Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Turing Test

Paul Leonard The Turing Test (2000)
If this Who novel following on from something first read back before I had pubes suggests an emerging theme, I should probably make it clear that it's really just comfort food for my eyes. My reading time is otherwise presently taken up with proofing print copies of my own five volume Mexico Diaries. I've spent the last five years editing the thing, and whilst I consider it at least sufficiently entertaining to have been worth the effort, it's pretty tough ploughing through all five of the cunts for the millionth time and still finding typos. Anyway, the point is that I needed light relief, hence The Turing Test.

The Turing Test was, as you probably know, part of a series of novels which kept Who going during the decade or so of it being off the air prior to its 2005 revival as a massive steaming pile of shite. This one followed on from the slightly underwhelming Paul McGann movie, and has been remembered as one of the better books, although not necessarily by me - which I'll come to in a moment.

To give credit where it's due, the BBC Who novels pulled some interesting moves in their time, facilitated by their collectively working as a larger ongoing narrative. At this point of his notional existence, the Doctor had been left stranded on Earth following not only the destruction of his home planet but also the retroactive erasure of his past; so he doesn't know who he is and the TARDIS may as well be just a wardrobe. He doesn't seem to age, and he doesn't know why, and he's living his life one year at a time with the vague understanding of something due to happen around the year 2000. I gather the point of this was to really get the writers earning their tuppence ha'penny, and to see if Doctor Who still worked with more or less all of the established props and references rendered off limits.

The Turing Test occurs during the second world war and draws in Alan Turing, Graham Greene, and Joseph Heller as both characters and authors; furthermore, the novel is divided into three parts, each one a first person narrative written in an approximation of their respective styles. The story, just to get it out of the way, concerns an impenetrable code which, so it transpires, derives from alien visitors rather than Nazis, hence Turing. Graham Greene additionally worked for MI6, aside from being a novelist, so that's how he figures, and Joseph Heller knew how to fly a plane, and at one point they need to fly a plane…

In its favour, The Turing Test is a novel which is quite happy to be a novel, with none of the usual passages half-wishing they were on telly. It's been a while since I read either The Power and the Glory or Catch-22, but Paul Leonard seems to do a decent job of capturing the voices of their authors, so far as I'm able to tell. Additionally in its favour, The Turing Test tries to say something beyond simply plugging up a few hours of your time with adventures. Specifically, it presents comparisons by which we might consider the question of what is human - hence the title - with variant flavours represented by the Doctor, the aliens, Greene's somewhat dour pessimism, Heller's humanism, Turing's vulnerability, various Nazis just doing their jobs, and so on and so forth.

It's ambitious and generally exceptionally well written, and it almost works but sort of doesn't, or didn't for me. I felt the same way the first time I read it however many years ago. The problem is that, I would guess, Leonard put so much work into impersonating Turing, Greene, and Heller that he lost his grip on the dynamic of the story, which just seems to drift along for a few hundred pages without any clear objective in sight, pissing away the goodwill of the reader - me in this case - until we come to the final third and suddenly notice that here is a writer who has taken the author of Catch-22 and made him have an exciting adventure with Doctor Who from the telly, which is just silly. The Turing Test has its feet in two camps and is neither one thing nor the other - too ponderous to be gripping, too juvenile to provoke much thought. Its not a bad book by any means, but I really feel it should have been better.