Doctor Who: Wicked Sisters

Out in November, Wicked Sisters is a trilogy of Doctor Who stories in which the Fifth Doctor and Leela must destroy two powerful beings who threaten all of space and time. Their names are Abby and Zara...

It's been a thrill to reunite the Doctor with the leads from my sci-fi series Graceless, and I couldn't be happier with the result. The series stars Peter Davison, Louise Jameson, Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington - plus some amazing guest actors who will be announced in due course.

Full press release as follows:

The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) is on course for a reunion with some old friends when he crosses paths with sisters Abby and Zara.

Created by pan-dimensional beings the Grace to assist – and sometimes hinder – the Doctor in Big Finish’s Key 2 Time trilogy, Abby (Ciara Janson) and Zara (Laura Doddington) went on to their own time-spanning adventures in the acclaimed spin-off series, Graceless. After centuries of their own wanderings through time and space, Abby and Zara are about to meet the Time Lord again...

Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures – Wicked Sisters is now available for pre-order, from just £16.99, and is due for release in November 2020.

The Doctor is recruited by Leela for a vital mission on behalf of the Time Lords. Together, they must track down and destroy two god-like beings whose extraordinary powers now threaten all of space and time. Their names are Abby and Zara...

This new full-cast Doctor Who audio drama box set features three linked adventures by Graceless’ creator and writer, Simon Guerrier, who wrote the very first appearance of Abby and Zara in Doctor Who: The Judgment of Iskaar.

1. The Garden of Storms
2. The Moonrakers
3. The People Made of Smoke

Producer Mark Wright said: “It’s been ten years since we first took Abby and Zara off on their own adventures, and it’s fun to get the team that’s worked on every episode of Graceless together every couple of years.

“Simon Guerrier’s scripts always take us into unexpected territory, and Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington bring something new to their performances each time Abby and Zara are back together. As it’s been a decade since the first series of Graceless, we thought it was time to bring things full circle and take the sisters back to where it all began – with the Fifth Doctor.” 

Writer Simon Guerrier added: “It’s been a thrill to write for the Fifth Doctor and Leela, and put them up against Abby and Zara. You don’t need to know anything about Graceless - that was part of the brief from my masters - but they’re sisters with extraordinary powers that threaten all of time and space.”

“They’re very different from the women the Doctor first met all those years ago when we did the Key 2 Time series. Back then, he wasn't required to kill them...

“The three days we had in studio just before Christmas were the highlight of my working year. A dream cast, a lot of laughter, and Lisa Bowerman ably marshalling everyone as we faced the collapse of the universe.”

Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures – Wicked Sisters is now available for pre-order, exclusively at the Big Finish website from just £16.99. 

Doctor Who Magazine 550

Issue 550 of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out tomorrow and comes with posters, a cardboard TARDIS control room to make and plenty of other treats. That includes my in-depth interview with director Michael E Briant about The Robots of Death. That story is part of the Season 14 box-set to be released on Blu-ray as soon as the global crisis allows...

What with all that hullabaloo, magazines are facing a thin time so now would be the perfect opportunity to subscribe to this noblest of all titles. Please and thank you.

Also, this afternoon I took part in the Stay-at-Home! Literary Festival, on a panel about writing Doctor Who books alongside esteemed colleagues Una McCormack, Jonathan Morris and Jacqueline Rayner. Jac commissioned me for the very first bit of fiction I ever got paid for, and it was nice to be able to remind and thank her. 

Van Gogh's paintings in Doctor Who

Vincent Van Gogh was born on this day in 1853, and this evening my clever friend Emily Cook at Doctor Who Magazine has organised a special online watch of 2010 Doctor Who episode Vincent and the Doctor, with tweeting along by writer Richard Curtis, script editor Emma Freud and stars Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Tony Curran.

The Lord of Chaos has greatly enjoyed the last two tweet-alongs, but I suspect tonight he'll want to know more about the paintings featured in the episode. So I have made a list.

1. Wheat Field with Crows, July 1890

The episode begins with Van Gogh painting what some have said is his last work, a wheat field with crows. We then cut to the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, in the present day, where the picture is part of a special exhibition of Van Gogh's work - and presumably on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

2. Self-portrait with straw hat, summer 1887

As Bill Nighty's unnamed art expert expounds, we see more pictures in the exhibition. This self-portrait is now in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

3. Olive Trees, 1888

The art expert passes a screen on which can be seen this sketch of olive trees, now held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts Tournai in Tournai, Belgium.

4. Road with Men Walking etc. 17 June 1890

The screen changes, to show this sketch contained in a letter Van Gogh wrote on 17 June 1890, listed as "Road with Men Walking, Carriage, Cypress, Star, and Crescent Moon" in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum.

5. The Starry Night, June 1889

Now the Doctor and Amy breeze into shot, and we get glances at a range of paintings on display - which we'll get clearer views of later. The Starry Night, which will be a pivotal one later in the episode, is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

6. Still Life: Vase with 12 Sunflowers, c. 1888-89

Across the gallery, we get a glimpse of this, one of numerous paintings of sunflowers by Van Gogh. This one is now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

7. Wheat Field with Cypresses, late June 1889

Back in the main part of the gallery, there's this wheat field which is now owned by the Met in New York.

8. La Berceuse, December 1888 to early 1889

Next to it is one of the five portraits Van Gogh produced of Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, wife of the postmaster at Arles. I'm not sure I've got the right one of the five - this one is from the Met collection.

9. Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890

Then there's this, one of a number of paintings of the same scene - as sketched in the letter (image 4, above). This seems to be the right one, with the distinctive curves of the tree and green patch of grass in the road at the bottom centre. This one is from the Kröller-Müller Museum, in the Netherlands.

10. Siesta, or Noon: Rest from Work (after Millet),January 1890

Next, there's this famous one of a sleeping couple, today in the Musee D'Orsay.

11. Wheat Field with Thunderclouds, mid to late July 1890

This one is next is thought to be the first of the sequence that culminated in Wheat Field with Crows (image 1). I wasn't sure at first as the version on screen seems to be a different shape and the clouds more grey, but the triangle of green in the middle seems to match exactly. It's now in the Van Gogh Museum.

12. Portrait of Dr Gachet (second version), 1890

This is one of two portraits of Dr Paul Gachet,  both painted in June 1890. This one is in the Musee D'Orsay collection.

13. The Yellow House, September 1888

Showing 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, this is the house Van Gogh rented - and shared for nine weeks with Paul Gaugin. The painting is now in the Van Gogh Museum.

14. Church at Auvers, June 1890

We focus on Church at Auvers because - in the episode - there's a monster in the window. The painting is now in the Musee D'Orsay. The art expert tells the Doctor it was painted between 1 and 3 June 1890.

15. Bedroom in Arles, 1888

Next the painting of the church hangs Bedroom in Arles, which the episode later recreates as a set - a joke surely lifted from the 1991 Guinness ad. The painting is now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum.

16. Blossoming Almond Tree, February 1890

Shocked by the monster in the church window, the Doctor dashes past three paintings hanging together. We see them in a blur, but get a better look later on. This one of a blossoming almond tree is in the Van Gogh Museum.

17. Portrait of Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, June 1890

This is a portrait of Marguerite, daughter of Dr Paul Gachet (see in image 12).  It's in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

18. Irises, May 1889

This is now in the collection of the Getty, Los Angeles. This is the last of the paintings shown in the pre-titles sequence.

19. Cafe at Night, 1888

On arriving in 1890, the Doctor and Amy look for Van Gogh and Amy matches this painting, seen in her book of postcards from the exhibition, to the exterior set.  This is the cafe terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, and the painting is now in the collections of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands.

When we meet Van Gogh in the episode, he is arguing over the merits of his self-portrait with straw hat (image 2). When he talks to the Doctor and Amy, he also unrolls some of the canvas for Siesta (image 10).

Amy and the Doctor follow Vincent home, and Amy looks at her postcard of the Bedroom (image 15) before entering Vincent's house. The house contains many of the pictures we've also seen - the Yellow House, both Gachet portraits, the apple blossom - as well a still life of flowers in a vase with a red background that Van Gogh will later paint over in the episode. There is one we've not seen before:

20. Prisoners' Round, after Doré, 1890.

This was inspired by an 1872 engraving by Gustave Doré of the exercise yard at Newgate Prison in London. Van Gogh's painting is now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

There are also various sketches pinned around Van Gogh's home which I've not yet identified.

21. Still Life with Basket and 6 Oranges, March 1888

The Doctor chides Van Gogh for using the above as a tea tray. It's now held in a private collection.

22. Self-portrait as Painter, Dec 1887-Feb 1888

Finally, when the Doctor goes to see Van Gogh in his bedroom (the set designed to match image 15), this self-portrait is on one wall. It's now in the Van Gogh Museum.

After this, Amy fills Van Gogh's garden with sunflowers, as per his famous still lives. We then see him paint the Church at Auvers (image 14), and he shares with Amy and the Doctor his view of the night sky (an animated version of image 5). We return to the exhibition in the present day, giving us a better look at paintings glimpsed in the pre-titles sequence.

Picard: The Last Best Hope, by Una McCormack

This extraordinary novel by my friend Una McCormack is something really special: the best tie-in novel I've read in an age, a great novel in its own right, and disturbingly, horribly timely.

The brief is simple enough: to bridge the gap between our last sight of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (in the 2002 movie Nemesis) and the start of his new TV series, Star Trek: Picard, which itself follows on from the destruction of the planet Romulus in the 2009 reboot movie Star Trek. Una sets out her mission on the first page, beginning, as does the new TV series, with retired and elderly Picard at home on his vineyard in La Barre. Only Una has him picking over exactly what led to him being here.

It's so much more than just joining the dots between movie A and television series B. The prose is immediately arresting, the scene poignant and moving, the great Picard now,

"One more outcast, cast adrift. Prospero, on his island. An old conjurer, his magic spent, nursing old grievances." (p. 3)

This is a perfect association for Picard, played all these years by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart. There is dignity, even majesty, in his fall from grace. Having established that sense of him, Una then has Picard settle on, "the moment when everything changed" - the day he left his beloved Starship Enterprise. 

We cut back to that day, and Una swiftly lays out the Great Problem that Picard is tasked with - a refugee crisis that involves old enemies who are too proud to ask for help. Picard is promoted to Admiral and takes charge of a new ship and crew to boldy go sort things out. Nicely, Una also has him take his leave of old friends, especially those who've not (yet) had cameos in the new TV series. One conversation with an old friend is like a knife through the heart.

