Infinite Requiem

Daniel Blythe Infinite Requiem (1995)
Regular readers may be dimly aware of my general dislike of Doctor Who and the possibly record breaking levels of bile to which it and its devotees have occasionally driven me; but, as is probably obvious to any passing psychologist, I was once quite the fan, and my anger is therefore driven by what fucking idiots have done to the thing I once loved. I'm not saying it was ever the most brilliantest brilliant thing of all time as its contemporary cultists would claim, but it was fun and it had something, and it was mostly half decent as science-fiction. Perhaps significantly, my favourite era of the show ended up being those years when it wasn't actually on the telly due to having been cancelled, but carried on as a series of monthly novels selling to a presumably dwindling hardcore of readers.

Virgin Books had bought the rights and took to publishing these New Adventures as a continuation of what we'd seen on the screen, but without the fucking terrible music. The idea was that they might stand as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, perhaps even launching the careers of promising new science-fiction authors in the process. Fandom being what it is, what careers were launched were mostly in the direction of yet more Who novels, and the discovery of the next Asimov never really happened; but on the other hand, most of the New Adventures actually worked as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, or were at least of a standard allowing one to regard them as spiritual successor to at least Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan and Sexton Blake rather than just yet more product on the shelf adjacent to the one sagging under the weight of all that Star Wars tat.

That being said, my first impression upon seeing one of these in a book store was oh for fuck's sake, let it die. Then a couple of months later I noticed a few of them cropping up in my local WHSmith, and Paul Cornell's No Future - which sends Sylvester McCoy's Doctor to London in 1977 to defeat an alien invasion which intrudes upon the formative years of punk rock - was apparently just stupid enough to warrant my buying the thing. Then I read Jim Mortimore's Blood Heat because there was a Silurian on the cover, and I decided that was it. I was nearly thirty. I had a girlfriend and we were having it off and everything. I didn't need to collect yet another series of anything, not least because there were already thirty or forty of the fuckers at a fiver a throw and it was just too much. I think The Left Handed Hummingbird was next because it sounded like an unreleased Nurse With Wound album, followed by this.

I bought it because it was the only one they had in Chener Books, my local book shop on Lordship Lane, and in buying it I knew I was doomed to collect the fucking set.

Curiosity is therefore why I'm reading it again in 2022. Infinite Requiem made an impression at the time, although not much of one, but enough to inspire my shelling out for the other four million in the series over the years which followed. I read it back before I could really consider myself a regular reader of anything, back when it might take me up to six months to get through a book, and I rarely strayed from my lane, thematically speaking. I wanted to see how well this had aged, and whether it turned out to be better than I remembered.

Thankfully, it actually is reasonably well written, and my own generally increased literacy hasn't left it beached as time travelling Harry Potter or equivalent. It features the man from the telly having an adventure and is about as deep as you need it to be, but Blythe avoids the sort of clichés and shortcuts which often blight ventures of this kind. The only real problem is that, as the title possibly indicates, it pits our man against one of those all-powerful and omnipotent greatest threats to everything ever - or three of them if we're counting - attempting the kind of horrifying scale which never seems to work in print and isn't massively interesting here. This is a shame because the peripheral detail and supporting characters are great, and thus significantly more engaging than the menacing psychic tosspots who want to destroy everything because that's the sort of thing that menacing psychic tosspots go in for. Being the fruit of 1995, we get a futuristic space library where everything is stored on disc, but on the other hand we get the Phracton Swarm which could have been one of the more interesting alien species to run riot across Who continuity, but I guess it wasn't to be.

Internet research reveals that Daniel Blythe went on to write a shitload of other things as distinct from the same thing over and over again, and as such achieved a sort of escape velocity from the cult ghetto which developed once Who made it back onto the telly. So that's good, and if Infinite Requiem probably isn't a masterpiece, it nevertheless had enough going for it to translate into a generally decent read three decades later.

