possible hint of telepathy for all you Psi-Powers fans. (Don’t panic.) The truth is weirder: these are artificial people who, through an extreme form of empathy, become the thing(s) another person needs. Ostensibly this is a treatment for people who struggle to connect, but there’s a more villainous reason behind it which we’ll find out later. The real issue, regardless of the slightly typical baddie in the last act (who literally pretends to be the Devil for some of it – I dunno, do you think he’s secretly really nice?) is whether the “Toys” are in fact alive. It’s a worthwhile concept / argument, and Jones invests enough in the characters to make them indistinguishable from the humans. Tilda, head of a local club that takes all kinds, feels like somebody he’s written about before, lived-in and world-weary. Eddy makes a memorable impression in his brief time at the start, described by the thoughts of his boss more than by actually interacting with people, then through the hole he leaves in Jack’s life. Patsy has a little less to do than Tilda, being a more literal mirror of what Chris is feeling and ultimately of Roz herself, but her longing to exist seems to decide the argument once and for all.

But then it’s more complicated than simply being artificial and alive, as the Toys (frustratingly they don’t get a “proper” name) need another person’s feelings in order to exist, and in the long term they need the person. Chris is outraged by being “tricked” into his feelings for Patsy and the Doctor, with surprising ease, agrees that it would be wrong to “trick” other people into essentially mating for life with their (fake) perfect partner. This seems like a satisfying switcheroo until the book simply changes the subject, having the baddies show up again to make a mess before we can get into it. And they should be adding to the moral complexity, as there are “blank” Toys with instructions to kill – but why don’t they ever long for something more?

Sadly, the villains let the side down. Local criminals Gordy and Carl Scraton have some internal bitterness and jealousy going for them, but otherwise they’re transparent thugs. Moriah, the man having all the Toys killed, is out to recreate his lost wife who hated him; there’s some complexity in the fact that even when presented with a perfect copy who loves him, his own issues mean he expects her to hate him and so she does. But he’s a monotonous presence otherwise, gleeful about killing others to the point where it’s a bit odd that he’s managed to run a mental hospital and convince the staff of his good intentions. And as for the Doctor’s plan to stop him – creating the perfect wife he’s been after, then mentally forcing her to love him long enough to get them both away somewhere – firstly, what’s to stop him coming back when it wears off? Secondly, uh, what? Are these beings alive or not? Where does the need for another person end and consent begin? It doesn’t work, thank goodness, but by then you’re already frowning heavily at the Doctor. I’m all for writing him as a fallible character, but they don’t call him out nearly enough on this, and it’s hardly a story that brings his cold manipulations to the fore. (If anything it’s the opposite, at one point highlighting his refusal to execute a plan against his friend’s wishes. They let him when they realise he cares.)

If you like judgement of the Doctor, you’ll love the subplot. There’s a returning character in Bad Therapy with a pretty justifiable reason to be mad at him; Big Finish would later explore the same topic, with mixed results. While the character’s feelings make sense, and it’s nice to see them again, there’s a lot going on here already. (I haven’t even mentioned the killer taxi cabs that zoom around London devouring people whole.) Again it serves to underline how fallible and vulnerable the Doctor is, coming to a head in a similar way to Mel’s return in Head Games. Things aren’t so irrevocably ruined this time (thanks again, Steve) and there are some lovely moments between the two of them, along with a really cool piece of writing when you figure out who the character is. (Quicker folks than me might guess it from the planet they’re on and, oh all right, their name.) Honestly though, I’m struggling to justify their inclusion in this book. You could easily have the same plot occurring without that ingredient, and similarly you could mine a lot more book out of this reunion if you really wanted to. It probably feeds into the longing for Roz, but Chris is doing that rather literally, and the blossoming (but ultimately unfulfilled) companionship of Jack seem to do that as well.

