The shadow of Alan Moore stretches long over this one. The specific antecedent is “The Anatomy Lesson” – we’ve got a gloomy atmosphere, an inactive hero, and revelations on his nature, structured as an inward journey. We also have epigraphs for each chapter, which, in this case, smack of Watchmen over Stephen King.
There’s much to be said about Moore’s influence on Andrew Cartmel’s run of Doctor Who – particularly that unlike a lot of comics writers, who took the lesson that comics should be grim and dour, Cartmel and his writers understood that Moore’s work lit the way for more politically aware, mature science fiction created from pulp iconography. Cornell’s learning here, on the other hand, is the way Moore will strip the thing in front of us down to its bones and reconstruct it from there.
To that end, how does it hold up? Now, I’d like to give some disclaimers here. This is considered to be the book that changed how Doctor Who would forever be in the future – the antecedent to Lawrence Miles, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat’s takes on the character. And I have no reason to think this isn’t true.
Further, it’s got all the right elements. A church on the moon! (RTD would nick that for “Smith & Jones”!) A ghostly intelligence created from all the prayers prayed in the church – a sentient prayer, essentially. The Doctor dancing with Death herself. On the moon! All of the previous Doctors, alive in this Doctor’s mind. Exciting stuff.
Given all of that, I should like this. And yet, I don’t.
Here’s the thing about all the other revolutionary de/reconstructionist takes – Miracleman, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, or to expand away from just Moore, The Sandman, A Song of Ice and Fire, or to bring it back to Doctor Who, “Rose” or “The Day of the Doctor”. They don’t simply work in the conceptual realm. They take the concept and follow through on its implications, and, here’s the most important thing, they are unified in doing this. Every element of the story is working to strengthen the central idea. If it’s not, it’s not in the story.
I will admit here that Lawrence Miles’s work doesn’t fit that pattern. Both Alien Bodies and Interference have a lot of faff in them, and they are a bit scattered, but in that case, the new elements are so intoxicating that I can ignore the rest. Perhaps this is the case for fans of Timewyrm: Revelation, and of course, I have no objection to doing that.
But as I read this book, I found it largely a slog. The human characters who are Cornell’s focus are fairly trite – he’ll get much better at this by Human Nature – and the three plots in the novel are tenuously linked, let alone thematically united. For all that Cornell is a character-based writer, I didn’t find myself caring about anyone in this book, and all the concepts I mentioned up there are simply thrown in without developing them into anything interesting. The focus is clearly the journey into the Doctor’s mind, which makes the rest of it feel like filler to bulk this up to novel-length, which might have in fact been the case, since this is supposed to be the expanded version of a fan fiction story that Cornell wrote.
Now, I don’t grudge this book its success, and of course, Cornell would develop into a fine Doctor Who writer over time. But this is clearly an early work, and I found myself slightly baffled at its reputation.
This is where I have to cede ground – because many, many people I respect hold it in very high regard, and I have no reason to doubt their sincerity. It was published in 1991, and sometimes innovative stories are plundered to such an extent that one can no longer see what was special about them. Most times, I am able to look beyond this and see what’s special about the original – in fact, I’m usually pleasantly surprised to find that the original remains a stronger work than its imitators (Alien, The Godfather, Miracleman, Miller’s Daredevil, Elric – to name a few). The luminosity, I find, is undimmed.
But this one feels like a very 1991 book, and, once in a while, you just can’t get there from here.