"[Picard] had never quite summoned up his courage, when it came to Beverley Crusher." (p. 20).

Picard must also argue the case for the officer he thinks should succeed him on the Enterprise, and much is made of the significance of Captain Worf, a Klingon, taking the helm of the Federation's flagship just 100 years since the enmities of 1991 movie, The Undiscovered Country. That works well, but oddly it's relayed through other people's responses. We barely glimpse Worf at all; he's given no dialogue. I assume there's some contractual issue, or some other spin-off has bagsied Worf's perspective, but still.

One other thing seems missing: I've still little sense of how Picard knows Laris and Zhaban, the Romulans working for him at the start of the TV series. They get no more than a name-check in the book. Again, I assume that's a story for another time - or something I missed in the series. [ETA, Laris and Zhaban apparently feature in the comic mini-series Countdown.] But that and the silence of Worf are hardly complaints, just the sole two moments where I thought, "Wait, what?"

Otherwise, the book's use of established, TV-derived lore is exemplary. So much tie-in fiction is about playing in the margins, at a discrete distance from the primary source. But Una includes scenes that I've watched in the TV series, adding to them, extending them, offering more context and insight. It's more than simply access to the production team and the episodes well ahead of broadcast: there's evident care and trust and parity of esteem in the relationship between production team and writer for this to dovetail with the series so perfectly. The result is that I'm engaged in and am enjoying the Picard TV series more because I've read the book.

Again, it's not just about joining the dots. Una creates her own characters - indeed, a whole ship under Picard's command, the Verity. Two characters are so well drawn that we really feel their loss when they die. I also found ambitious politician Olivia Quest particularly easy to visualise, as Emma Thompson in Years and Years. Characters new and established feel psychologically real: there are few out-right villains, just people with conflicting views about what should be done in the face of vast and awful crisis.

I think there's something of the TV series Chernobyl in this response to - and denial of - calamity. We're also told that the people of Earth long solved its climate crisis, and then Picard despairs of those refusing his help:

"But there must have come a point - long past - when it was clear that something on Romulus was going horribly wrong. Yet many people - even among the elites, most of whom have been privy to the information - seem not to have believed the evidence of their own eyes. They seem to have wantonly refused to connect the dots between the increasing heat, the storms, the floods, and the freak weather pattern. I struggle to understand why. Perhaps some truths are simply too much to face." (p. 253)

Una couldn't have known it, but much of her novel feels horribly pertinent right this minute, as we square up to Corvid-19. Politicians and experts argue over the correct response to an unprecedented crisis. There's selfishness and denial from ordinary people, not sure what to believe in the calm before the storm. But, fast becoming reality, there is suffering and death on a barely imaginable scale...

We know from the opening page of the book that things do not turn out well for Picard or those he pledges himself to save. I'd already seen the episode of the TV series which flashes back to the day Picard resigns from Star Fleet. Una includes that, and shows us his resignation. He fails. Then she concludes with some thoughts, from Picard, on the cruelty of history.

Bloody hell. It's a book that's changed my sense of the TV series, and the world outside my door now.

At Childhood's End, by Sophie Aldred

This melding of Doctor Who old and new is great fun and surprisingly moving. With help from Mike Tucker and Steve Cole, it's written by Sophie Aldred, who played Ace in Doctor Who between 1987 and 1989, and it sees an older Ace reunited with the Doctor - the current, female incarnation.

It's structured in three parts, just like one of Ace's TV stories, and includes a character from 1989's Survival and a load of references and retcons to that era, but all feels engagingly, refreshingly new. I especially liked how well the author(s) capture the current Doctor and her companions, with some credible awkwardness between police officer Yaz and explosive experts Ace.

At one point, due to quantum wossnames, Ace glimpses all kinds of possible lives, allowing her to encompass the various Aces from books and comics and audio while at the same time over-writing all that with this authoritative version. It also dovetails nicely with the trailer Aldred starred in last year for the Blu-ray release of her final season in Doctor Who, legitimising it and following its lead emotionally.

I think there's a callback to the days of Doctor Who books aimed at an adult audience when we first meet this older Ace: she's woken from a nightmare and gets out of bed; we're told on page 11 that she's naked. It's an odd, incongruous detail for an adventure aimed at the whole family.

Otherwise, the horse-like and rat-like aliens and the various scrapes and solutions make this feel very much like the TV series of today. It rattles along breathlessly, full of jokes and surprises. I find myself wondering where exactly in this year's series it takes place: after the events of Fugitive of the Judoon, given than Yaz first learns of Cybermen in that story, but chats about them with Ace here on page 137. 

Doctor Who Magazine 549

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine includes a feature I've co-written with Sophie Iles, a preview of the animated version of 1967 story The Faceless Ones.

We spoke to producer/director AnneMarie Walsh, sound restorer and remasterer Mark Ayres, colour artist Adrian Salmon, 2D animator Kate Sullivan and character designer Martin Geraghty.

Vortex 133

The new issue of free magazine Vortex includes a feature on Doctor Who audio spin-off Susan's War, including an interview with me about the episode I wrote - The Uncertain Shore - and a picture of the splendid cast. 

The series is out next month: order Susan's War from the Big Finish website.

The Painted Banquet, by Jocelyn Rickards

Subtitled "My Life and Loves", this gossipy autobiography by costume designer Jocelyn Rickards is great fun. From an early age, crises never get in the way of her having a good time. She tells us on page 9 that the sight of her as a baby stopped her father killing himself after being declared bankrupt.

