Seasons of War is a charity Doctor Who
short story collection, edited by Declan May, with all proceeds going to the
Caudwell Children charity.
After a touching
preface by Nicholas Briggs, remembering his friend Paul Spragg, to whom the
book is dedicated...
The opening
image, of a solitary man on a bleak crag overlooking a land of mist and swamp
reminded me of the cover to the 80’s Penguin Classic edition of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and while I’m aware that’s an
extremely up-myself way to start a review for a Doctor Who book, it also seems strangely fitting for a collection
of stories featuring a Doctor so dark as to make the Seventh seems positively
uncomplicated and angelic. At this
point in time, two pages in, I’ve no idea if it’s an image which accurately
reflects the remaining one and a half million stories (or at least that’s how
it feels when you look at the two pages of contents– this is a book which gives
value for money even if you buy the ebook then
the limited edition paperback!) but it’s a quality I hope to see more in the
pages to come.
Anyway, back to
that first story..
If I had to
describe it in a single word, I suspect I’d plump for ‘perverse’. An opening story called ‘Epilogue’, which revisits another story titled, in part, ‘Genesis’,
Matt Fitton’s timeless tale is more
of an intriguing starter (or dessert - take your pick) than a fully-fledged
story in its own right, but in a long collection such as this some stories
serve as building blocks for others, and I get the feeling this is one of
those.
Christ on a
bike. Next up is '1. Karn’ by, I assume (it
doesn’t say) editor Declan May. This is the first thing I’ve read by the
author, but bloody hell he doesn’t miss, does he? Set a heartbeat after the events of the
McGann-Hurt regeneration, this War Doctor isn’t the basically cuddly old
curmudgeon we saw in ‘Day of the Doctor’, this is an absolute bastard. Judged purely on his words and actions in
these few pages, this is a Doctor to make the Master look kindly, a Doctor who
cares about nothing bar victory, a Doctor who can forget the name of a dead
woman in seconds and doom a mythical race in a moment. I’m not sure I like him much, but it’s a
brave decision and an impressive introduction to Mr May’s writing.
After two grim
opening tales, ‘Crowsnest Past’ by Warren Frey comes as a welcome change
of pace. Where ‘Epilogue’ took place in a world of vicious peaks and ‘Karn’ featured a vicious Doctor, this
one kicks off with a spot of fishing, as the Doctor (I’m just going to call him
that, by the way - it’s only a missing adjective ,after all) sits in the door
of the TARDIS and tries to catch a gumblejack or two (incidentally, this is the
third story in a row to specifically reference an old TV episode – is this a
deliberate thing, I wonder?). Of course,
it soon goes a bit horrible and scary, with burning eyed monsters attacking the
helpless human settlement, but this is a ‘proper’ 21st century Doctor Who adventure, of a type I wasn’t
sure we’d see in this book. Kudos to the
author for a solid Who story and to
the editor for slotting it in here, just where it was needed.
I love Lee Rawlings’ ‘Eight Minute War’. The
writing itself is peculiar, disjointed and with an occasional lapse in
vocabulary – exactly, in fact, as you would expect an alien to sound speaking a
language not his own. The fact that this
is first person, and that the jagged nature of the text is consistent
throughout makes me think this has to have been a deliberate choice by the
author, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was impressed by the way the
bewildered narrator describes events he doesn’t entirely understand and ends up
confronting a Doctor who is a failure, no matter how you cut it. We’ll never see something like this on
television, in the new superhero version of Doctor Who, and in some ways that
may be a good thing. Rawlings’ Doctor is
a hard man to respect…
Whereas JR Southall’s Doctor is very much the
twenty-first century version, prone to doing what’s needed and feeling a little
bit sad about it later. Like Warren
Frey’s story this is a story I can easily imagine being tweaked and used as the
basis for a Matt Smith or David Tennant episode. With echoes of ‘Journey to the Heart of the
TARDIS’, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and – for obvious reasons – ‘The Mind Robber’,
this is the sort of tale I can picture Steven Moffat enjoying, as the Doctor
does what needs to be done in what might be the Land of Fiction, and is
lessened because of it.
That Southall’s
less spiky interpretation of the Doctor leads straight into the second of Declan May’s ‘Doctor as
uber-pragmatist’ can’t be co-incidental.