There are some frustrating drawbacks to Bad Therapy. Most of the writing is thoughtful and it’s enjoyable to plough through, but there are some less artful moments. Irritating as it is to point them out, there are quite a few typos. (It’s mostly missing words and wrong apostrophes, like “Julia looked at ‘Tilda’. Really looked her.” / “You’re entire being is affected by my will.” / Sometimes words are repeated a few too many times in a sentence, and there’s a train-of-thought bit about Gordy that I’m about 90% sure is about Carl.) Some of the characters’ choices don’t quite add up, and the action ping-pongs too often between the club and the institute. (I kept thinking of that line in Hitchhiker’s Guide about commuters, who once and for all ought to figure out just where the hell they want to be.) That returning character is probably over-egging things, as is the explanation for the Notting Hill Riots – something else the book could have got more out of if it wanted to.

None of that spoils what is, on the whole, a promising first novel. Matthew Jones imbues most of the characters with life and colour, and handles the two regulars and their grief with care. He manages fan-pleasing moments mostly without seeming too pleased with himself, like the gorgeous bit about the constantly changing TARDIS wardrobe. (This includes "an elderly bespectacled shop assistant. When Chris had asked the Doctor if he knew that there was a tailor aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor had replied, absently, that he’d been wondering who’d been sneaking into his bedroom and darning his socks.") The story is driven by ideas, although their complexities occasionally get the better of it. I was reminded of another race whose motivations are interesting but make you uncomfortable, and then remembered pleasantly that he wrote The Impossible Planet as well. It’s nice to know he got more out of his theme.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #89 – The Plotters by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#28

The Plotters

By Gareth Roberts

If you were new to Doctor Who you might find it odd that there are so few stories where the characters get embroiled in history. It seems like an obvious win for a time travel show, and to be fair there are many great examples of this in the early years, with characters trying to keep history on course while struggling to escape from it. But Daleks and Cybermen get you more Radio Times covers, I guess, so after 1967 the historicals sadly died off; all of a sudden the only way to see history was if aliens were trying to blow it up. (Not including Black Orchid, where you only wished aliens would blow it up.)

The novels have mostly followed suit, stapling reassuring sci-fi bits to any errant historical settings with two exceptions: Sanctuary, David A. McIntee’s grim book about the Spanish Inquisition, and now The Plotters by Gareth Roberts. In some ways this is the better historical. No doubt McIntee did more detailed research (Roberts’s book opens with an acknowledgement that The Plotters isn’t very accurate), but this one’s set in the Hartnell era, where you were most likely to find trips to the past. Roberts knows exactly how best to use these characters in that context, with the Doctor, Vicki, Ian and Barbara assuming more or less parallel roles to those in The Crusade. They slide back into the swing of things with such ease that you could easily imagine this being made for television.

Arriving in 1605, the Doctor dismisses Barbara’s obvious enthusiasm for this period of history but allows her and Ian to take in the sights while he and Vicki loiter in the TARDIS. This is a lie, of course: he knows just how close they are to a juicy bit of history and he intends to find a good seat to gawk from. His deception leads to some pretty unpleasant business for everyone else, and it’s absolutely in keeping for Hartnell’s Doctor to lap up every minute of it regardless. He’s a wily, wilful, crafty old sod in this, as comfortable leading Ian and Barbara astray as he is playing word-games with the devious Robert Cecil. He never exactly apologises to his friends for the consequences of his fib – more on those shortly – and none of it seems to upset him at all. He practically cries with laughter at King James’s oblivious line on the back cover, “If anyone tries to interrupt the opening of Parliament … there’ll be fireworks!”, and later he works with one of the conspirators because doing that will be better for history than not. You could put all of this down to Roberts indulging Hartnell’s gift for mischief, and that’d be fair, but I like to think it deliberately underlines how the Doctor is unlike his companions. He can often be a serious presence in historical stories, reminding the others of the implacability of time, but at this stage Ian and Barbara have learnt the lessons, so he seems almost free of obligation. He has faith that time will sort itself out and if he has to give things a little nudge along the way, nudge them he will.