Dark Shadows: The Flip Side

Cody Quijano-Schell Dark Shadows: The Flip Side (2013)
I was something of a Big Finish junkie until around 2005, bagging more or less everything up until LIVE 34 which featured Andrew Collins whom I've long regarded as Philip Schofield with a Ned's Atomic Dustbin album, and whose turning up on one of their Doctor Who audio plays significantly contributed to my general impression of the company as having somewhat lost it. The main CD range hadn't really yielded anything I'd regarded as exceptional since possibly The Natural History of Fear, and all these new subsidiary series - Dalek Empire, Gallifrey, The Further Adventures of Man Sweeping Floor from Episode Two of Claws of Axos - all felt somehow akin to a cynical exercise in squeezing all of the milk from the cow before Russell T. McDavies turned her into cheeseburgers. Of course, there was doubtless some good stuff there, but then how much sodding Doctor Who does one person really need? Additionally, I'd begun to associate Big Finish with a certain genus of fan mentality, specifically the type which would slaver over the revival of yet another crap and rightly forgotten 1970s kid's show because there was a fucking space rocket in it, and yet would not be induced to read a book that wasn't a tie-in to something or other. Who is this Michael Moorcock? they whined and bleated upon hearing of The Coming of the Terraphiles, for one example. Is he good enough to write an eleventh Doctor novel?

None of which necessarily reflects on Big Finish itself, or on their audio plays, or has much bearing on anything beyond my ability to overcome certain prejudices regarding the culturally impoverished.

I'd not heard of Dark Shadows until roughly two years ago when I moved to Texas and married a woman who had narrowly escaped being named after one of the characters, such had been my new mother-in-law's love of the supernatural television soap of the late sixties and early seventies. I've now seen a few episodes, and although I like it, I'm still not entirely sure why or what to make of it. Nevertheless, here I am listening to a Big Finish audio play continuing the story of some culty old telly show when I could be reading a book...

My Dark Shadows background knowledge doesn't extend much further than vague impressions of a spooky house and a man named Willie Loomis throwing anguished poses; so I have no real idea who the people in this play are supposed to be, but thankfully The Flip Side seems to stand on its own merits. Most of the story occurs in The Blue Whale, the bar from the television series, or at least it occurs within the thoughts of those found drowning sorrows in that bar. The narrative is sometimes disorientating, a parapsychological drama spun on choices made and alternate realities - all deftly employed in moving the story forward rather than as showy continuity points. In places it's confusing, but it works as a sort of darkly psychedelic Harold Pinter, and the listener is absolutely drawn in. Well, I was.

Whining reservations aside, I've always found Big Finish to be exceptional in terms of production values, and The Flip Side is true to their established high standards - expanding on the series from which it is drawn whilst remaining absolutely faithful to its spirit. Cody Quijano-Schell is a writer whose ambition has sometimes outstripped his ability on the printed page, and his uniquely vivid imagination blooms during this excursion into a different medium. The Flip Side is an hour well spent of anyone's time - good enough to be a book.

Doctor Who Classics Omnibus

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison & others
Doctor Who Classics Omnibus volume one (2010)
Perhaps inevitably, I was once quite the fan of Doctor Who, right up until its 2005 reinvention which, for me at least, missed all the major points of what had made the series so enjoyable in the first place; and then I found my disappointment somewhat polarised by the repellent fervour with which so many embraced the revival, a fervour which often seems indistinguishable from bullying from where I stand, and bullying offered in support of opinion presented as doctrine, received wisdom reiterated as fact.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story.

