Just War

I checked my mail - and it had come! All wrapped in lovely brown paper, like the best Christmas present ever. I've been wanting to read Just War since finding out it was set in Guernsey. Over time, things had conspired to change my opinion. I read Dying Days and Cold Fusion, and decided its author Lance Parkin was divine. But I'd also got sick and angry at the Doctor Who book range - too dark, too violent, too fanfic. I was already aware that Benny spends half the novel being tortured. Finally, and this really is the irony, I read Love and War, mistaking it for "the Guernsey one", and that book peeved me off so much I have barely touched the Seventh Doctor since.

Yet when a book you have been keeping an eye on for a year appears on Amazon for £10, the first time you've ever seen it below £30, you don't say no. If for no other reason that in two years time, you can flog it for more. Best of all, it's a really bashed up copy I've got. Digression: I read and adored Sands of Time on the BBC website, but it's no fun reading PDF files - not in the same way you love a book. So I ordered the cheapest copy I could find, and the note on amazon said "good as new". But I didn't really believe it - and that's the moral of this story, have faith in people's good nature. It's unblemished. The pages and spine are completely untouched. I wish it was a knackered copy, then I could in good conscience do what I intended to do with it - curl up in a corner and enjoy. It's so brand new that I feel like a vandal doing anything other than leaving it loved, but untouched on my shelf. End Digression.

What to say? I spent a long time ogling the cover - naturally, that's meant to be the Town Church at the bottom, and the arcade on the right - I definitely recognise that large grey building as a bank. But I'm sure the Town Church doesn't have a window on that side - indeed, the view of the church seems to be the one from the sea, with the High Street smacked on top. It's a bit like visiting film sets - you recognise it, but the proportions are all wrong somehow.

Of course, what all Doctor Who authors do is start with a little known idea and work from it. Like repainting Bad King John as a good guy for King's Demons, or the discovery that it was still classified why both the Americans and Russians halted their "drill into the Earth's core" projects inspiring Inferno. Just War is different - of course I know Guernsey and the Channel Islands were the only bits of Brit soil conquered by Germany. Jerry bags, the toll of rationing, rounding up and sending off the English folk - I know all of this. Doctor Who! In Guernsey! Not even Jersey, or Sark - but my Channel Island.It also makes me wonder whether the Doctor's claim that "I always wondered what that explosion on March 1st was..." is based in a real unsolved mystery.

Being at Uni at the mo, I instantly went into nostalga-trip mode. Ma Dorcas begins by recounting the one and only bombing in Guernsey - the Germans mistook tomato trucks for munitions. The wait for the invasion. The Mayor making a speech in Smith Street, SMITH STREET! I mean, I got pretty damn excited when I stumbled across Henrietta Street last month (as in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, another great Who novel) - but Smith Street in St Peter Port is actually somewhere I call home. And the Royal Hotel! Which was evidently still there when Mr Parkin wrote the book in 199-something, but has since been abandoned, burned then demolished and replaced with a big monstrosity. At times I wondered whether the author had ever actually visited the island - in particular, mentioning the granite cliffs.

By the time the plot begins, however, the Guernsey stuff is mostly over - one personal tragedy is that the TARDIS never actually lands there in the book - but thank goodness for it, because I feel I might have got touchy. I certainly frowned at one or two moments in the early part. The claim that a spy caught in Guernsey had been shot without trial - I'm not sure there were ever any summary execution. And though it was often threatened to punish several people for one person's crime, I'm not sure it ever came to actually shooting people. As for Wolff, I'm almost certain we never had a member of the SS on the island; and Benny would have been shipped off somewhere else. There is no big underground torture chamber - unless it was meant to be the Underground Hospital, which, though it's a nasty place to visit, as you might have guessed was a hospital. It seemed to me that the novel's Nazis were far, far too mean - the impression I always had was of young lads in the German army, enjoying the rather cushy placement they had, not a hotbed of dedicated sadists.