"What to this day I don't understand is how, when we were in severe financial straits, I had a nanny until I was three and I was in no way aware at any time that the quality of life was less than carefree; nor do I know why, from the very beginning, I was allowed to go to only expensive private schools, which must have been a severe financial strain."

If there's no sense of the sacrifice and effort from her parents in getting her that education, we see the result of it: having joined an artsy, well-off set in her native Australia, Jocelyn follows them to London on a one-way ticket, and rather strolls into a world of connections with leading artists and directors. She takes pride in how few of them can trace Australian in her accent. She glides through love affairs, parties, digs, picking up plum jobs painting and designing for the great and good. She almost gets into the movies by accident.

Jocelyn is snobbish - "For the first time ever I was in an hotel where I didn't have to hide something from sight" she says on page 148 - and often bitchy (she herself refers to having "bitched" on p. 158), and there's a sense that she skims over her own bad behaviour. There are passionate affairs and friendships here, but also bitter rivalries - which she seems to relish.

"Oscar Lewinstein, talking to Evangeline Harrison, announced quite simply that I was the 'wickedest woman in the world,' a view shared with Renee Ayer and Stuart Hampshire. I can't think of three more desirable enemies." (p. 93)

There's lots of what X said about Y, or how Z was indiscreet, and times Jocelyn said or was heard to have said something mean. She rubs a lot of people up the wrong way without ever quite saying why. Of course, the chief appeal is what she can reveal about the famous names she courted and worked alongside. For example, she worked with Marilyn Monroe on The Prince and the Showgirl:

"God knows whether she herself wished to project an image of such blazing sexuality. But I do remember Bumble [Beatrice Dawson] bringing armfuls of wool jersey dresses for her to try on, all the right size, which Marilyn then changed to two sizes smaller." (p. 52)

Or there's the glamour of making a Bond film. In Istanbul on location for From Russia With Love, Jocelyn and director Terence Young had,

"two plates each of exquisite trip soup before separating - he to search for locations in a small boat, and I to do the same by car with the art department. It's difficult to say which of us had the worse afternoon - Terence, dragging his bare arse through the Bosphorous, or me without a blade of grass behind which I could conceal myself at all too regular intervals, as the tripe soup made its logical progress from entrance to exit." (p. 82) 

And there's what now feels extraordinary, in the midst of production on Blow-Up:

"the dark green corduroy jacket which David Hemmings had worn throughout the film had been stolen by some light-fingered passer-by. To anyone not used to working on movies such a loss would seem merely an irritation. But with four months of film shot in which the star was dressed in this particular jacket, it was a disaster; and we had only until eight o'clock the following morning to come up with another exactly the same. I rang Bermans, and told the man who'd been with me when I first found the jacket, at the Shaftesbury Avenue Cecil Gee, that I'd send him a car and would he please scour London. For four hours Rebecca Breed, the wardrobe mistress, as I waited in a state of depressing inertia. Then our misery was relieved, at least partly. The colour of the jacket we were given when the car got back was a perfect match; the pocket details were all different, however. Rebecca didn't think we'd get away with it. But a little subtle stitching of the pockets so that they didn't gape made it fairly unlikely that anyone would notice. They didn't. Of such minuscule details are the crises of film-making made up." (p. 101)

Today, a lead actor in a movie would have multiple sets of the same costume on standby. But Blow-Up wasn't alone - I know from my work on Doctor Who Figurine Collection that, for instance, the Second Doctor had only one version of his outfit - all of it second-hand and unique. Even by 1975, Tom Baker's first outfit as Doctor Who was a one-off. (As far as I can tell, the first time they had a spare set of his costume was when they needed a duplicate of him in The Android Invasion, by which time he'd been in the role for more than a year.)

The book ends with Jocelyn's marriage to director Clive Donner - though earlier chapters deal with filming on Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which took place several years later. The sense in closing is that she's no longer so restless, and no longer so keen on working in film. There's nothing on the 17 years between that moment and the time she wrote the book. Her 2005 obituary in the Guardian is culled  from details in her book, as if little of note came afterward. So there's the feeling that, even for her, this is an account of a bygone age: elegant, wild and carefree - even in a crisis.

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker

This account of the final year of the Trojan war is largely from the perspective of princess-turned-slave Briseis, although there are also a few chapters told from the point of view of Patroclus and Achilles.

"What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times [in the future, i.e. us]? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers are.
His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave." (p. 324)

It's a violent story, but much of the menace comes from the constant threat of violence. For example, Briseis is hounded by the thought that Achilles - or Agamemnon - will tire of her and pass her over to the common soldiery. We follow the politics, the gamesmanship, of the women in surviving. It's haunting, oppressive and compelling.

It's a book full of complexity and nuance, enriching the familiar story. The men have the power and yet they are clearly trapped, too, on that beach in sight of Troy: trapped by their own pride, obstinacy, petty in-fighting. Barker makes it all vivid and fresh, but I found myself back in my secondary school classroom in the weeks after weeks that our classics teacher recounted, from memory, the Iliad and Odyssey. His speciality, I think, was in oral storytelling; those weeks felt at the time like we were getting away with not doing real work, and yet it all went in. I recall those lessons, that story, more vividly than pretty much any other moment of that school. It was, looking back on it, an ideal adventure for an all-boys' school: Odysseus the wily nerd besting the jocks of the Greek army.

