Many and grievous were the sins in the 90s committed in the name of trying to make Doctor Who more ‘adult’. The TV movie is merely the most egregious effort, but most of the work was being done in the book ranges. The writers dragging Doctor Who toward supposed maturity were mainly young, inexperienced men and this was largely a dwarf star alloy anchor to their vaulting ambition. They mistook the paraphernalia of adulthood for actual maturity, tits, big guns and sadistic violence that the show could never have gotten away with on TV, not even under Eric Saward. It was there in the first of the New Adventures, Timewyrm: Genesys, which simply bolted sex and violence on to an otherwise fairly standard Doctor Who story. Those first three books in the range were weird, transitional hybrids where elements justifying the ‘too broad and deep for the small screen’ hype were simple surface details. Underneath the show lay unchanged, if anything retreating from the more modern direction the series had been taking in the final days of its original run. Fortunately the fourth book, Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation, produced a paradigm shift which pointed out that there was far more potential in Doctor Who as a novel range than the first three books had demonstrated. It hasn’t aged particularly well, mainly as the then fresh tricks it used became so well-mined but reading it at the time it was almost revolutionary. Character was emphasised, a sort of SF version of magic realism conjured up and for the first time the Doctor was fleshed out as a character rather than simply being a lone ranger riding into town and catalysing change. Most significantly Cornell included contemporary references to the likes of My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses and Simon Groom, the shared pop culture of the day. As Russell T Davies aimed to include a huge dollop of 2005 in Rose, Cornell included a huge dollop of 1991 in Revelation. It’s the last stage of the Cartmel approach, anchoring the Doctor to our era. What’s noticeable is that, in line with our entertainment preferences of the time, most of these references were to film, TV and music rather than books. It’s often claimed the books are a significant influence on the reinvigorated Doctor Who of the 21st century, but aside from surface elements it’s the approach pioneered here which constitutes the major influence.
What most took from Revelation was the element of angst present, the Doctor’s guilt and the weight of his actions down the centuries. As a result the series often became morbid, a gloomy outlook punctuated mainly by black comedy and odd comic interludes from the likes of Gareth Roberts and Steve Lyons. Wit was often confined to Bernice Summerfield’s snarky asides, the brighter side of life largely abandoned. In short Doctor Who had ventured far from its original conceit as a centrepiece of Saturday night television designed for as wide an audience as possible. The audience now was pretty much self-selecting, fanboys of a completist stripe or those in thrall to the work of adventurous comic writers such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. You can see the two halves of the audience in the then infamous ‘rad v trad’ wars (often characterised as ‘frocks vs guns’. With Virgin expanding their range to include previous Doctors the books could seem like an ideological battle for the Doctor’s soul, designed more to prove a point than to provide a satisfying adventure. If you wade into the depths of the internet it’s captured in the RADW newsgroups of the time (although much of the debate can be deeply unedifying). It lent a buzz to picking up the books each month but often it came at the expense of joy – the run from St Anthony’s Fire through to Sanctuary may well be the most downbeat sequence of stories in Doctor Who’s history.

The books moved from Virgin to the BBC and the eighth Doctor became the centre of the ongoing adventures but, after a transition period which tried to reset the books to a default adventure structure, a semblance of normality was returned, with Alien Bodies giving the range a jolt by drawing inspiration from the Doctor’s future as much as his past. It retools an old enemy to great effect but it’s more interested in setting up mysteries, as much the touchstone for the BBC books as Revelation had been for the Virgin ones. The appeal is still obvious, even at the end the reader’s left wanting the mysteries raised here to be answered. Faction Paradox remains a striking enough concept to power a book range nearly two decades after their first appearance and the universe of potential Miles creates here would essentially shape the eighth Doctor range for eight years, with key books either building on it or being a reaction to it.

The trouble was, beneath the snazzy, sparkling concepts Alien Bodies was largely remixing the same influences that had driven the latter half of the range, old toys dressed up and made shiny and new (in retrospect the extent to which the ranges became a Grant Morrison tribute act to the detriment of everything else can be embarrassing at times). The radical tradition became defenders of what had become a status quo, like all revolutionaries once they become the establishment, fooled by shiny toys. Perhaps this is why Alien Bodies has maintained its reputation, because there was something for everyone in there. And like any limited ideal over time the Morrison fuel lost its potency, leaving the BBC range to woozily wobble through increasingly convoluted plots to a muddled and not overly satisfying conclusion; killed by the phoenix phenomenon of the revived show.