The differences are readily apparent and altogether striking. It’s clearly the same character, but where
Southall’s Stranger is taking a break from the front lines, May’s Man in the
Bandolier wouldn’t function anywhere else (it’s interesting to see the various names
the author give our protagonist, incidentally – seven stories in, and he’s yet
to be referred to, even in passing, as the War Doctor). As manipulative as the McCoy incarnation and
as hard as very early Hartnell, had he wandered into the previous story, he’d
have killed Alice on the first page and have forgotten her name by page
two. Nice to see the titular Corsair
making a re-appearance too.
And now we come
to an unexpected (because I’ve not checked out the contents page at all)
treat. A new Kate Orman Doctor Who story! Easily in the top five prose authors ever to
write for the series, it’s fair to say that ‘The Ambassador from Wolf-Rayet 134’ is one of her lesser works, if
only for reasons of brevity, but even so, it’s a delightful piece, where Orman
contrives – with only a few thousand words to play with – to sketch in an
entire alien species in sufficient detail that this reader at least would have
been happy to have heard far more. The
particular talent of the Ambassador’s people is reminiscent of Telos’ Time
Hunter series, but Orman gives the concept a twist of her own, allowing that
skill to become overwhelming and then perfectly reporting the exact alien
reaction to being so overwhelmed. As
with all of Orman’s writing there’s a real sense of effortless ability on
display, and I’m reminded again of my desire to see the publication of single
author Doctor Who short story
collections…
In contrast to
Orman’s relatively small story of one ‘woman’ and her need for peace, ‘The Amber Room’ by Simon Brett and John Davies
remembers that other Who staple – the big set piece (with dinosaurs). Kicking a story off with a time transported
soldier being chased by an allosaurus does usually mean that you’re obliged to
pull back on the throttle a little as you progress, but that’s not the case
here, where the authors immediately raise the stakes by removing the entire
Earth in the next paragraph! If I have a
criticism – and it’s a small one – it’s that Leo, the soldier grabbed from an
early twenty-first world of terrorist attacks and IDEs, accepts the Doctor and
his TARDIS with no apparent concerns.
But it’s a minor complaint, and in no way detracts from another solid,
well told tale.
Andrew Smith and Matthew Smith – the two names from
my youth which occasioned in me such feelings of jealousy that I might as well
have had a big sign on my forehead that said ‘under achiever’. Games’ buffs of a certain vintage will
recognise the latter name as that of the teenager who wrote Spectrum classics
‘Manic Miner’ and ‘Jet Set Willy’ but it was the former who convinced the
thirteen year old me that I’d already missed the talent boat. Author of really rather brilliant tv story ‘Full Circle’ while still in Primary
school (or so it felt at the time), Smith disappeared into the black hole which
is the Police Force, and has only recently resurfaced in our little corner of
the internet, producing work for Big Finish and now – more unexpectedly,
perhaps – for Declan May in this book.
But enough of
the slightly breathless history lesson, what’s ‘The Celephas Gift’ like, I hear you ask? It’s damn good, actually. The story has a complete shape which, for all
their positive qualities, some of the other stories so far have been missing
(though, to be fair, those without such a structure have been so for a reason)
– a sense that this story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It helps that there’s something of a
pre-credits sequence, as the Doctor completes one (unseen) adventure and then
suffers the ramifications of the fallout from that adventure, but Smith is
clever in that, while there’s a definite sense that this story takes place
against the background of a wider War, and that this is not the Doctor we’re
used to, there’s enough meat in the story he tells for us not to care that
we’re not seeing the bigger picture. A
high spot of the early part of the collection, even amongst strong competition.
The next story
but one is a reworking of a chunk of Shakespeare’s Henry V, so it’s good that two such meaty pieces are constructed
around a third Declan May (this time
with the assistance of John Davies)
entry, ‘The Girl with the Purple Hair’. Less immediately about the War Doctor himself
than about his new, occasional companion, Jenny Shirt, and her perception of
him as he visits at various points in his own timeline, it still manages to add
another brick to the character May has been portraying all along.
And so to the
reworking of Henry V! In some ways this is simply an extended joke,
with key roles for Commander Maxil (primarily remembered on Gallifrey, we are
told, for shooting an unarmed man), Castellan Kelner (similarly ‘feted’ back
home for his craven behaviour during the Invasion
of Time) and Commentator Runcible (a joke all in and by himself), as well
as any number of other references to make the long term fan chuckle in
recognition. But is it too much of a
stretch to suggest that almost the last line of the footnotes makes the key
point of the piece in noting that the cowardly Runcible, post-regeneration,
‘became a War TARDIS flotilla commander and was known as ‘Lady Runcible The
Fearless’, one of the most ruthless and capable soldiers in her field’. There’s a warrior in all of us, if need be,
apparently….