That's just one example; and it might work if accounting for novels like Campaign or The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but these are usually some way off the radar of those for whom Doctor Who is beyond criticism. I have no idea who first said those words, and I'm amazed they can be restated year after year without anyone actually pausing to ask themselves what is actually meant, whether it might be true, or whether it's just another flavourless lump of hyperbole wheeled out because it sounds vaguely more authoritative than the one about my dad being bigger than your dad. What it appears to mean, so far as I am able to tell, is that being as the Doctor can go anywhere in time and space, the settings may vary a great deal without stretching credibility too thin, additionally allowing for some liberties to be taken with the narrative. You could probably say much the same of Star Trek, not that it would necessarily be any more true as a statement. Stories set in fictional environments or from the viewpoint of a minor character are not necessarily indicative of wild narrative anarchy, and certainly not when every last one boils down to the magic Doctor Who telly man having adventures in his TARDIS whilst occasionally reminding us to be nice to those who are a little bit different. Maybe I'm wrong, and Doctor Who really does allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, in which case I assume I must have missed the equivalents to Finnegans Wake, Rendezvous with Rama, Heart of Aztlán, Lady Chatterley's Lover or all those other Doctor Who stories which didn't frame everything in relation to a time traveller having adventures whilst human companions are captured and find themselves having to ask what's happening, Doctor?

So the wonderful thing about Doctor Who is more likely that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, excepting stories of which any aspect is of greater importance than the main character, which actually leaves quite a lot that Doctor Who can't do without looking ridiculous.

Anyway, that's just one aspect. My point - quite aside from Doctor Who merely being a television serial from which a mighty ocean of merchandising has sprung forth, just as Softly Softly and On the Buses were merely television serials - nothing was ever the better for being taken more seriously than it deserved.

Nostalgia guided the hand that picked this from a pile of cheapies in a branch of Borders just before the retail chain imploded, specifically the nostalgia of having read about half of the strips collected herein when they first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly back in the early 1980s. The Iron Legion, The Star Beast, City of the Damned and others - they were great at the time, just as you might expect from 2000AD regulars like Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, but returning to these now that I'm fat and in my forties, it's difficult to get beyond their being written for a slightly younger audience than at least those early 2000AD strips which have generally stood the test of time. The ideas are nice enough for all the predominance of primary narrative colours, and Dave Gibbons' artwork is beautiful, but it's the kind of shorthand storytelling wherein panels are captioned so as to describe what is quite clearly seen to be happening without any real need for such descriptions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I'm a fully grown man and it no longer works for me, not least because the mere presence of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. does not in itself hold my interest. The thing is, as children's comics go, there are plenty which retain some appeal in later years mainly through having refrained from too much talking down to their readers - Asterix the Gaul, Dan Dare, at least some of what 2000AD published - besides which these strips read sadly like ham-fisted promotional material such as you might find printed on the wrapper of an ice lolly. Neither content, vintage nor the presence of a Doctor Who logo is really enough to justify describing these stories as classic, although I've no doubt there are many people out there prepared to wage dreary online wars in their defence. There may even be one or two reading this review, getting ready to fulminate, having never before taken any interest in either Pamphlets of Destiny or the novels I've written about herein, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about and it must therefore be debated with all due reverence, which I really feel proves my point about things being taken more seriously than they deserve.

Of course, it could be argued that this is also what I have myself done when I could just have said Doctor Who Classics Omnibus is all right if you're about ten, but even then you'd be better off with some Judge Dredd or whatever.

The Wicket in the Rec

This isn't the cover, but I needed something visual in order to silence the inner voices and sometimes I find it very difficult to leave my GIMP alone. Whilst I don't wish to imply The Wicket in the Rec is actually a Penguin Modern Classic, it's nevertheless not something to be sniffed at.

Paul Hayes The Wicket in the Rec (2011)
I'm not sure anyone in the history of publishing has ever really isolated quite what it takes to get a novel past the slush pile firewall and into fancy-pants print, although Paul Hayes has clearly given the matter some thought. Quality might be a factor, at least in so much as published novels generally tend towards a certain minimum standard below which we find the stapled fruit of Brer Photocopier, uninviting eBooks, and other denizens of the realm of the self-published. Then again, there are plenty of self-published authors I'd rate very highly - Jason Mills, Jim Mortimore and Andrew Hickey to name but three - and whilst there will always be shite like J. Lee Mace's Naked Deceit to bring down the average, the legitimately published Dan Brown did all right for himself despite this sort of adjectival landfill :

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

So getting into print is probably just a combination of talent, luck and blow-jobbing your way to the top of the metaphorical pile, not necessarily all of those or in that order.