Barbara, possibly winning the “least fun weekend in 1605” award here, goes with Ian to a tavern and promptly gets embroiled in the work of Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby. She’s kidnapped, assaulted and threatened several times with execution, only escaping because she tells Fawkes a worrying amount of the truth about where she comes from and what she knows about him. (You can guess what she leaves out.) Fawkes is dead set on his goal, but he has no wish to harm her; he helps her escape from the more dangerous Catesby. Barbara observes several times that Fawkes is not such a bad man, or not universally so, and she’s absolutely tortured by the knowledge of what will happen to him. She still goes out of her way to ensure that it will. If The Plotters had somehow been made back in the ’60s, this would have made a bleak but satisfying end to Barbara’s learning curve in The Aztecs.

Good as all of that is, it would be fair to say that Barbara essentially just gets captured and escapes in this, which makes it even more unimpressive that Ian’s entire role in The Plotters is to dash about looking for her. Despite often inhabiting the more heroic role in Doctor Who, or maybe because he does, Ian fades into the background of the plot. (And later, The Plot.) He meets a pair of cheerful shoemaking rogues, Firking and Hodge, who offer shelter and haphazard support when he needs rescuing from Catesby and co. Roberts seemingly can’t wait to steer Ian back towards these two, as it allows more opportunity for amusement. I love Ian, but he’s at his funniest when the Doctor is making a faux pas, not so much when Barbara’s in danger.

Firking and Hodge provide a few straightforward laughs, but there’s a better comedy double act in the bickering Haldann and Otley: working to transcribe the King James Bible, they constantly snipe at each other but quietly agree it’s best to leave out some of the boring bits, because “Well, would you like to be stuck on the begats for week after week?” The Doctor’s apparent interest in 1605 is the transcription (at first), and he ingratiates himself not just into the King’s court, but between these equally cantankerous old goats. I found myself looking forward to these bits and gleefully imagining them on telly.

It’s debateable whether this version of King James would have made the cut. It’s remarkably similar to Alan Cumming’s take in the recent series, all lascivious looks and lusty Scots wit. But Roberts doesn’t so much acknowledge the King’s sexuality here as build a rocket out of it: he subverts the trope of the lusted-after companion by disguising Vicki as the Doctor’s ward, then making her the object of his affections precisely for that reason. It’s a particularly crafty farce that all Vicki has to do to end the King’s advances is lose the disguise, which is the one thing she can’t do. Grim as the consequences of her discovery would be, Roberts has endless fun with the obsessed King, whether patting his knee hopefully and sending knowing looks or throwing a drunken sulk because he can’t find him. There are some near misses: “‘I promise if you let the King have his way you will get a lovely surprise!’ ‘Not half as lovely as the surprise you’d get,’ said Vicki.”

A character like King James is a gift when you can write prose like Gareth Roberts. “With a snap of his fingers he summoned a boy to refill his goblet (boy-summoning was a choice pastime of his).” / “He was constantly searching for these little reminders of his specialness. He remembered his father warning him that the first sign of serious levels of unrest in one’s subjects was everybody’s dinner looking the same. Poor Dad. Blown to bits at Bannockburn.” / “‘Something – oh, something awful has happened!’ ‘Ugh. How awful?’ ‘Very awful, Your Majesty.’ James remained to be convinced. ‘On a riding scale, if one is a stolen pie from the kitchens and ten is revolution in the streets, how awful?’ The Chamberlain hesitated. ‘Oh, eight, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh, doom.’” Even the prose around him is fun. Describing the busybodying Chamberlain: “Patches of pink bloomed on his cheeks, making plump mulberries of them.” And the Chamberlain on food prep: “He’d forgotten to remind the cooks of James’s innate loathing of meringues.” There’s just gobs of this stuff, all delicious.