‘…half-crazed
Robomen, force-mutated mounds of pain rejecting their half-destroyed mechanical
prostheses, and time-distorted semi-corpses from unidentifiable races… If you were expecting more belly laughs from
‘Here Comes the Doctor’ by Christopher Bryant then you’re in for a
disappointment, though I suspect that would be the only one you’d
experience. I must admit the name is a
new one to me, but I’m very keen to read more.
There’s an air of RTD about the way he punctuates the meat of the plot
with carefully constructed lists like the one above, or drops unexplained
references - ‘I saw the birthing of the
Final Pathogen’ – into the Doctor’s dialogue.
Equally, though, there’s an old
school feel to the Doctor turning up in disguise rather than waving the psychic
paper around, then having to use his wits to convince people he’s the good
guy. For myself, I thought it was
missing a trick to have the Daleks turn out to be the bad guys (though the
clues were there, which I did appreciate, in retrospect) but the author makes
up for that by allowing the story to continue beyond the point at which a
common or garden short story would stop (read it yourself – didn’t you expect
Aceso wasting the flying Daleks to be the end?). And Bryant’s War Doctor – the Patient, as
he’s known here – makes May’s look like the softest liberal bleeding heart
ever. “People change’, indeed. Christ.
A really good
short story feels like a novel in miniature – obviously not so detailed and
maybe not so tricky, but with several characters interacting in several
different ways, and a variety of plot twists and so on. A really great short story does all that and
yet still feels the perfect length. This
is a great short story, simple as that.
I’ve got a
slightly complicated relationship with the novelist John Peel. On the one hand,
I actually enjoyed ‘War of the Daleks’
and think that a genetic cross of Chris Bulis’ workmanlike prose and Gary
Russell’s flights of continuity fancy is something to be cherished, on some
level. On the other hand though, pretty
much everything else’s he written has been too pedestrian to be linked to
flying of any sort and has left me bored or confused (and sometimes both at
once). Fortunately, short stories allow
Peel less time to get lost in his own canon-related knots and so what we have
here is a competent, solid Doctor Who
story, heavily laced with references to previous adventures, and none the worse
for that.
‘Sonnet’ by Jenny Colgan, conversely, is anything but pedestrian or
boring. Rather it’s exactly what it
claims to be – a short poem in which Shakespeare considers the Doctor and his
past adventures. A peculiar choice,
perhaps, but like the earlier pastiche of Henry
V, an enjoyable – if brief – experience.
Moving onto a
more commonplace story telling format, Elton
Townend-Jones wins the award for best image of the book so far. ‘Five wet fingers…and a grasping, groping
hand’ appearing from within a mug of tea is not your everyday occurrence, but
it is the type of unexpected juxtaposition which the 21st century iteration of Doctor Who is very good at. The amusing way that the author then skips
over anything approaching a genuine technical explanation for what’s just
occured also echoes one of the better tropes of the new series, as does the
bittersweet ending – which, for my money, Townend-Jones nails more effectively
than anyone else so far. Another
excellent story in a book so far filled with them.
One thing worth mentioning - the
author’s choice of name for the female protagonist – Cass – is a little
distracting, in that I expected it to be a call-back (or possibly forward) to
the character from ‘Night of the Doctor’,
but in the end it appears to be a co-incidence.
‘IV. Loop’ is another story by the
Editor, though this one is considerably longer than previous such entries. May makes good use of the extra space though,
dipping inside the head of the War Doctor, early on in his mission, exhibiting
his hopes and fears, but without descending to maudlin sentiment or
(alternatively) jingoistic machismo.
Instead, we get a form of multi-Doctor adventure, complete with what I
assume is the War Doctor just before he uses the Moment, and a rumination on
the passing of time and the effect that can have on individual morality.
The last few
stories have been something of a breathing space in the flow of stories – well
crafted and well told, slightly smaller stories, with more emphasis on character
building than pyrotechnics. Exactly what
any long collection needs at this point, in other words.
‘The Holdover’ by another name new to me,
Daniel Wealands, throws us back into
the middle of the Time War, however.