Nevertheless, conscious of the unfortunate associations of self-publishing, for better or worse, Paul Hayes resists temptation, seemingly refusing even to accept the term author until given sanction by virtue of publication. Sadly, I can see exactly why he should adopt this stance, and ironically that's what drew me to The Wicket in the Rec where normally I would only click on those buy my great new free downloadable eNovel links out of the same masochistic fascination that draws me to interviews with Bobby Gillespie or those shaved chimps from Oasis.

Whilst Hayes' humility regarding his own abilities seems quite driven, perhaps even excessive, I would guess it's only the expression of a profound desire for progress, and an absolute fear of the vanity which so often blinds aspirant authors to their own failings. I suspect Hayes is harder on himself than even the most demanding editor; and if this is so, then it has at least paid off. The prose he himself describes as merely workmanlike is elegant and hits the mark every single time, never settling for a sketchy version of the point nor on the other hand labouring so hard as to build up a sweat.

The Wicket in the Rec spends roughly a month in the lives of the inhabitants of two small Sussex villages, an understated drama centred around, of all things, the late 1980s repercussions of a cricket match postponed fifty years earlier by the outbreak of the second world war. Initially reading as an exercise in nostalgia, it's more an examination of the same, drawn in part from aspects of the author's childhood. In essence, The Wicket in the Rec - which spins up the most engrossing tempest from details that initially seem inconsequential - is itself about detail, about tiny events that build to storms, and meaning gleaned where least expected:

You will find some moments in your life – some quite random, bizarre, moments that are not particularly notable for anything, but which for some reason stick in your mind. Any reminder of them, no matter how small, can take you right back to that point and place in time. For Nathan Wright, such a moment would always be that particular car journey on that hot July afternoon; in spite of everything else that was to follow that day, this was the part of it he would always remember the most clearly.

Even when he was an old man, the details would always be there. The seats in Elise's car were boiling from having been under the sunlight blazing in through the windows for so long. There was that aroma of warm vinyl, mixed with the rich smell of nicotine and tobacco from her cigarette. There was a battered copy of Melody Maker in the footwell behind the driver's seat, and an empty Cherry Coke bottle next to Nathan in the back.

Then Gemma stuck a tape into the car stereo – it was a Madonna album, True Blue. The track order was burned into Nathan's brain from many journeys in Elise's car where it was playing. Elise put her hand to the stereo and turned it up loud as they raced along the Arundel Road, towards Worthing. Forever more, whenever Nathan would hear the opening bars of 'Papa Don't Preach' at any point in his life, he would feel the rush of memories like a punch to the stomach, and would be back there instantly. He could see the interior of that car, smell the sunlight and nicotine, and be ten years old again.

Nostalgia in itself is probably not a great reason to write a novel, but that doesn't seem to be Hayes' purpose as he gets into the mechanism, casting warm familiarity over an era some may remember quite differently, and without stooping to the sentimentality of Stewart Maconie bleating on about spangles or Nick Berry giving Myra Hindley a friendly clip around the ear to a soundtrack of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. He proves that maxim I'm sure I've heard somewhere about a good story being as much in the telling as the tale; in short, he's a skilled communicator, not least for having just conned me into reading a novel about cricket.

In fact never mind just cricket, all those elements which could have gone so horribly wrong are handled with a rare lightness of touch - real emotion and pathos achieved without pulling the obvious teary-eyed rabbits from overwrought hats. It's a long time since I've been genuinely moved by an emotional reunion scene. More often I'm left only with a slightly wearying insight into the author's viewing habits begging the question of whether there's anyone left who still regards novels as novels rather than potential Hollywood source material.

The Wicket in the Rec, in case all this gushing gives the wrong impression, is by no means the greatest novel I've ever read, but it really is astonishingly good, and probably not even the greatest novel Paul Hayes will write. If there's any justice - which admittedly there may not be - this guy shouldn't have to spend too much longer worrying about getting published.