Simon Guerrier The Time Travellers (2005)
This was one of the final Who novels to be published before the thing returned to the screen in 2005 and therefore belongs to the era of proper Who to my way of thinking. Additionally it has helped me clarify what I mean by proper Who, at least for the sake of argument, which boils down to this. Proper Who took place in a vastly mysterious universe and told stories which could only ever reveal one small part of the picture at a time, usually by looking past the main character to whatever was happening around him, so the main character was never quite the focus so much as the lens - even when whatever we were looking at seemed to represent some aspect of his own role in the greater story of this imagined universe; and although some of the weirder details were occasionally explained or hinted at - as with The Three Doctors, Lungbarrow, or Alien Bodies - that which was revealed seemed only to deepen the mystery by posing further questions. I'm not suggesting this was anything intentional on the part of the producers, but this was how it looked to me and why it usually worked.
New Who, on the other hand, rewrote the mission statement with a main character who became focus rather than lens, like a cool older brother*, someone of whom dimwits on forums claimed that the Doctor is always good as though it were part of some manifesto, essentially reducing him to yet another dull adventurer. New Who is proper Who reimagined by Tim Burton, or someone aspiring to Tim Burton's formulaic brand of surrealist whimsy, with changes made based on the findings of focus groups and committees. It's slick, corporate, targetted, and even its fans refer to it as a franchise, a property, a concern; as distinct from earlier versions scraped together by cranky radiophonic outsiders who probably would have ended up homeless had they not managed to con their way into the BBC. There's no real mystery in new Who, because everything you need is right there on the screen in big snowflake swirls of magic and wonderment. His name is actually Darren Who, and he's quirky and kind of zany but always good, and he went to school with the Master. One day he did a drawing of a horse, and the Master said it was shite which caused young Darren Who to experience feelings of sadness and low self-esteem, and from thence forth he didst vow that never again would the forces of evil blah blah blah…
You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. Soz.
Anyway, I know it's all product, and the usual alarm bells sounded with unusual volume at Guerrier's resume, which is extensive and seemingly exclusively Who related, excepting a pair of novels tying in to other culty telly franchises; and a Sapphire & Steele audio drama.
Sapphire & Steele…
Jesus fucking Christ…
Anyway, there appears to be a multitude of writers of this general career driven type, each one just itching to tell an untold and entirely negligible story of some television Who companion about which we'd otherwise forgotten for reasons which actually aren't that difficult to understand, and ordinarily you couldn't pay me to read their work, not after that shit about how Davros created the Daleks because someone called him names when he was a kid; but, I remember liking The Time Travellers a lot, and statistically speaking, there has to be at least one of these guys who can actually fucking write, yes?
Simon Guerrier is that man, it seems. The story is actually a bit of a mess, as is possibly inevitable given all of the potential paradoxes upon which the story is built, but it works because it's well told. Guerrier's prose is, I suppose, efficient, if not really given to flights of poetic fancy, but at the same time it commits none of the usual sins of Who obsessives, imagining that writing is somehow a bit like talking, or like a portentous cinematic voiceover; and he eschews both clichés and button-pushing sentiment. The Time Travellers is clearly the work of someone who actually knows how to write, which shouldn't be taken for granted.
Of course, certain expectations come with the book being a Who novel, which is fine. Guerrier strongly invokes the mood of something which could easily have been on the box back in 1964 and yet wasn't, without it feeling like a self-conscious period piece - or like it would rather be telly for that matter; and his story works on a sort of vintage logic, kind of like old programmes run on the latest operating system, which is even a little impressive given the once prevalent temptation to do an Alan Moore by forcing the innocents of yesteryear through the contemporary wringer, turning Pogle's Wood into a popular dogging spot, for one example. Except Guerrier actually does this by transposing sixties telly characters to a fairly harsh version of London in the year 2006 with Canary Wharf, the DLR, mobile phones and so on, but gets away with it by telling the story on their terms, rendering the contemporary as something weird and borderline Orwellian.
The cover says it all, really - more unsettling modernism than a hook in the commercial sense, a suggestion of mood which promises only further questions. Within a year these books would have photographic covers of the stars, reaching out to punters and figuratively asking would you like to come on an adventure with me? It was all downhill after this, downhill and right into the crapper.
I really wish Guerrier would write something which hadn't been on the box in some form.
*: Or indeed sister. I don't have any problem with the recasting of the Doctor as female beyond the existing problems I've had with the television show since 2005.