But that meant the women played only minor roles. I've since read, years ago now, Elizabeth Cook's Achilles - recommended to me by a friend from that same school - but I haven't yet got to Margaret Attwood's The Penelopiad or Madeleine Miller's The Song of Achilles. There's clearly a movement to redress the relative silence of women in the archetypal myth of Troy. Here, as in so many versions, the irony of Cassandra is that even those who know of the curse that means her (true) prophecies are not heeded still don't listen to her anyway. But she's only one of the many unheeded women, their lives defined - and curtailed - by men.

Susan's War cover

Tom Webster's exhilarating cover to Doctor Who audio box-set Susan's War has now been revealed, along with the blurb for my story:

2. The Uncertain Shore by Simon GuerrierSusan and Commander Veklin are on the trail of a spy. Under cover on a ravaged world, they find a weary population, trapped, and waiting for the inevitable. But one among them is a traitor.
The Time War is coming to Florana, and Susan will face a struggle to simply survive…

Susan's War is out in April.

The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman

Will Parry runs away from home and then into another world, where he meets Lyra Silvertongue and seeks to help her. But soon they're despatched on a whole new quest, to find a special knife sharp enough to cut through reality...

A long and stressful drive through Storm Dennis on Saturday was much alleviated by the Audible audiobook of The Subtle Knife. As with Northern Lights, which I enthused about last year, this extraordinary version is read by the author, Philip Pullman, but with actors doing the dialogue. The cast includes Julian Glover and Stephen Thorne, but it's not (as my poor, tired brain kept thinking) Camille Coduri as Lyra.

The Lord of Chaos like the fact he already knew some of the plot as it has been in the TV version of His Dark Materials. The only jarring thing is that the audiobook has much less diversity in its casting, so that it took a moment to realise some of the people we hear are characters we already know from TV.

Another change is that in the TV adaptation Will is from Oxford - a condensed version of what happens in the book, where he's says (on page 62) that he's from Winchester and has run away to Oxford. On page 85, he says he goes to St Peter's School. St Peter's in Winchester is a primary school - I know because it's the primary school I went to; I left when Will must have been about two. Will is 12 in The Subtle Knife so he must be lying to the librarian who asks him. But I find myself wondering if that's where Will did go, even if he's since moved to a secondary school, and thus whether the eventful trip to the supermarket with his mum was at the Sainsburys at Badger Farm, the villains of the Consistorial Court of Discipline stalking the lanes of my own childhood.

It's a thrilling story full of arresting images and moral dilemma, and it ends with the shocking death of two principal characters that still packs a punch. The Lord of Chaos was hunched forward in his seat listening keenly for those bits, but admitted to zoning out for the talkier stuff - all witches and philosophy. We've already ploughed on into The Amber Spyglass and just need another long car journey to finish it.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

More than a decade ago, I was in the audience to see my clever friend Farah Mendlesohn interview Iain Banks. In preparation, Farah had read all his books again - the sci-fi and the non sci-fi - and was brilliant at spotting links and themes between them that seemed wholly original to me (I'd studied Banks as part of my MA and published a paper on his stuff in the academic journal Foundation). That evening was a perfect example of what I hanker for in criticism: diligent research to dig out something new.

Farah's new book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein (2019) does the same thing: she picks carefully through everything Heinlein produced in a long and prolific career, and joins the dots between them. After an initial chapter of biography, there are sections devoted to: Heinlein's Narrative Arc; Technique; Rhetoric; Heinlein and Civic Society; Heinlein and the Civic Revolution; Racism, Anti-Racism and the Construction of Civic Society; The Right Ordering of Self; and Heinlein's Gendered Self.

I'd thought this might be a counterpoint to the description of Heinlein in Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding, which I so enjoyed last year (and reviewed for the Lancet Psychiatry). It is in some ways, but it's more a deep dig into the meaning and context of the work he produced. It's exemplary and exhaustive, often witty and insightful, packed with academic rigour in an engaging plain style. I like, too, that it's often very personal: Farah's own life experience informs her judgements and insights. If I struggled at times, it's simply because I don't know Heinlein's work very well. Farah has made me want to correct that, and then try her assessment again.

One thing in particular has really stayed me: a caveat in the preface that I think has much wider application to those of us who love old fictions of one sort or another:

"It is not terribly clear how much more influential Heinlein will become. The critical voices are getting louder, and although as a historian I frequently want critics to have a stronger sense of context ... we live now, in our context, and what was radical once we can recognise as problematic, and something to be argued against. For all I value Heinlein I do not require him to continue to be read or valued as contemporary fiction. Because I am a historian, discussing the really terrible Heinlein works can be enfolded into a discussion of his limitations (both rhetorical and political) and understood without serving as some kind of justification. As a historian, I am perfectly happy to know that I like Heinlein without feeling that it is essential that newcomers to science fiction need to read him," (pp. xii-xiii)

When Will There Be Good News?, by Kate Atkinson

The third Jackson Brodie novel (after Case Histories and One Good Turn) is another compelling read, by turns warm and funny, then utterly devastating. We start with a typically rich and vivid prologue of a mother and three young children, in just a handful of pages sketching in their characters, their peculiarities, their whole lives - before something really awful hits them.