The trouble is it didn’t have to be this way. Alien Bodies was the clear standout of a directionless first year of the range (the books not having had a chance to assimilate Miles’ ideas yet). Only Jon Blum and Kate Orman’s two books offered any sort of forward vision for the show or coherent idea of what this Doctor should be and what the tone of the era might be. In theory this was a range with the perfect chance to do what Doctor Who did best – to juxtapose unlikely ideas and offer an infinite variety of stories. In practice it largely ambled through a holding pattern of amiable, generic stories. And then, in September 1998, Paul Magrs arrived to present an arresting, alternative vision.
Magrs had a small brush with the Who range before, his name appropriated by Paul Cornell for a minor character in Love and War but he’d spent the intervening years developing his own writing career, finding his voice with the northern English magic realism of the Phoenix Court books. Magrs at this point was perhaps too idiosyncratic to provide a specific template for the series but it wasn’t necessarily the story The Scarlet Empress told but what it did and what it stood for that actually mattered. The story of the Who range to this point is that it’s a range of books powered by people obsessed with a TV show and comics; therefore the sources they’re drawing from are largely and openly from different forms of entertainment that don’t have the strengths of the written word. Shadowmind, for instance, openly rips off Quatermass, a re-read of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run tells you precisely where all the ideas in Falls the Shadow come from and stories such as The Eight Doctors are openly Doctor Who eating itself. Magrs melded his love of Doctor Who in all its forms with the richness of ancient storytelling traditions of 1001 Nights, turning Doctor Who into a fairytale on a London bus. He even had the temerity to introduce his own creation, Iris Wildthyme, a female mirror of the Doctor (and who’s become something far more interesting and complicated since). It was beautiful, bright and challenging, a full banquet in the middle of a menu of junk food. Doctor Who hadn’t quite been like this before – perhaps the closest were the heyday of the 80s comic strips with The Tides of Time and Voyager. It certainly shares a meta fascination with stories with the latter.

Magrs returned a year later. Appropriately his next book, a co-write with his partner Jeremy Hoad, followed the egotistical mountain of Lawrence Miles’ Interference, Doctor Who’s literary equivalent of a concept album. It parlayed the fascinations of Alien Bodies into a sprawling tale of gun running, torture, paradox and the author’s ever growing fascination with ideas and media. It was inventive in precisely the approved manner, putting the Doctor and his companion Fitz through the emotional and physical wringer, playing games with Doctor Who’s history and, in places, being terrifically angry with the state of the world. In short it was a Big Statement, a State Of The World address. For all the fuss about the much misunderstood paradox Miles introduces the real significance of the books is to tell you that this approach to Doctor Who has lost a lot of the zip and sparkle it promised and that the joy was gone. It’s Doctor Who’s Be Here Now, ideas and promise buried under layers of noise. The signal vanishing in the interference if you will. It’s pushing it too far to say that Miles was burning out but it’s clear from how he chafes against the limitations of Doctor Who during the book that there are things he wants to do that are better done outside the format (and which he would do with This Town Will Never Let Us Go). For author and series this was a dead end, a definitive statement which prioritises ideas over characters or series. It’s a hazy, horrible and unclear introduction for Compassion and even by the standards of companions messes Fitz up to the point he’s barely a viable character any more and that’s even before the idiosyncratic idea of introducing a paradox into the Doctor’s past (whatever its reputation it’s *not* a retcon).

Follow that then.