Where the TARDIS team are concerned, the wit is tinged with characterful insight. Barbara on the TARDIS’s failure to hit the 1960s: “Back to the Ship and pull the handle on the fruit machine again.” And adorably, “We’re only about three hundred and sixty years out. That’s quite good for the Doctor, all told.” Vicki is particularly, almost conspicuously unamused by the Doctor in this – probably spurred on King James’s affections – observing “He wore his own Edwardian outfit, which [she] didn’t dare point out was as anachronistic as any plastic mac.” More significantly, “[she] had noticed before how he faked symptoms of ill health when bringing bad news or trying to conceal a mistake.” At one point she’s so tired of lugging books for Haldann and Otley, she contemplates kicking him in the shins. The Doctor meanwhile snidely congratulates himself that “This excursion was turning out quite satisfactory, particularly without those schoolteacher people to distract him,” and on meeting the Chamberlain “found his constant gesticulations irritating, and quelled a desire to reach out and slap him.” Significantly (and dangerously) he gives Cecil one in the eye when he says “‘The ordering in the Alexandrian section is quite gone to plot – I mean to say, pot.’ Feeling rather puffed up and pleased with himself for that one he strode away round the corner.”

It’s not all playful and fun, of course, what with Barbara’s mistreatment and her inner torment over the fate of Fawkes. Also some marvellous, earnest little nuggets like this jumped off the page: “In this age it was still possible to see the stars, and as he trudged up the road Ian stopped more than once to look up and wonder which of them he had visited.” There’s a grim interlude where Ian and Barbara witness a bear being exhibited for cruel London punters, and there’s a surprising and horrifying murder late in the book (which thankfully Barbara misses), but nonetheless the plot errs on the side of fanciful. (Hence Roberts’s acknowledgement/warning at the start.) The Plotters offers a sinister linking presence to the machinations of Cecil and the delusions of Catesby. It’s never less than fun to read, particularly as the Doctor surprisingly disarms Cecil by agreeing to help him, then hoodwinks a mastermind by sheer dumb luck. But some of the machinations do get a bit silly, particularly a male character’s prolonged successful disguise as a serving wench, which seems more like Blackadder than Doctor Who. Towards the end of the book there’s an almost unruly number of scenes with characters held captive in dank little rooms; I had trouble remembering who was where, held at sword-point by whom.

I’ve definitely got some quibbles. The Plotters is a smidge too long at nearly 300 pages, some of it being the aforementioned game of “Whose cellar is it anyway?” Also it’s so intent on giving the Doctor a whale of a time that Ian and Barbara, and very nearly Vicki don’t get a great deal to do. But I’m so enamoured with the prose that I can just about write this off as era-appropriate. Historical stories could go on a bit just as much as the sci-fi epics, and four characters is always a lot to balance in terms of plot. (The Crusade, which I adore mainly as a novelisation, ultimately runs out of material for the Doctor and Vicki.) Where The Plotters isn’t perfect, it still feels like something the Hartnell era was foolish to let go. It’s just great Doctor Who.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #88 – So Vile A Sin by Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#56

So Vile A Sin

By Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman

I’m not sure this warrants a spoiler warning since the book is 20+ years old and the major event in it is probably referenced in half a dozen other books. But you might have made it this far and not know, and I don’t want to be That Guy Who Ruined It For You, so: spoilers ahead.

Brace yourselves, this one’s important. So Vile A Sin is the culmination of the Psi-Powers arc, the last New Adventure to feature Roz, and it’s by Ben “Yes I wrote The Also People, I do other things, you know” Aaronovitch – added up that’s more than enough to hoik up the price on eBay. But then there was a mix up with a malfunctioning hard drive and a timewarp and it ended up being a) delayed, b) co-written by the equally beloved Kate Orman and c) the last New Adventure to feature the Doctor, his book rights having swanned off to the BBC. The accumulated geek points mean it is now d) eBay gold dust, unfortunately for prospective readers.