That awfulness then haunts the rest of the book. We have Dr Joanna Hunter ("Call me Jo"), the lovely, high-achieving GP and new mum. There's Reggie Chase, the teenage orphan helping Jo and baby. There's Jo's useless husband Neil and his dodgy business - so far, so column in the Guardian. Then there's Mrs MacDonald, Reggie's former teacher now terminally ill and all set to embrace the Rapture. There's Reggie's ne'er-do-well brother, Billy, caught up in something criminal. And then there's Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe - returning from the last book - who has married the wrong man.

As past crises resurface and new crises erupt, Dr Hunter and the baby go missing without trace. Reggie is keen to investigate where Louise is not, and her one hope is the man whose life she saved in a train crash - former copper and detective, Jackson Brodie. Brodie spends a lot of the book on the periphery of the main plot, which only adds to the suspense. The longer we no absolutely nothing about the missing woman and her child, the more it's like twisting a knife. Atkinson is brilliant and hooking us with this stuff, offering us something keenly observed and fun, and then dropping a bomb. The light froth of the book is peppered with sudden, visceral horror, and the sense of threat is pervasive.

It's tricky to say much more without spoiling things, but the end hinges on one particular character acting with chilling ruthless steel, and getting away with it. It extraordinary and shocking, and yet looking back at all that's led up to it, inevitable. That's the thing about Atkinson's books: they're deceptively simple-seeming but intricate and clever. Delightful and devastating.

Celestial Toyroom 502

Issue 502 of Celestial Toyroom, the journal of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, features a big interview with the authors of various titles in the Black Archive series of books - which analyse individual Doctor Who stories. I'm one of those spoken to, about my study of 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks.

I've also got my name in issue 548 of the official Doctor Who Magazine - out today - with news of the Big Finish audio series Susan's War, for which I've written an episode. Oh, and writer Sophie Iles, who's been writing for the magazine for the last few months, has been kind enough to tweet that I've been secretly mentoring her.

Haven't You Heard?, by Marie le Conte

Subtitled, "Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works", this is an insightful and often funny insider's account of the informal processes of Parliament, written by a political journalist. She's read widely and spoken to a lot of people involved - many of them off the record - and the result feels comprehensive and right. The informal processes are what make the formal bits of Parliament work; often what happens in the Chamber is rubber-stamping officially the deals done in the corridors and over dinner or drinks, what's called the "usual channels".

There's loads that made me laugh out loud, such as Francis Wheen's anecdote about a Christmas party held by the Special Branch protection people where they invited those they protected. That included an odd assortment of people: Salman Rushdie, Enoch Powell, various former and some largely forgotten Ministers. One old hand in protection who was about to retire took the opportunity to say something to the man he'd been protecting for years:

"When it was the harvesting season [on this guest's farm], when the pigs were giving birth, they [the protection people] would all get raked in to do basically farm labouring jobs, and it turned out that he was by far the most unpopular person they'd ever protected. They all compared notes among themselves, and he said, 'I have spoken to my colleagues about this, we have taken a vote, and you are definitely the most unpleasant person we've guarded over the years.' This is very revealing, that only the protection officers would have realised quite how awful Tom King was." (p. 78)

I'm fascinated, too, by the changing culture described here - the way gossip and exposure has made people behave better out of fear. The authorities got noticeably better in the years I worked there on issues of harassment, on wandering hands, on intimidating behaviour - though there was clearly still more to be done. At the same time, rumours of an MP being gay could until recently end a political career.

"The late nineties were a point where the wind was still just about turning on the question of homosexuality. Section 28 was still in place, and when the Guardian commissioned a poll to try and shut the Sun up, it found that 52% of people thought being openly gay was compatible with holding a Cabinet position; though 52% is a majority, it can hardly be called a landslide." (p. 250)

There's some excellent side-eye in that last clause. But Le Conte also says the day after this report was published, the Sun announced it would no longer out gay politicians without overwhelming public interest.

There's lots more, but I might use it elsewhere - once I've compared notes with some former colleagues in politics. This book is an excellent excuse to go out for drinks with them...

Sherlock Holmes - The Vanishing Man, by Philip Purser-Hallard

In 1896, Holmes and Watson are called in to investigate the disappearance of Thomas Kellway from a locked room with a window in the door, through which he was being watched by pairs of observers on a carefully organised rota. Kellway was engaged in a psychic experiment, and his acolytes think he has teleported to Venus. Holmes investigates the strange group of individuals who took part in the experiment - and before long he's caught up in a murder case...

My friend Philip Purser-Hallard has produced a really engaging and fun mystery for Holmes, published last year and part of the line of new Holmes stories from Titan Books. The basic idea - of a psychic who claims to be able to reach across space - feels very Conan Doyle and yet wholly original. It reminded me first of all of the "Victorian seance" performed by Derren Brown.

The strange assortment of characters seem authentically Doylish, too, as does the mix of the oddly comic and the outlandishly macabre. At times I was ahead of Holmes but there are a series of related mysteries and I didn't solve them all. They're all satisfyingly unthreaded by the end.

I especially liked the retcon of Holmes' ignorance of certain subjects that most people take for granted. That issue is described by Watson in chapter two of introductory story, A Study in Scarlet (1888):

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he enquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
'You appear to be astonished,' he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. 'Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.'"