From a scheduling point of view it might have made more sense to follow Interference with a relatively straightforward tale, one leaning towards a ‘trad’ version of Who. Instead piling The Blue Angel on straight after Interference is an act of glorious madness. Interference has the reputation as the more difficult book but it really isn’t. It’s a shout of anger at the state of the world and Western culture, an attempted definitive statement. It’s a teenage idea of maturity, that dark ‘realistic’ places demonstrate the writer’s adulthood and wisdom. Frivolity, mirth and joy are an equal part of life and often it’s far more adult and difficult to try to deal with them in story. By that measure The Blue Angel is infinitely stranger and more adult than Interference and far truer to the spirit of the series than its immediate predecessor. This is a novel which happily captures the camp ridiculousness of the original Star Trek and asks what might happen if it found itself in the Doctor Who universe. And it places it against the other worlds Magrs had created before, the worlds of Iris Wildthyme and Phoenix Court. Magrs brings his Northern version of magic realism to Doctor Who and lets it roam wild. It doesn’t only impact on the main story, which starts in a shopping centre but also on the parallel narrative which is interspersed throughout the story. It acts as a meta commentary on Doctor Who and the story, much as the backup pirate strip does in Watchmen. This is clearly an even richer brew than The Scarlet Empress, looking outward to other sources to move the series forward where Interference only looks inward. It remembers that smart tricks are acceptable as long as you remain entertaining. And if you can’t find entertainment in the Doctor essentially teaming up with Captain Kirk to fight a city of glass men ruled by a Ganesh like being from the Obverse… you’re clearly reading the wrong series.

The most controversial aspect of The Blue Angel remains its ending. As a series filled with books from inexperienced writers the Virgin ranges and their BBC successors were filled with books which rattled along for 250 or more pages and were having so much fun they were forced to stop rather than actually come up with an ending satisfying both plot and theme. The Blue Angel’s final chapter is a series of twenty questions which ask what happened next. You can read that ending as a clever literary conceit commenting on that. Or you can read it as a great cheat because the authors have hit their word count. Only, on the latter count, you’re wrong and not reading carefully enough. The main story ends with the Doctor being removed from the action, though much of the plot is unresolved. It’s an ending which seeks to engage the reader and ask them to work their imagination even harder and depends largely on how the reader perceives the characters and their motivations. It laughs hard at the idea of pretension and refuses to acknowledge that such a concept exists; this is simply another appropriate idea for the authors to play with. Where many books have simply drawn on Doctor Who itself or the cutting edge of comics Magrs and Hoad are happily plundering literature beyond the ken of the average fan to enrich their work (naming an alien race after Gertrude Stein? Now that’s style). I’d already thought that the chapters of the Doctor and his companions living an ordinary life might have been the finest to appear in a Who novel but the quirkiness and cheek meant that thought didn’t survive to the end of the book. There’s more ambition and playfulness here than almost any other book in the range.

Angels are beautiful you know. And an antidote to sin. Let yourself be seduced and you might find out what one face of mature Doctor Who really looks like. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1883649.html

I didn't really get much out of this Eighth Doctor novel, set immediately after the two-volume Interference, with the Doctor, Fitz and new companion Compassion getting involved with various aliens and Iris Wildthyme. I did like the fact that we encounter a young svelte Iris as well as the standard more elderly version - indeed this is one of the better stories about Iris out there. But I was hoping to get a better handle on what Compassion is all about, and didn't; and the various alien plot threads were all entangled without being terribly interesting. One of those books that I recommend only for completists (and fans of Iris). ( )

The Blue Angel started out well enough, clear from early on that it was going to be convoluted and non-linear. That is fine and good as long as it comes together at some point and provides a clear picture. It didn't.

There are several diverging stories in the book, all involving characters I like (I was drawn to picking up Blue Angel to complete the span of the series that features Compassion - and thought that I could hardly go wrong with Iris included as well). None of them was resolved in a satisfactory or clear way.
It is as if Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad managed to talk the series editor of the EDAs into treating the book as a prank.
Story aside - it was technically written well, language and imagery wise - it was like a dream that kept getting interrupted and was never allowed to make sense.
An incredibly miss-managed opportunity to use a fully realized cast of characters satirizing the Star Trek series was neglected and tossed aside.
I think I can honestly say that not a single question posed in the book is answered. All motivation to continue reading it for resolution ends with a final chapter that asks the reader twenty contradictory questions which are never answered.
I read it in 4 attentive sittings, but clearly I must have missed something because some readers respond well to the book.
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After sitting on this for a little while, a few possible answers have occurred to me, in a dreamlike fashion. The treat of being sucked into this additional thinking, and its potential rewards, shouldn't go unmentioned. The book is a strange egg, but I stand by the thrust of my review: It isn't for everyone. ( )