This wasn’t supposed to be the end of the New Adventures (feat. Dr. Who), but it is how they stopped: with a huge plot spoiler arriving half a dozen books too late. I can only imagine the weirdness of reading all the subsequent fallout before the actual event, or the even bigger weirdness of sitting down to So Vile A Sin afterwards and trying to look the least bit surprised.

Thankfully I’m able to read it in order, though it’s now become so infamous that avoiding the main spoiler was impossible. So Vile A Sin seems to anticipate this, strangely, announcing the major event on Page 1. Was that always the plan, or did they rearrange the flow of the story around the fact that most readers would already know? Either way the book is like: Roz dies. *mic drop*

Page 2 is her funeral. Much about this is unexpected, from taking place so early in the book to the blazing sunshine that accompanies it; the Doctor seems to be coping with disturbing ease right up to his heart attack. It’s a well-judged gut punch of an opening. I tried to imagine reading this totally unspoiled, and... you’d assume it was a wheeze, wouldn’t you? Doctor Who certainly isn’t above a dramatic fake out. The TARDIS “dies” every other Wednesday.

The ensuing story hops around in space and time and concerns different timelines and possible futures. The Doctor, in particular, is besieged by alternative lives and an actual double for some of it. The cumulative effect is the tantalising feeling that, all joking aside, there are plenty of escape clauses to choose from and we just wouldn’t do that to you. They dangle the possibilities quite openly here and there, like the Doctor seeing various futures and saying to Roz “You’re alive with me in four of them.” And elsewhere a young Forrester contemplates: “The rumour mill had it that little Thandiwe’s Aunty Roz hadn’t died, that this was a cover story for something far more interesting.” There’s even a sweet bit at the end that hints, maybe, somehow…? Hmm.

The book’s tone also seems to belie such a cruel twist of fate. I wonder if it’s indelicate to guess which author made which contribution, so I’ll just say that more often than not the book feels like Kate Orman – which here means that despite a lot of horrible things happening, it’s somehow a rather light and spirited read. A weight of expectation rests on it all, certainly, but at the same time it seems more than happy to zip away and think about something else instead. There’s a jolly scene where Chris meets some of Roz’s family in her multiple-museum-sized home, which includes an adorably Also People-ish bit with sentient airplanes. (Ben? Or is that too obvious?) There’s a fun bit where some of the AIs from SLEEPY unexpectedly gain physical form and have a rendez-vous. (Kate? I bet I’m getting this totally wrong.) One seemingly random diversion has two bit players meeting an alternate Doctor in his strange little home, and just being there, soaking up the odd atmosphere before he vanishes. The damn book is the first one to tell you that Roz dies, but there simply doesn’t seem to be time for something that big and awful to actually happen. (It employs a similar zippiness with the Brotherhood plot, with the signal from Damaged Goods being wrapped up rather succinctly early on. You begin to suspect that their plan, like Roz’s death, has been exaggerated.)

I spent the whole thing waiting for some catastrophic conflagration to come along and epically take Roz away, but of course, that’s not always how death rolls. One day she’s in a war zone, things don’t go her way and that’s it. The event itself is not transcribed.

The fight against the Brotherhood takes a bit of a left turn when Roz’s sister, Leabie, decides to go for it and take control of the Earth Empire. It’s worth noting that the Empire is in tatters and propped up by the Brotherhood, who have their own agenda, but it still feels like a coup and Roz might be wrong to participate in it. The epilogue doesn’t hem and haw too much over this, saying everything’s in good hands with Leabie, but it still didn’t quite sit right with me. But then, so what? There’s something brisk and unexpected about a companion taking such a dangerous, morally uncertain decision, especially as their last one. Roz’s final conversation with the Doctor is a rebuke, telling him that he’s not in charge and she should be able to go off and make her own decisions; that she isn’t like every other companion he’s had. “When all those children you call your companions have their fits of moral anguish and cover up their eyes because of the things you have to do, just remember who it is that stands by you. Who does the necessary even when the necessary costs … You owe me. So you can threaten Bernice and Dorothée, you can show your human side for the cameras, but I know. That history kills people and sometimes even you can’t save them. So you owe me this, for my family, for the children of the angry man and for the ones that died in the slave ships and mines and all the others you couldn’t save at the time.” All the Doctor can offer in response, occasionally throughout the book, is a defeated entreaty not to get involved. Because undoubtedly he knows she will and that it’ll be over soon.