Though of course, when you live in the place where it happened and there are many people who still remember it, memories are, well, selective. I've a friend who did her history coursework on collaboration between Guernsey people and Germans, and she found that people were either still outspokenly critical or unwilling to talk about it. The myth of our friendly model occupation is no more wrong than Parkin's cruel and vicious one. Certainly Operation Todt, the slave workers from Europe, were a reality. Alderney even had it's own Prisoner of War camp. And I'd be interested if anyone could either confirm or correct my historical assumptions in the paragraph above.

In any case, as the Doctor would put it, "time is in a state of flux" - which covers any inaccuracies nicely. And Parkin chooses to go all the way with the darkness: ultimately the moral is not "the Nazis are as nice as we were", but "we were as evil as the Nazis". And while they're all pretty nasty pieces of work, they never turn pantomime - even the sadistic SS officer somehow remains believeable. I've noted this before, at some length, about Cold Fusion - but he has a brilliant touch with adult subjects, never cheapening them or making them seem gratuitous. He knows when to go into detail, and when to stay vague. It's this genius touch which is so sorely missing in so many other Doctor Who novels, which are peppered with sex! and bloodshed! with the enthusiasm of a teenager newly exposed to the joys of alcohol.

It's all typical New Adventures stuff - owls, and chess, and getting a companion naked within 30 pages - he just does it so well that I'm too busy enjoying it to roll my eyes. Let it not be forgotten that this is the guy who actually gets the Doctor laid, three times, without fandom going into total meltdown (and when you think how much trauma the Movie kiss caused, you'll appreciate how impressive it is). That's why he gets away with using what is probably regarded as the foulest word in the English language some chapters from the end.

And the Doctor is fantastic - this is the Seven I love! (best doctor ever, incidentally - always has been, always will be). Like the tits'n'gore mentioned above, there's nothing intrinsically different in his character. He's dark, mysterious and manipulative, just like a man getting shot in the guts will always be a man getting shot in the guts. It's just the way it is done here doesn't annoy me as much it does in pretty other Seventh Doctor book. Except Cold Fusion, in which Mr L.P. again demonstrates a genius for getting away with things which in other circumstances make me angry (in this case, double-crossing his previous self then knocking him out. I do sometimes wonder how I'd have reacted if Lance Parkin had sprung the "Death the Eternal demands I wipe out my previous self" thing, and whether he'd be able to treat that in some way it works). When it all, inevitably, starts going a bit "Season 21", with the Doctor running around like the only sane man in a crazy universe, with even his companions blowing things up and dealing death at every turn - you just want to sit him down and give him a hug.

The companions are interesting, if for no other reason than they're all futuristic. When confronted with 1940s ideas, it's never forgotten that all three come from an era far far advanced. I first met Roz and Chris in Cold Fusion, where they had to endure being less interesting than Seven, Five and the whole of his crowded TARDIS. Chris is fun, but reminds me of Fitz - womanizing, chirpy and cheeky. Not necessarily a bad thing, because I love Fitz - but I've yet to read a book where their characters diverge. This book gave me a lot more info about the both of them, particularly Roz' backstory. She reminded me very deeply of Hannah at times, in a complimentary way. I think it was her dismissive "good boy" to a fellow officer, when informing him that she was completely off limits. I don't know much about her, but I think her rather racist musings at the end make an interesting counterpoint to the book. Other moments too. Benny is as Benny always is - completely and utterly adorable.

Other things I'll remember later. The best fanwank award goes for the brilliant two-page ramble, as the Nazis remind Benny of the Daleks. Irony almost certainly intentional (although an internet review points out correctly - and this is another point for his subtlety on serious topics - neither the D-word, nor "Hitler" is ever used in the book). The bad fanwank award "and they were all wearing...". Yes, I sniggered at the time, but it jolted me out of the story.No, I remember. Chris describing the Guernica painting as "a dairy in a transmat accident". And the Freudroids which made me laugh in Cold Fusion. There are some great, great little touches in here.I did intend to, you know, save it and read it slowly. Well I sat down, and I've only just noticed that it's tomorrow - three minutes past 12 exactly. Which means I've been reading solid since, oooh, 8 or 9. It was a very good book. It's even revived my faith in the New Adventures - if for no other reason than I want to know more about the future Chris and Roz come from.

Incidentally, in the future Guernsey is Undertown Spaceport 7.