Phil has Watson regret writing these words, with Holmes explaining:

"'When specific knowledge is required of me, I am quite capable of acquiring it from the available sources. I would have been unable yesterday to tell you with any great certainty whether Venus was a planet, a comet or a star, but today I have at my fingertips such facts as are known about its magnitude, its periods of rotation and orbit, its atmosphere and its surface, in case these data should should become relevant to the matter at hand. Among other things, I have learned that Venus is judged by astronomers to be a younger world than our own, on the basis of its greater proximity to the sun, just as Mars is supposed to be older. That being the case,' he said languidly, 'the superior development that Kellway ascribes to its inhabitants appears to be rather anomalous.'" (p. 60)

It's a simple, logical fix. It also nicely incorporates scientific thinking from the period (which we no longer think is right), and even better has Holmes use that as part of his deductions. Clever. 

The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan-Doyle

"This Sherlock Homes story was published in 1890 so contains actions and attitudes reflective of the Victorian era in which it was written..."

So begins the very good BBC Sounds audiobook of The Sign of the Four, read by Kenny Blyth and released in August last year. This is Holmes' second published adventure and a huge improvement on A Study in Scarlet (1888), where Part I is the detective story in which Holmes first meets Watson, and Part II is a wholly less engaging Western told to Holmes by the culprit he ensnares. The Sign of Four still ends with the culprit regurgitating his back story in one long info-dump, but it's done in a single chapter.

It's something like 20 years since I last read the canon of Holmes stories written by Doyle - the four novels and 56 short stories published between 1888 and 1926. Then, Jeremy Brett was indelibly "my" Sherlock Holmes, but there's since been Cumberbatch and Downey Jr vying for that title (and I've caught up with Rathbone, Wilmer and Cushing, too). I'd thought the 21st century Sherlocks made the original stories more pacey and action-packed so it was a gratifying surprise to return to The Sign of the Four, which I remembered as one of the better ones, and find so much adventurousness there.

The book is full of striking, strange incongruities. The villains are hard to forget: a one-legged man and his diminutive companion - who I shall not say more about rather than spoil it. But there's also the incongruity of Holmes scrambling barefoot across the roof of a grand house (Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood, just up the hill from where I type this), or that Holmes gets access to the house in the first place because he happens to know the servant on duty at the door, having boxed with him for three rounds at a benefit fight four years previously. Even before that, there's the, "Hindu servant, clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash," who opens the door of the only occupied house in a new, dull terrace just off Coldharbour Lane - even Watson notes that, "There was something incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace doorway of a third-rate suburban dwelling-house." Later, there's the gathering of street urchins in the respectable rooms at Baker Street, and the oddness of the Sholto brothers whose case this partly is. It's all arrestingly peculiar.

I am also struck by how much of this story takes place south of the Thames, not least because the bit of London I've lived in for 20 years is so often overlooked by them northerners. Here, Thaddeus Sholto lives off Coldharbour Lane, his brother in Upper Norwood, Mary in Lower Camberwell, and Toby the dog in Lambeth, while Jonathan Small is brought to ground at Plumstead Marshes. Doyle didn't move to his house on Tennison Road in South Norwood until 1891, so I wonder why the south so appealed. The Victorian buildings of South London - including the one that I live in - seem old, but in Doyle's time this vast metropolitan sprawl was all new. Watson makes his feelings clear about these, "interminable lines of new staring brick buildings,—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country." Doyle fills these identikit buildings with distinct individuals.

The joy is that ordinary life is presented as being full of wonders, if only we trouble to look. Plus. there's the promise that these strange, seemingly random incongruities will be threaded together by Holmes. Famously, he demonstrates his deductive skills early on when Watson passes him an ordinary pocket watch, a scene all the best later Holmes stories whether by Doyle or his successors have attempted to emulate. Just from the engraving on the back of the watch and a few dents and scratches, Holmes deduces the life and tragic death of Watson's elder brother. The thrill is not in his insight, but that he then explains exactly how the trick is done.

"The implication is that we could replicate the experiment ourselves and learn to be like Holmes. As he challenges Watson in The Sign of the Four (and some later stories, too): 'You know my methods. Apply them.'" - Me, "My Immortal Holmes" in The Lancet Psychiatry

It's fun to see Inspector Athelney Jones attempt to play the game and come to the wrong conclusions. But Holmes can be mistaken, such as when he, Watson and Toby (a dog) follow a trail to the wrong place. There's his frustration, too, when the boat he is looking for completely disappears despite his ingenious efforts to find it. For all his brilliance, the investigation is not easy - and the more difficult for him it is, the more satisfying it is to read. But at the end, the incongruities are connected in a way that feels satisfying, logical, obvious - just as with the demonstration with the watch. Doyle doesn't cheat us.

Holmes here is more than an egg-head: he's a man of action. He can box, he can climb a roof, he can disguise himself so perfectly as a painfully asthmatic old man that his friend, housemate and doctor (Watson is all three) is entirely hoodwinked. The whole adventure is pacey and exciting, and culminates in a death-defying chase down the Thames. Holmes is dynamic, relishing the danger. He's exciting yet unemotional.

Watson is the romantic lead, drawn to Holmes' beautiful client Mary Morstan but prevented from acting on his feelings because she might be out of his league given the fortune she seems about to inherit. Time and again in his account, Watson tells us what Mary thinks now - as in, when he's narrating, looking back on these past events. That means we know she's never in any danger in the story, but that's not the point. The jumps forward help to build up the moral dilemma sub-plot of Watson falling for an heiress but not wishing to seem out for her money. Mary is very nice and moral, too, but there's not very much else about her. (Doyle wrote a more memorable woman - the woman - in his next Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia".)