The Doctor’s powerlessness crops up throughout, from not knowing which version of himself is a duplicate to being unable to save Roz. There are literally other version of him that do have a plan and, it is strongly suggested, “our” one that finds himself at the funeral is not among them. He’s crushed. But in that curious way that I’m tempted to lay at Kate Orman’s door, he also has a lot of frivolous and fun little moments, like temporarily finding himself as a (terrible) ship’s cook or, after assassinating the current Empress – a thing that happens, incidentally! – he argues with and flippantly denies the authority of his trial. So Vile A Sin is acutely aware of the Doctor’s rep as a master game player, and wrong-foots it in a way that makes him seem a little more three-dimensional. He even admits to the Brotherhood that “‘You think I’ve been chasing you. Trying to expose you. But our paths have crossed at random. I’ve never sought you out.’ His shoulders fell. ‘We didn’t have to be enemies.’” Which, in all fairness, might say more about the Psi-Powers arc than it means to. I don’t think I’m alone in being unimpressed with the Brotherhood, and while it is satisfying to tie together their exploits in various earlier novels, I won’t miss them.

The book has an unusual way of dealing with these momentous events – Roz’s imminent death, the Brotherhood’s ultimate plan – in that it’s so flighty that they don’t feel momentous at first. Some of this I’m sure is an insidiously clever way to manage the reader’s expectations. It also (brilliantly, I think) reminds you that even grief and death are shrouded in life, upturns and random good bits: you can’t have one without the other, hence the odd feeling that you’re reading a really colourful and fun book about something awful happening. But then there’s the elephant in the room, somehow tooting “This isn’t how it was supposed to be” with its trunk. So Vile A Sin, as we’ve read it, is a recreation of what it might have been. There’s no point getting caught up in the ways Ben Aaronovitch would have handled all of this on his own, of course, because that book doesn’t exist for comparison, but the flighty, almost frantic pace of the thing – the jumps in time, the characters just plain conveniently turning up when they’re needed – do point to a kind of “Oh crumbs, how do I stick this together?” Which isn’t hard to believe.

It never feels rushed in the way a lot of other Virgin books do, i.e. changing tracks every half a page to spuriously try and get a bit of momentum going. But it nonetheless gives the impression that it is summarising, however brilliantly, another book. (I’m just observing, I really don’t mind. This is the only way we were going to get So Vile A Sin, so three cheers for Kate Orman for completing such an uphill brief. It’s not that easy – I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, which does a similar thing with his own abandoned story idea. I spent the whole thing wanting to read the original.)

You know what? I’ll need to read it again to get all of the nuances out of it. There are tons of characters who for various reasons (blah blah, see above) don’t stand out as much as they might. I think that’s excusable. But maybe that’s just me galloping through the book, perpetually surprised I wasn’t reading something turgidly weighty. Roz’s life, her contradictions and her secrets are celebrated here, going right back to Original Sin, and there’s nothing token about her death. (Which is a relief as, according to Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, there were plans to kill her in her first book!) We’re given plenty of nudges and winks that all might not be what it appears, and yet some sense of closure is somehow snuck between them. For what you might think of as a rescue mission or a juggling act by Kate Orman, that is a real achievement.

With its multifaceted Doctor and worlds of possibility, it also serendipitously embraces its place as a finale, ending (if you like) the New Adventures on a sad note, but with love. The Doctor could be anything and his companions can make their own choices. It’s not a bad legacy.

8/10