Clearly the Editor thinks that the Reader has had enough of the pleasant
stuff for a while! Wealands’ War Doctor
is a cynic and a pragmatist, but more importantly, his Time Lords are most
definitely no better than the Daleks (a position which the book as whole has
only hinted at until now). Internment
camps, ethnic cleansing, conscientious objectors vilified and imprisoned – you
can almost feel the stakes rising as you move from one page to the next, from
one graphically described horror to the next.
Perhaps the links to the Nazis is a bit unsubtle, but it’s also
effective in repelling the reader.
Indeed, if I had any criticism it’s that by the end you might well find
yourself rooting for the Daleks, just a tiny bit, so revolting is the Time Lords’
plan and so vile its implementation.
The fact that the tv series demonstrates that the plan backfires
horribly in the end is a consolation, I suppose, but still, this is dark, dark
stuff…
It’s no
surprise, given the comparatively little we see on screen of the War Doctor and
his own description of himself, that most authors in this collection have opted
to portray a dark and troubled figure, either a flint-hard soldier with the
greater good always in mind, or a weary old soldier, longing for the end of the
fighting. Lance Parkin, predictably, chooses a different path altogether, and
shows us a War Doctor who remains recognisably ‘our’ Doctor, a cunning
trickster choosing the most sensible path, even if that means very slightly
helping the Dalek war effort. It’s a
clever inversion of expectation – the reader gets to the end of the story,
thinking Parkin hasn’t brought his A game (‘of course it must be a trick – we
know how these types of stories go!’) and then has the carpet swept from under
him and the expected twist turns out to be a straighten after all, and the
better for it. A nice switch in tone,
just as the reader thinks he could do with a change from all these piles of
bodies.
Like Christopher
Bryant earlier on, Sami Kelish is a
name new to me, but one I’m very keen to see again. A complete change of pace from even Lance
Parkin’s story, ‘Gardening’ does
exactly what it says on the tin. A
quiet, small story of one woman and her garden, this is beautifully written
(reminiscent, for me, of Mags Halliday’s lovely writing style), with what is
probably the most three dimensional character in the book so far. Kelish’s War Doctor falls somewhere between
young street fighter and weary veteran, but – as with Parkin’s story – I really
was ready for a gentler, less cold-blooded hero for a story or two. Kudos to the editor for providing this brief
oasis, and to the author for crafting so engaging a heroine.
Having said
that, I’m inclined, if I’m being honest, to both criticise and praise the
editorial work on the next story up, ‘Sleepwalking
to Paradise’ by Dan Barrett. Which is not to say that the story is poor –
anything but. It’s impressively layered
and plotted, with several competing stands of action, at least two clever
twists, and an ending which left me making an actual noise of surprise and
pleasure at the author’s cleverness in staying true to the character, rather
than providing a pat and easy ending.
Editor Declan May deserves credit then both for allowing the story to
take up the space it requires (it’s quite a long tale) and for using this story
at the edges of the War to gently slide the reader back into the conflict after
two more pastoral stories. Where I might
perhaps quibble a little is that, following on from a story called and about
gardening, the last thousand words of this story are very similar in tone to
much of that story, as a character describes her garden using pretty similar
phrases in each. A very minor quibble,
in truth, which swapping Parkin and Kelish’s stories round n the running order
would fix in a trice (if it needs fixing at all – it may be I’m enjoying this
anthology so much that I’m now looking for things to moan about, in order to
keep my curmudgeonly reputation intact!)
Damn, and that's
the stakes raised. 'Guerre' by Alan P. Jack
and Declan May continues the theme
of Doctor as Bastard seen in the earlier May-penned vignettes, but leavened now
with a slightly softer (and older) War Doctor.
One weary of killing, but forced to kill, aware of the necessities of
war but equally cognisant that those necessities can change a man. This story (set, very effectively in World
War I), even though it doesn't feature the most radical depiction of the
Doctor, has convinced me that this is not the man we knew any longer. He's not even, by this point, a variation on
the Doctoral theme really. This War
Doctor is a man for whom the choices available keep narrowing until even the
unthinkable is possible. In terms of the
plot, it does seem a little convenient that Vincent just happened to be
returning home as the Doctor landed, but coincidence is hardly the worst of
plotting sins.
The second short
'Girl with Purple Hair' story
meanwhile is short and to the point, though again showing a very weary Doctor
contemplating death, and serves as a coda to the story preceding it. Hard to say anything further without giving
everything away...