This was one of the final Who novels to be published before the thing returned to the screen in 2005 and therefore belongs to the era of proper Who to my way of thinking. Additionally it has helped me clarify what I mean by proper Who, at least for the sake of argument, which boils down to this. Proper Who took place in a vastly mysterious universe and told stories which could only ever reveal one small part of the picture at a time, usually by looking past the main character to whatever was happening around him, so the main character was never quite the focus so much as the lens - even when whatever we were looking at seemed to represent some aspect of his own role in the greater story of this imagined universe; and although some of the weirder details were occasionally explained or hinted at - as with The Three Doctors, Lungbarrow, or Alien Bodies - that which was revealed seemed only to deepen the mystery by posing further questions. I'm not suggesting this was anything intentional on the part of the producers, but this was how it looked to me and why it usually worked.
New Who, on the other hand, rewrote the mission statement with a main character who became focus rather than lens, like a cool older brother*, someone of whom dimwits on forums claimed that the Doctor is always good as though it were part of some manifesto, essentially reducing him to yet another dull adventurer. New Who is proper Who reimagined by Tim Burton, or someone aspiring to Tim Burton's formulaic brand of surrealist whimsy, with changes made based on the findings of focus groups and committees. It's slick, corporate, targetted, and even its fans refer to it as a franchise, a property, a concern; as distinct from earlier versions scraped together by cranky radiophonic outsiders who probably would have ended up homeless had they not managed to con their way into the BBC. There's no real mystery in new Who, because everything you need is right there on the screen in big snowflake swirls of magic and wonderment. His name is actually Darren Who, and he's quirky and kind of zany but always good, and he went to school with the Master. One day he did a drawing of a horse, and the Master said it was shite which caused young Darren Who to experience feelings of sadness and low self-esteem, and from thence forth he didst vow that never again would the forces of evil blah blah blah…
You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. Soz.
Anyway, I know it's all product, and the usual alarm bells sounded with unusual volume at Guerrier's resume, which is extensive and seemingly exclusively Who related, excepting a pair of novels tying in to other culty telly franchises; and a Sapphire & Steele audio drama.
Sapphire & Steele…
Jesus fucking Christ…
Anyway, there appears to be a multitude of writers of this general career driven type, each one just itching to tell an untold and entirely negligible story of some television Who companion about which we'd otherwise forgotten for reasons which actually aren't that difficult to understand, and ordinarily you couldn't pay me to read their work, not after that shit about how Davros created the Daleks because someone called him names when he was a kid; but, I remember liking The Time Travellers a lot, and statistically speaking, there has to be at least one of these guys who can actually fucking write, yes?
Simon Guerrier is that man, it seems. The story is actually a bit of a mess, as is possibly inevitable given all of the potential paradoxes upon which the story is built, but it works because it's well told. Guerrier's prose is, I suppose, efficient, if not really given to flights of poetic fancy, but at the same time it commits none of the usual sins of Who obsessives, imagining that writing is somehow a bit like talking, or like a portentous cinematic voiceover; and he eschews both clichés and button-pushing sentiment. The Time Travellers is clearly the work of someone who actually knows how to write, which shouldn't be taken for granted.
Of course, certain expectations come with the book being a Who novel, which is fine. Guerrier strongly invokes the mood of something which could easily have been on the box back in 1964 and yet wasn't, without it feeling like a self-conscious period piece - or like it would rather be telly for that matter; and his story works on a sort of vintage logic, kind of like old programmes run on the latest operating system, which is even a little impressive given the once prevalent temptation to do an Alan Moore by forcing the innocents of yesteryear through the contemporary wringer, turning Pogle's Wood into a popular dogging spot, for one example. Except Guerrier actually does this by transposing sixties telly characters to a fairly harsh version of London in the year 2006 with Canary Wharf, the DLR, mobile phones and so on, but gets away with it by telling the story on their terms, rendering the contemporary as something weird and borderline Orwellian.
The cover says it all, really - more unsettling modernism than a hook in the commercial sense, a suggestion of mood which promises only further questions. Within a year these books would have photographic covers of the stars, reaching out to punters and figuratively asking would you like to come on an adventure with me? It was all downhill after this, downhill and right into the crapper.
I really wish Guerrier would write something which hadn't been on the box in some form.
*: Or indeed sister. I don't have any problem with the recasting of the Doctor as female beyond the existing problems I've had with the television show since 2005.
No comments:
Post a Comment