A lot of modern Holmes has attempted to make more of the women in his and Watson's life. Like Buchan, these boys' own adventures are too happy excluding girls. The treatment of India is interesting: yes, Doyle/Watson is condescending and there's a eugenicist link between Tonga's appearance and his personality. But it's not as simple as - in the works of other authors of the time - that foreign equates with bad. Watson's own military experience in Afghanistan is a source of pride and of melancholy, the life of ordinary Englishmen entwined with the orient and wider world. The Victorian attitude is imperial but nor parochial, and there's little sense of the white man being superior given their behaviour here. Given the evidence here, Watson is morally exceptional just as Holmes has an exceptional brain.

The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman

The middle chapter of The Book of Dust is thrilling, rich and downright weird. Since reading volume one - La Belle Sauvage - I've gone back to Northern Lights and reread most of The Subtle Knife (which my son has now pinched), as well as been avidly glued to the TV version. Given that immersion in this fantastical universe, I can report that The Secret Commonwealth is Pullman at his best, the story so compelling that I raced through the hefty tome of 687 pages in just a matter of days.

It's set 20 years after the events of La Belle Sauvage and eight after those of the His Dark Materials trilogy, with Lyra Silvertongue nee Belaqua now a grown-up. Shockingly, she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are not getting on - when their bond gave the original trilogy such emotional power. We keenly feel their separation, while for those in this world it is utterly scandalous, physically repulsive, that they can be apart. The sense is that they have been changed, psychologically and physically, by the trauma they have been through in previous books. Pan, shockingly, sneaks off without Lyra - something most daemons would find impossible - to explore nocturnal Oxford, where he witnesses a murder...

Lyra and Pan go to report this to the police, but Pan recognises a policeman as one of the murderers. Other figures of authority are also a problem: the new Master of Jordan Collage evicts Lyra from the rooms she's lived in since childhood, and threatens to expel her from the college entirely; there are new people at and gathering power within the Magisterium - one of whom has personal reasons for wishing revenge on Lyra. And far away in the east, something is going on to damage the trade in certain derivatives of roses (yes, really) that suggests the emergence of another, ruthless power...

With the stakes so highly set against her, and an adventure that begins in the locality of Oxford but then jaunts across the world, it feels like Lyra is in a spy novel, and a good one - le Carre or James Bond, but with magic. The characters and situations are vivid and arresting, with plenty of twists and shocks along the way. The atmosphere is tense and bleak through ought. Pullman also develops the mechanics of his world: we see all kinds of exceptions to the normative, binary human/daemon relationship - the daemon who falls for another human, the people who buy and sell daemons, the man who insists that daemons aren't really there. In each case, it's more than just a fun idea; Pullman explores the resulting emotional devastation. How brilliant to make the intricacies of such fantastical relationships so moving.

Whereas I felt La Belle Sauvage lost its way in its second half, The Secret Commonwealth sustains the pace and excitement, while at the same time covering lots of philosophical ground as per previous books. It's as deep but less talky, I think, and also palpably angry, with stuff to say about fake news, restrictions on academic freedom, the parochial nature of reporting and politics. There's a lot, too, on the cruelty of families and the kindness of strangers. I wonder how consciously Pullman is addressing readers of Lyra's age or thereabouts, the now young adults who first read his books as children: how much is this a rant, and how much a rallying cry?

There's one thing I really wasn't keen on: the fact that Malcolm Polstead, protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, is in love with Lyra - who he knew as a baby. Yes, she's now 20 and could be a consenting adult, but I didn't feel comfortable about the balance of power between this Oxford tutor and this vulnerable student who has so much on her plate already. I really hope they don't get together in book three.

But I also can't imagine that Pullman would do anything so simple as that... I wish he'd hurry up and write it.

Susan's War

Yesterday, the splendid lot at Big Finish announced Susan's War - a box-set of audio adventures in which we find out what Doctor Who's granddaughter did during the Time War.

I've written the second of the four stories, The Uncertain Shore, and the other writers are Eddie Robson, Lou Morgan and Alan Barnes.

Carole Ann Ford of course plays Susan - as she did in the very first episode of Doctor Who in 1963 - and the cast of the four stories includes William Russell as Ian Chesterton and Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor.

Gallifrey needs every Time Lord to fight the Time War. A summons has been issued across the universe to its prodigals. Whatever their skills, the war effort can use them. Susan’s call-up papers have arrived, and, unlike her grandfather, she is willing to join her people’s battle and finally return home. Because Susan knows the Daleks, and she will do her duty...

Susuan's War is released in April 2020 and available to pre-order now. 

Once bitten in the Lancet

The February issue of the Lancet Psychiatry includes my "Once bitten", my review of the book Dracula for Doctors by Fiona Subotsky.

“According to Pliny in the first century AD, 'epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators,' considering it 'a most effectual cure for their disease.' Medical science took longer to accept the restorative powers of someone else's blood. During the summer of 1492, in an event sometimes claimed as the first transfusion, the comatose Pope Innocent VIII was reportedly given blood from three ten-year-old boys. The boys died, as did the Pope, and the doctor fled...”

I posted a little more about Dracula for Doctors last month.