'V. Lady Leela' completes a triumvirate of consecutive Declan May shorts - and manages to be
the bloodiest of the three stories.
Again, it's sufficiently short that too much discussion will give away
too much away, but suffice it to say that I thought the characterisation of our
favourite savage turned implausible army wife was spot-on and exactly how I
imagine Leela would react to the Time War.
In passing, it's
a pleasure to observe the way in which the editor has shaped the flow of
stories. Too often people think that
deciding the running order in a short story collection is simply a matter of
making sure no two consecutive stories have too similar a plot, but Declan May
demonstrates here that the order of stories can create a story of sorts
itself. Impressive.
A few years back
I picked up Nick Mellish’s
self-published short story collection on Lulu, and was pleasantly surprised by
the very individual prose voice he turned out to have. In the intervening years, Mellish has
improved as a writer (not that he was a bad one before), but that gift of
unusual phrasing has clearly stuck with him – lines like ‘it would catch me,
stun me, and either kill me or take me off to the camps where I would work until
death, and even then they would probably find a job for my soul’ are sprinkled
across the pages of ‘Making Endings’
to its great benefit. The story itself is also very well done – just when you
think it’s one thing, it turns out to be another, and then a slightly different
other still, and then it’s all done, and I found myself at the end feeling both
happy and sad, just like a really good story always does. Suddenly I find myself wondering where my
copy of that Lulu collection might be…
‘The Book of the Dead’ by David Carrington sees the return of
Jenny Shirt (who, frankly, I’m starting to think of as a tv companion I’d
somehow managed to forget about – and if that’s not a pleasingly ironic piece
of post-modern shenanigans in a book about the War Doctor then I don’t know
what is). This is good, as she’s a
splendid character, with more personality than all but the very best tv
assistants, but better still is the idea – introduced early on – of a library
inside a majestic oak tree. That, let us
be clear, is the sort of image to win over the heart of this particular
bibliophile reviewer! Packed with
splendidly wild ideas and images – I especially liked the proposed plant Daleks
– this is good, solid Doctor Who writing, of the sort that the Big Finish Short
Trips collections used to do, at their very best.
On the surface,
it’d be very easy – and very simplistic – to see ‘Driftwood’ by Simon Brett
as something too similar to the tv episodes ‘Into the Dalek’ and ‘Dalek’,
featuring as it does a Dalek apparently turned into something else, something
less Dalek-y. But that’d be wrong – this
Dalek, Azrael as the non-Daleks call him, is more than just a prisoner or an
enemy. Named after the Muslim Angel of
Death, I was unexpectedly reminded of Dante’s Satan, trapped deep in the ice at
the centre of Hell, or even Milton’s deceiving, poetic devil – and if that
seems pretentious, well even if it is, it’s no less true for all that. As the story progresses, little clues build
up, pointing the reader in one interesting direction, only for Brett to
surprise every one (well, me anyway!) by carrying out a sneaky, and damn
clever, side step at the last moment. Another high point in an altogether
stellar collection…
I’ve come
particularly to look forward to the ‘Girl
with the Purple Hair’ stories which pop up intermittently in Seasons. They’re short, precise vignettes which
provide a spine for the book, without intruding into the flow of the other
stories. Which makes it a shame that
number III in the series is, for me, the first mildly jarring mis-step in the
collection. Don’t get me wrong – it’s as
neatly and concisely written as earlier entries, with some useful and touching
commentary on the life of the War Doctor from the titular Jenny Shirt, but
there’s an unexpected clumsiness in the key moment of the story, a moment which
I won’t spoil but which felt, to me, a little too obvious and a little too keen
to pluck at the heart strings. It’s not
a major problem – and even if it was, the quality of the other stories in this
mini-series more than compensate for a very slight tonal issue like this – but
it was enough to make me pause in my reading and wish that a more subtle
approach had been taken. One interesting
aside is that, at one point, the author refers to ‘Kaled Deadnoughts’ rather
than Dalek ones, which may have been unintentional, but did make me picture a
Time War in which the Daleks go back to a time pre-Davros and absorb their own
ancestors into the conflict…
Alan Ronald’s ‘The
Ingenious Gentleman’ on the other hand is an absolute blast. Cleverly starting with what appears to be the
War Doctor on a white horse, Ronald throws the reader straight into the action
as a famous Spanish writer and adventurer encounters a materialising TARDIS by
a suspiciously giant-like windmill. The
tone throughout the first half of this splendid tale is firmly tongue in cheek,
as Don Quixote and the Doctor trade stories of their respective quests and,
after some genuinely gruelling (in the good, intentional sense) recent stories,
it’s hard to deny that the change is a welcome one. Even so, there’s room left later for the two
heroes to interact at a less frivolous level – in fact, thinking about it, this
is one of those stories where the plot is less important than the characterisation
and perhaps the key thing the reader should take away from it is the idea that
perhaps – one day – the War Doctor might feel able to drop the ‘War’ from his
name. Another thumbs up for both author
and editor for slipping ‘The Ingenious Gentleman’ in exactly where it was
needed in this increasingly impressive collection.
