Doctor Who Books Read So Far, part 7

And here we are again – the longest running series I’m doing, so far.  This offering has the 1^st, 3^rd, 5^th and 7^th Doctors.  As usual, I’m noting whether book or kindle read, and I refer you to my previous posts for the order in which I’m reading each series.

1. Doctor Who: Deadly Reunion, by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks (BBC Past Doctors Adventures)
   (3^rd Doctor.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  This was an odd one.  I selected the book to read specifically because I liked Barry Lett’s era and the sorts of stories that showed up then; and I wanted something solid the way Terence Dicks can produce them.  But…it was a book of two definite halves.  Sadly, I absolutely hated the first half.  Anyone who loved The Navy Lark, or anything nautical with military types and a sort of late 40’s/early 50’s banter, where there is always a character called Nobby, will love this bit.  I don’t mean to do it down.  It just really is not the sort of writing I enjoy.  I ended up skimming the first half.  Everyone was unbearably cheery and stiff upper lip and POSH, and I got very very tired. 
   
   Then the second half started – enter the Doctor.  Yes, that was the other thing.  You read a Doctor Who novel for the Doctor and his companions primarily.  Granted, the Brigadier – one of my all time favourite characters, was in the first part…but he didn’t really sound like himself or act like the Brigadier we know and love, as it was supposed to be a much earlier segment in his life.  So basically, the Doctor doesn’t make an appearance until almost halfway through the book, about 45%.  Thankfully, he then shows up complete with Bessie, Jo, Benton and Yates [more of my favourite characters], and the Doctor is utterly himself.  The bit where he tells a dangerous to dog to “Sit down, Sir!” was wonderfully visualized, my sense of Jon Pertwee’s bearing could not have been improved. 
   
   I actually LOVED the second half of the book, including the gore.  I loved the themes of it – the people committing random acts of violence that end up due to an alien drug.  The Master was there [on his bicycle, a la The Daemons], there was a cult, a ghostly abbey, a pop festival [where people kept mistaking the Doctor for a rock star, unsurprisingly]…and Greek ‘Gods’ misbehaving.  I got the feeling I should have read Terence Dick’s Players first from various references, but it stood alone ok. 
   
   Its difficult to rate this book, because my experience of the 2 halves was so different.  Maybe I should rate it almost as 2 separate books; after all, it said in a note at the back that Barry Letts’s naval experiences were a big reference for the first half.  So maybe I should simply note that boys and naval book lovers will adore that book; and people who loved the feel and atmosphere of The Daemons [in a funny kind of way] will adore that book.  So that was me sorted.  This book actually interfered with my reading of The Daemons which is next on my list of Pertwee Targets to do.  This book’s sense of that particular Pertwee time was so strong, I felt I needed to give him a rest before coming back to The Daemons.  It should be the other way round as The Daemons was first, but I read most of this book all at once on a very long journey – it was too late to stop.  ACTUAL BOOK.)
2. Doctor Who: Whispers of Terror, By Justin Richards (Big Finish Audio, Past Doctors Series, no.3)
   (6^th Doctor and Peri. Hmmm.  A great idea.  I really enjoyed Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant.  I just didn’t enjoy the story; though it was a good one.  Especially toward the end, it just felt a bit forced.  The idea of a person cheating death  by downloading themselves into a soundwave on a computer [the X-Files episode Bite Me comes to mind] and of the story taking place in a Museum of Aural [or was it Oral] Antiquities was very good.  Made for radio/CD.  The political element of an ambitious and unscrupulous candidate altering past speeches for an endorsement that never would otherwise have been received was good – but I just didn’t like the sound of any of the voices except the Doctor and Peri.  A lot of the acting felt a bit OTT.  I especially felt the last episode seemed to drag on and on.  Shame as I was enjoying it at the beginning.  It was a very good idea indeed.  I think it must be difficult to write to these episode lengths – not quite enough to get an episode structure going without a lot of the scenes being strangely small and tight.  I think the range will improve as it goes on, as there has to be a knack to both the medium and the episode length they have allotted themselves.  Don’t think I could have done at all better, so my criticism is tempered with respect for the task.  ON CD.)
3. Doctor Who: The Aztecs, by John Lucarotti (Target Original)
   ( 1^st Doctor.  I didn’t find this as riveting as Marco Polo, possibly because I didn’t feel I got such a strong sense of the place or culture of the time depicted: this was very much a snapshot of a small moment in a particular place.  However, I did get the flavour of the mentalities – the Perfect Victim, the Priest of Sacrifice etc.  Though I did detect an overlay of attitudes of the time in the story, in the portrayal particularly of the 2 main villains, said Priest of Sacrifice, and the Chosen Warrior [who spends the entire book trying to kill Ian, who resourcefully escapes him constantly]. Obviously everything ever written has a flavour of its own time about it [its why reading George Eliot’s lone historical Romola is so hard – we have to excavate to the author’s time to understand her attitudes, while she is excavating back to a much earlier time period to tell her story – it’s a bit of a mind bender to follow]. But I felt the flavour of that Hampstead BBC acting of the time again, here and there, and it slightly marred my enjoyment, as I simply don’t enjoy that style. 
   
