I'm not sure I liked Goth Opera. It gets almost universal praise on the web, and there was nothing exactly wrong with it but...it may have been written by nuWho darling Paul Cornell, and he may have made his reputation for character pieces, but this was where I felt it was lacking.
I felt someone was working off a ticksheet. All the little Australianisms Tegan comes out with. She's shouty and sulky; Romana is refined. Nyssa too - a scientist, who wants to help, but has a complex about Traken. I never saw them as people, but as a collection of quirks. When they spoke, I didn't get the thrill of hearing the actors in my mind, as I did with Cold Fusion or Sands of Time. After a page of "ooooh, complex characterisation!" from other reviewers, I feel somewhat mean likening it to subpar fanfic. The characters who I wasn't meant to recognise were all well drawn (I liked Jake and Madeline particularly, Lang also came through well).
The Doctor rubbed me the wrong way too - cricket, celery, Adricguilt. Tick tick tick. Lots of tea. I first got suspicious when Ruath explained her motivation for choosing incarnation number five was targeting him at his most vulnerable.
Oh it makes me mad - vulnerable indeed. It's as much a front, I tell you, as the larking about is to 4 or 10. Five's difficulty isn't that he's a softie - but that he looks like a softie, leading to a serious authority problem. And yet here you have his Greatest Hits - getting chained to tables, passing out, not shooting when it makes sense, feeling terrible and being ineffectual. They're all things he does at times, of course, but having them all together seems like joining the dots. These are the understandings of someone who has seen every one of his episodes and made a list. Actually, I have no difficulty believing he'd stake Yarven - because in the heat of the moment, when there are lives directly threatened, he always does (the green Dalek in Resurrection, the Cyberman in Earthshock, Omega in Arc of Infinity).
Quite frankly, he doesn't come out of the book well, and that's not fair. I don't like the suggestion, for example, that his decision to team up with Ruath is soley to avoid a long and miserable death. I mean, I would - but there's something a bit strange about him going on that alone. And anyway, if Ruath wants to find a version of the Doc who'll team up with the vamps, why pick on the one (another stereotype coming...) who's always behaved whiter-than-white?
Not sure I like the way he and Tegan are portrayed either. I've always thought the best Doctor-companion relationships are made when they are both a little bit in love with each other - 3 and Jo, 4 and Sarah, 9 and Rose. One of the things that failed with Martha was a total lack of chemistry - she thinks she's in love (she isn't...), and he never sees her as anything more than his responsibility. And then we got Donna who pointed out she didn't fancy 10 so often and vehemently it started to sound like denial by the end. Different sort of love - more sisterly-brotherly, but still love and no less cute. Suddenly, things got fun in the TARDIS again.
I don't think it hurts to see 5 and tegan like that, even though the evidence is so subtle it's invisible. It's only occasionally they let their guard down on the matter - the end of Mawdryn Undead, start of Planet of Fire, bits of King's Demons et al. This was far too cute by half - on TV, they squabble, but aw we know they don't mean it. The effect doesn't quite work in prose, when the author holds your hand and tells you they don't mean it.
Like the Adricguilt, I don't like having it made explicit. I tend to see it in everything he does, and
rightly so. But having him point it out - "I'm not going to lose another companion in this incarnation!" - feels wrong. The Doc's attitude towards bad things has always been private wallowing, never public. Ticking boxes.
When the situation gets extreme, I never felt it was the natural way the story was heading - the author just wanted to prod them to see if they'd bleed. Particularly when he gives Tegan the Curse of Fenric treatment, which was one of the points in the book where I just stopped believing entirely.
I'm not sure I liked the tone taken towards Christianity here either. I'm not religious meself, but people who are overly critical always verge on the insulting.
There were, of course, things I liked. I liked the Prydonian hijinks Ruath and the Doctor allude to - particularly introducing cats to the Gallifreyan ecosystem. I liked Mr Cornell remembering to point out that, if the vampires cause an artificial nighttime for a few minutes over England, in Australia they will experience it as a short artificial dawn and consiquently, while the northen hemesphere are in terror of a coming apocalypse, in the South people aren't that concerned. One of the few well observed things about the Doctor is letting himself go along with Yarven's plans, and using the Ring of Rassilon at the last moment. He did, on occasion, go along with things to a suicidal extent in the hope of getting to the bottom of matters (Black orchid and Arc of Infinity are two), and it was a smart plan to get them to a planet with a short cycle, to give them exactly enough time to repent if they wished. The instant vampire converter is also interestingly shown, those with strong faith exploding instead (although, with the mega-faithbomb 7 throws at the Haemovores, one wonders why the Doc didn't blow too?) And I always like people to pick up on the Tegan-Nyssa relationship, which I've always thought was rather special.
Anyway, it's not like it was a bad book - it just annoyed me more than it made me happy. A crying shame, because Mr Cornell is responsible for my favourite Who-related piece of fiction ever - a short story from a CMS-Invision magazine, Logopolis issue, about the Watcher. It's one of the most moving and beautiful things I've ever read and catches the Fifth Doctor's mindset and era perfectly.
I've enjoyed his TV adventures, and thought Human Nature was the best thing since sliced Moffat when I first read it. But maybe I'll stay away from his books for a bit - if you think I'm sulking about this one, then you're lucky that this blog wasn't in operation when I finished his Love and War, which just made me madly furious. Again, mostly for his treatment of the Doctor - like Five in Goth Opera, Seven did not come out of the book looking very good and now I think of it, also appeared more as a sum of his cliches than a rounded piece of fit-in characterisation.
In the introduction, the Missing Adventures mission statement is spelt out as fitting seamlessly into the TV canon. Imitation has been done rather too well, I feel - in short, it was all too obvious. What I recognised about the characters seemed overfamiliar; what he had added seemed wrong. And if you screw up the characters, then you've already lost me in Doctor Who.
Pity, too. The more of these books I don't enjoys, the worse I feel about shelling out for copies. I've been wanting to read Just War for ages, and while the more continuity-heavy books I read, the more I feel I may be incurably allergic to the New Adventures, Lance Parkin is still in my good books since Cold Fusion and Dying Days. In particular, Just War is set in my own home island of Guernsey - Doctor Who in Guernsey! I've been watching the price on Amazon for ages. Episodes like this make taking a chance on a £20 novel very painful indeed.
To make up for that, I settle down to watch Music of the Spheres which I have been saving. What was that? Oh, the sound of the fourth wall shattering. Oh well...
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