There's a
strange line early on in Matt Barber's
'Fall' where the narrator remarks
that the Doctor's face 'had a look of Don Quixote about it'. Nothing wrong with that in itself, of course,
but it does feel slightly peculiar to have such a comparison straight after a
story in which he meets that Spanish literary eccentric - as though this is
something significant, rather than merely an incidental effect of story
placement. That's about the only
off-kilter moment in the tale though, as an elderly Brigadier makes his first
appearance in the book, coming to the Doctor's aid against a Krynoid
threat. I have an admission to make at
this point, though. This isn't the best
written story in the book, nor the one with the most interesting plot or the
most unexpected twist on the standard Who tropes. Which sounds like I'm about to say I didn't
like it at all. but in fact I loved
it. Everything in the story is more
accurately described as 'competent' and 'solid' rather than 'brilliant' or
'exceptional' but there's something about the whole - about the mix of old and
new favourites, about the obscure tv references and the knowing jokes, about
the interaction between the Doctor, the Brig and everyone else - which works
absolutely perfectly and turns this story into a real celebration. This is how I picture the Brigadier in very
old age, close, as he admits himself, to death.
Not slipping away in his sleep in a retirement home, but creating his
only mini-army who he leads when the time is right and the old UNIT gang are
required. Actually, I tell a lie anyway
- there's one element in which this story - rather than being 'merely' very
good - is the best. The author gets the
elderly Brigadier spot on, from the straightening of his aged spine when called
to action, via his feelings of pain when he allows one of his men (or women) to
die, all the way to his own feelings of inadequacy and his realisation that war
has chnaged his old friend, the Doctor.
It's beautifully done, and the ending almost reduced me to tears (it's
also damn funny at points, I should add).
Another highlight in a book which positively sparkles with them.
Jon Arnold's 'Always
Face the Curtain with a Bow', on the other hand starts with a bang and
never lets up until it finishes. With a
combination of humour, pace and sheer brio, Arnold takes the readers on a
terrific ride which reminded me at times of the work of the late Terry Pratchett
and at others of the equally lamented Iain M Banks, as great jokes and mad
ideas clash and collide in a frantic literary form of Brownian Motion. I especially liked the mind eating penguins
of Voltaria and the killer bunnies, but it's a slick story all round, with
echoes of Philip Jose Farmer's 'Riverworld'
and the movie 'Groundhog Day' - which is just the sort of unexpected mashup
Doctor Who is so good at, now I think about it...
'Help a Stranded Time Traveller' by Matthew
Sylvester is considerably more straight-forward an adventure story, with
the Doctor arriving as a ruthless and greedy criminal attempts to steal of
wrecked TARDIS in order to sell it to the Daleks. Sylvester is a confident, accomplished writer
and if I don't say as much about this as other stories in the book, that's not
an insult, but more a recognition that real professionalism is as often about
creating something solid, comfortable and dependable than something wildly
experimental or controversial. Sylvester has come up with a story which, in
some ways, could be about the Sixth Doctor or the First as easily as about the
War Doctor, and there's nothing wrong with that at all.
Quite a few of
the stories in this book are pretty large scale, with whole planets under
threat and entire armies wiped out.