   But I did like this book.  I liked the little simple bit I got taught at the end about leverage and pulleys and how to open something from a difficult angle with tools that are not strong.  [Aside: this is a lot of what the new poo Who misses: the idea of the Doctor being scientific.  The little joy of me, at 42, learning something I didn’t learn in school because it wasn’t explained interestingly, whereas here – a joy to learn; whereas the modern Who is all whizzbang jumping about clowning…Further aside – modern TV can perform this learning function: I will never forget learning about the concept of tensile strength from Prison Break! ]  ACTUAL BOOK.)
4. Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle, Time’s Crucible, by Marc Platt (Virgin New Adventures)
   (7^th Doctor. This one was very good, though small parts dragged a little.  But on the whole I was deeply invested with the characters, even the ones I didn’t quite get – Pekkary, Reogus.  The idea of the insect headed guards that are actually the Chronauts in a different stage of life was very nightmareish.  The whole thing was quite nightmareish.  The Pythia and her egg for an eye, Vael and his uncontrollable rage – there were a lot of poetic deaths here, of quite operatic characters. And the end was oddly emotional, even sentimental – but then I can be very mawkish, so that wasn’t a problem.  Ace was proactive and her attachment to Shonnzi was very well done.  The whole piece was cleverly played and layered, without seeming to be clever at all – I like that, the not boasting at the cleverness of your idea [a pitfall some of these books fall into, celebrating their own cleverness].  Its part one of a trilogy for Sylvester, and so far I’m liking it way better than the 4 parter that started the New Adventures, the Timewyrm stuff. ACTUAL BOOK.)
5. Doctor Who: The Sensorites, by Nigel Robinson (Target original)
   (1^st Doctor.  This one felt very long for some reason.  I found it much more watchable than the TV version.  Possibly because Carol and Maitland, in particular, read better than they watched.  As did the scenes in the sewers looking for the ‘monsters’ and the source of the poisoning.  Susan played a stronger role in this story, and her growing need to be seen as an independent person, not just as a grandchild was played on all through.  Interesting choice of words from the Doctor about her “setting yourself up against me, eh?”  Very all or nothing; just because she made a choice for herself.  Ian spent about half the book being ill, and Barbara spent a fair bit of it away on the spaceship, so the Doctor himself and the Sensorite politics got foregrounded.  This era has a lot of political intrigue of a very similar nature going on – reading the City Administrator’s machinations, if I closed my eyes it was almost like reading the High Priest of Sacrifice from The Aztecs again.  Villains generally do bore me – they have to have a certain difference.  Otherwise, they are either all Machiavellian and sly but in a boring predictable way; or they are all mad and raving, but not as good at it as say, Mistress Peinforte, who did I feel, do a Really Good Job…Onward. ACTUAL BOOK.)
6. Doctor Who: Arc of Infinity, by Terrance Dicks (Target Original)
   (5^th Doctor.  I enjoyed this one on screen, and I enjoyed the book.  Which I ate up in an hour – no idea why it took so little time to read, when some of them take me ages.  I like stories set on Gallifrey.  I like to see and imagine where the Doctor came from and why he might’ve left.  Certainly their society seems completely hidebound, ridiculously upper class, and no doubt says more about the scriptwriters at the time of the first story featuring Gallifrey who left those who came after with that sort of society to write round…but it’s a good set up.  It always manages to show the Doctor as both a lone rebel and a rebel leader in the making – the tension between the two being what causes him to constantly leave.  He can’t stay as he hates the way things are and the lack of the establishment’s wish for change; and he can’t leave it forever, because its wrong and needs fixing.  Despite the fact he got summoned to Gallifrey this time, as soon as he was there I got a sense of him bristling not only at the ease of them condemning him to death rather than try and figure out the traitor amongst them, or even that there was one; but just at the lazy thinking.  Every time I read stories featuring Gallifrey, I hear Colin Baker in my head, ranting about corruption in Trial of a Time Lord.  The other thing to mention with this book is the segments in Amsterdam.  From the point of view of the book, they could have been anywhere quite happily, I saw no huge reason for Amsterdam – though bucking the general view I hear, when it comes to the TV broadcast, I thought they made nice usage of the locations there. ACTUAL BOOK.)
7. Doctor Who: Land of the Dead, By Stephen Cole (Big Finish Audio, Past Doctors Series, no.4)
   (5^th Doctor.  I don’t really know what to say here. I loved the idea of this one: lots of dodgy but earnest characters holed up in a remote Alaskan mansion, and some  - basically – dinosaurs rampaging outside.  Snowy wilderness, biting winds, Peter Davison being gentlemanly and quietly, consideredly urbane.  And I have always thought Nyssa was a great foil for him: another scientific mind to bounce ideas off of, there’ve been too few in the classic series [only the Romanas and Liz Shaw, and Zoe to a degree].  So I was very happy to listen to this because I thought Peter Davison did really well in his segment of Sirens of Time [the segment on a ship, another claustrophobic environment], and even better in Phantasmagoria. 
   
   Yet this one fell flat.  I think again, it must’ve been the writers still adapting to the length and pacing of these oddly sized episodes.  I was waiting for this marvellous audio landscape – a feel of Arctic wastes, something like The Thing for my ears; yet both the outside snowy effects and the soundtrack just seemed a bit…flat.  The outside snow and wind sounds felt they had been lifted from a sample of radio sounds and maybe not mixed in as skilfully as they might have been; and the soundtrack didn’t really lift or illustrate the story. 
   
   Again – as with my last review of the audios, I’m not going to criticise strongly, because I think this is a hard transition to make, from TV to radio for a full blown new take on an old series, with – at this early stage, as Big Finish have been going a lot longer and more slickly now, many years later – limited resources in terms of both actors available and facilities.  I can hear great promise in these stories so far.  But this one didn’t do it for me.  There was too much shouting; an awful lot of dumped exposition, which I heard as clumsily written, and I really didn’t like any of the characters other than the Doctor himself and Nyssa.  Both of whom did their best with the story and effects as they were.  I feel concerned that I can’t recall any of the characters names, or, really, the main thrust of the plot…I was walking about listening to this, and yet, my attention was not strongly held past the middle of the first episode.  This story would probably have been very good indeed on TV as a multiparter – maybe with a similar vibe to the early episodes of The Seeds of Doom? Very effective indeed.  I was really sorry to not like this one.  The setup has many elements in it I really like in a story.  Still – I greatly enjoyed Nyssa and Peter Davison, and look forward to more.  ON CD.) 

A note on books and audios I don’t like when I speak of them here:

I am enthusiastically told by many Big Finish listening friends that the range improves exponentially as it goes on – and I’ve had great lists of highlights given me to look forward to.  So I’m happy to continue on. And whilst I will say if I don’t like a story, and I will say why – I know if I read a review of my own stuff and it was mean, unkind, witty at my expense and unpleasant, I would be on the floor in tears and generally miserable for quite some time.  So whilst I say what I don’t like and why, my aim is to never be unkind.  Just my impressions, subjectively – entirely subjectively. 

I hope the fact that I happen to not like something doesn’t stop anyone trying out any of the books or audio titles for themselves.  You might find what I have to say engaging for whatever reason; but never let me tell you what to do or think.  Go and try these out for yourselves and make your own mind up.  Always make your own mind up; never take an opinion from a blog or a review and accidentally call it your own because you didn’t have enough time to research the thing. 

Just felt like saying that – as the audience for these Doctor Who reviews/rambles, is weirdly high.  I hope these posts are getting more people to read/ listen, be interested.  Not substituting for your own experience in any way.  Sod me – try it all out for yourself!!

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The next lot of Doctor Who’s will a be dalek special – a lot of the books I’m at in various series, just seems to be daleks right now, so I thought I’d clump them all together and read lots of books about creatures I generally have no interest in as I think they are poor villains!  I hope to have my mind changed.  Wait and see!