That's an unavoidable consequence of putting together a large amount of
stories about a War which spans all of space and time, but even so, it's a
pleasure now and then to come across something slightly more small-scale (in a
good way). 'Storage Wars' by Paul
Driscoll manages to be both at once, which is the best combination of all,
if you ask me. Small scale, as the title
suggests, in that this is a tale about something found in a Totters Lane
junkyard and sold on a trashy bit of daytime tv schedule filler. Small too in that the Doctor at this point in
his life is living as a near tramp in central London, apparently taking a break
from the War. Small, finally, in the
sense that the whole story revolves around a payment of a mere six grand and possession of a child's
toy, not millions of pounds or billions of mazumas or whatever. But there's also grandeur in here, with the
genocide of one species reversed and the Doctor rejecting a weapon against the
Daleks because it would require that genocide to work. There's paradox too, most obviously in Ruby's
desire to weaponise something tiny in order to destroy something huge, but also
in the War Doctor - in spite of his name - choosing beauty over
destruction. And finally, there's some really
nasty stuff, as befits a book about a war - burned corpses and unmarked graves
and human nature shown to be less than the ideal. A lovely story composed of layer upon layer
of meaning, and an impressive achievement all round.
There's a point
in John Davies' 'The Postman' in which the author intertwines several disparate
time lines into one action-packed sequence.
It works pretty successfully, and serves as a micro-version of the story
as a whole, but it also marks the point at which Davies cuts the legs from
under the reader and what seemed on the surface, at the beginning, to be a
fairly jolly, at times humorous, story becomes something black as hell. It's not the first story in this collection
to be comfortable with the grim, but - more even than Daniel Wealands - this is
brutal, brutal stuff. It's hard to say
much without giving things away, but remember that the postman of the title is
one of the type who deliver black edged telegrams to waiting mothers and
fathers and you get the idea. Might just
be me, but I found this enormously moving and the timey-wimey sequence
painfully sad. As with every other
story, this is well-written, cleverly plotted and entirely affecting.
If I'm honest, I'm
not sure how I feel about 'The Thief of
All Ways' by Elliot Thorpe. For the first time in the book - even
allowing for the grimness of elements of the previous story - it feels like
this is not in any way the Doctor I know and love. This guy is an unknown now, sacrificing lives
without really looking for an alternative, and then expecting the victims to
thank him later. It's deliberate, of
course, and the author does indeed have the victim say 'thank you' and then
acknowledge that in some way what the Doctor is being 'forced' to do is the
'right' thing - "The Daleks would have used me in ways I can’t even
imagine. That’s a more horrifying thought than this...and it means I can at
least do something right." she says at one point - but I found the former
in particular a lot less believable as a sentiment than the "No! Wait!
Please!" she cries out when the time actually comes. It's hard to deny the maturity of this
writing though - noble self-sacrifice is a lot easier when it doesn't look as
though it'll be required, and panic when the moment comes is a perfectly normal
human reaction. But the 'thank you' at
the end is, I think, a mis-step - more of a way of quickly re-humanising this
callous, killer Doctor than a genuinely plausible reaction from someone who's
just been murdered, effectively (and the entire story, of course, comes just a
heartbeat after Paul Driscoll's very different take on the Doctor and his
willingness to compromise his core values).
Like I said, I'm a bit conflicted about this one, but it did make me
think and sometimes there's no greater praise you can give a story.
Paul Driscoll is
in danger of becoming my favourite new author in this collection. After his excellent initial offering, 'Storage Wars', his second story "The Time Lord Who Came to Tea' manages
to continue at the same high quality level.
It's a deceptively simple story, with the Doctor and a child crossing a
war torn landscape to collect some much needed supplies, but it's the
incidental detail and the world building which impresses. Dalek Meat Traders, Puritanians, the protection
of rotting corpses and the promise of Arcadia - each element Driscoll
introduces adds a little more to the world he has created until, in the space
of a few thousand words, Jericho feels as real as any planet from the tv show
or novels. I'd be happy to read more
about young Sophienna and her world - can't say better than that.
Damn, this next
story, 'The Nightmare Child' is about
as unexpected as anything I've read this year.
Normal narrative structure is abandoned in part, replaced by the bastard
offspring of James Joyce and Kathy Acker (minus the sex references). it's not clear who wrote this - mention of
wardenmen suggest that it may perhaps be John Davies - but the plot here is
subservient to the language, the nameless author playing with words and
phrases, combining and dissecting them with controlled abandon.
It makes sense
to follow this linguistic tour-de-force with a story from Paul Magrs. In the past I've
read similarly experimental cut-up approaches by Magrs to Sexton Blake,
Sherlock Holmes and Iris Wildthyme and so in a perverse sort of way it feels
right that he should be the one to return the collection to the everyday. In fact, reading it, I wonder if the
preceding tale and this are not both his, as Davros turns out to be an old disabled
guy in a wheelchair, who lives in a tower block in urban London and dreams of
the Nightmare Child. This return to the
setting of Magrs' and Jeremy Hoad's 'The
Blue Angel' novel (my favourite Who
novel), only updated for the new series, is both a surprise and a real pleasure
and has, not to put too fine a point on it, quite made my day.
Next up - Barnaby
Eaton-Jones can bugger off.
SPOILER ALERT
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
HE KILLED JENNY
SHIRT!
I'm tempted to
say nothing more about his story and hell-mend him, but I suppose I have to be
the bigger man here. Let's see...
It's pretty damn
good, actually, with a bone weary Doctor near the end of this incarnation and
ready for death. As I've mentioned
before, it's unavoidable that a War Doctor has to be violent and amoral, a
killer with little conscience, but I have particularly enjoyed moments like
this, where one author or other demonstrates that - in the absolute end - the
War Doctor will be bowed down by the weight of his actions, and regret all the
things he's had to do. Eaton-Jones
effectively turns this necessity from subtext to (almost) text in relating one
of the Doctor's memories concerning the death of one administrator who worked
with the Daleks (presumably - it's not made clear) because he had no choice but
to do so. It remains unspoken, but the
comparison with the Doctor is clear enough - forced throughout this collection
of stories to do all manner of things he'd rather not, to sacrifice all the
principles which made him the Doctor and, in doing so, become someone who, in
his own words, doesn't deserve that name or, perhaps, his own life.
So, maybe it's
not so terrible that Jenny Shirt dies, after all - for all that the Doctor says
it would seem I’ve made the wrong choice, it's a dying Jenny who tells him that
he hasn't - and that's pretty important.
"English.
Therefore probably drunk" - Gary
Russell wins the prize for funniest line in the book. And his story 'The Beach' slots in very well as near the end of the book as the
Doctor is near the end of his life.
Because the War is nearly over, the Doctor has a Plan, and it's time to
wrap up loose ends. Russell's writing
has been accused in the past of prioritising continuity concerns over story,
but that's the last accusation which can be levelled at 'The Beach', which is
sweet and small-scale recounting of debts repaid and promises kept. Quite lovely, in its way, in fact.
There's a reason
that George Mann was chosen to write
the sole War Doctor novel so far released by the BBC. He has the happy knack of capturing the most
interesting parts of the characters he writes, for one thing. Not for Mann a War Doctor obsessed with
fighting. Instead, he shows us a War
Doctor trying to please (and, perhaps, save) a single friend, and in doing so
pleases this reader enormously. The
litany of rescued moments which the Doctor shows Cinder (and how nice to get
what is effectively a deleted scene with that splendid girl) serve both as a
touching opportunity to gain her own survival and an affectionate reminder of
the multiple, wonderful, alien worlds of 'Doctor Who' as a whole. That we know, as readers of 'Engines of War',
how it all ends up does nothing to detract from that. Fingers crossed that this isn't the last time
Mann writes for Doctor 8.5...
Declan May obviously loves language. You can tell that from any part of his
writing. It turns out he wrote the
extravagant word gymnastics of 'The Nightmare Child', for example, but
in this last story in this more than accomplished collection, that adoration
for sound is equally evident and just as memorable. Descriptions like 'cruel, twisted tailor-made
naissance' and 'Gallifrey, spoiled in the heat of war and turned into a
desperate, treacherous, brutal beast' abound here, but even if they didn't, his
decision to list the thirteen Chronosmiths individually (Wigs, Rags,
Hynchcliffe, Sheepskin, Plunder, the Baronessa, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon,
Spinach, Thurber, Myopapa and the Cigarette Crow, fact fans) demonstrates an
unusually strong love of linguistic legerdemain which cannot be denied. He even dips into French at one point! As for the story...well, read it for yourself
and see what you think.
Read them all,
in fact...
Back in the bad old days, Doctor Who book
fandom split into two distinct camps – the rad and the trad. The former was the domain of Lawrence Miles,
Dave Stone and Jim Mortimore, with multiple realities, dead Doctors and, you know,
sex and swearing and shit. The former
attracted writers and readers more comfortable with, well, traditional style
stories, in which the Doctor and a plucky assistant or two battled evil in the
Home Counties. They both had their good
and bad points (and certainly didn’t deserve to be the basis for one jihad
after another on radw and related newsgroups, mailing lists and web fora.
