Notes on 'All-Consuming Fire'

Andy Lane, Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire (1994)

I was going to read this eventually.

- All-Consuming Fire is the 27th in a series of novels known as the 'Virgin New Adventures'. Between June 1991 and May 1997, a total of 61 novels were published, which continue the adventures of Sylvester McCoy's Doctor from the end of the classic series. It was cancelled in the wake of the TV movie co-produced with a number of American companies and starring Paul McGann. The BBC then took the fiction in house for a line of 'Eighth Doctor Adventures' lasting until June 2005, when that was also cancelled in the wake of the revised series. Between 1997 and 2005, they managed a total of 70 volumes. From what I've been able to gather from the various blogs and sites I hang around, although they featured some of the same writers, for a number of reasons, the 'Virgin New Adventures' were generally superior to the succeeding line. A high watermark for fiction spun off from a science fiction franchise (a low bar to clear, admittedly).

- There were also lines of 'Missing' and 'Past Doctor' adventures, short story collections, and other fiction lines. With the new series, we have a new line of fiction in a different trade dress again. It's all archived on Wikipedia, but still, faced with what must be well over two hundred books by this point, one has to wonder where to start.

- This wasn't a problem when I was a child, devouring 'Target' novelisations, most of which were written by Terrence Dicks, a man whose debt to child literacy in this country is for most part completely overlooked. Despite the fact that it was obviously exactly the sort of thing I would love, I adamantly refused to watch Doctor Who when I was a child, in the belief that it was too frightening for me. It was only because I switched on the TV after the credits had finished that I found myself watching what I now know was the final episode of Sylvester McCoy's serial 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. As it was the last episode, I missed the first sight of a Dalek flying. In addition, since it was the last episode, I can't have had any real idea about what was going on. Still, I was caught up in it, in the movement of events, and the sense that this was important. I loved it.

- Sylvester McCoy is 'my' Doctor as we say, and the aesthetic which was applied to the classic show in it's final years by then script editor Andrew Cartmell and the writers he brought on board became my default for how the Doctor Who should be. More than that actually, it was hugely formative in the development of my own taste. It was something I'd discovered for myself, and helped create a fascination with work that was difficult, strange, political, or surreal. I'm not sure how much of that influence has shown in what I've chosen to write about on this blog. There have been other formative influences, both before and since.

- The series ended the following year, so the 'Target' novelisations quickly became my source for a Doctor Who fix. Both my local and school libraries were well stocked - this was back in the days when such things still existed - and I read as many as I could find. As they no doubt were for many others, they were a means of discovering all that had happened in the past. It's only as an adult that I've finally seen as television programs some of the stories I read as a child. For me, initially at least, Doctor Who was something primarily textual, discovered through books, rather than something televisual. In prose, I found I preferred Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton's Doctors over John Pertwee or Peter Davison. Goodness knows what was surviving of their performances to cause that feeling. Perhaps it was the stories.

- The only one of the 'Virgin New Adventures' I read when it came out was Mark Gatiss' Nightshade, from early on in the range. I became interested in other things after that and largely forgot about Doctor Who. It became something to be embarrassed about ever having liked. I wanted to be serious and read things that were realistic. Not realising then the problems inherent in applying realism to fantastical material.

- The crucial difference between the novels produced to tie in to the new series, is that, like that old 'Target' books, they appear to be consciously marketed towards and written for a young audience. The fiction that appeared between 1991 and 2005 was marketed at an 'adult' audience. We need scare quotes there because 'adult' can also encompass things which, whilst they might be unsuitable for children, are also rather adolescent, so not exactly 'adult'. From what I understand, and on the basis of the few I've now read, some very fine science-fiction/fantasy novels were produced in all of the various lines.

- It's not just books, there are also audio adventures and comic strips, and spin off series from the spin offs, and goodness knows what else. If you're coming back to Doctor Who at a later date, and want to explore beyond the television show, where do you start? At the beginning? I noted above that the 'Virgin New Adventures' are seen by many people as a high watermark of this type of fiction. That's their reputation at least. Individual books though, are going to be of variable quality. Owing to a combination of Virgin's admirable policy of looking for new writers (because they're cheap), low rates of pay, and the need to produce a considerable amount of material against what I presume would be fairly tight deadlines, some of these 61 works of fiction will turn inevitably out to be crap.

- Good or bad, most writers on Virgin's series appear to have started out as fans, with little prior writing experience (at least as professional authors). That so many turned out to be capable writers, that several of them have have managed to sustain substantial writing careers beyond their start with Virgin, should perhaps be considered something of a minor miracle. But it's also a testament to the talent that was present in that generation of fans. Most of it seems to be formula fiction of one type or another - Paul Cornell has written for Marvel and DC comics, Andy Lane has produced a series of 'Young Sherlock Holmes' stories - but whatever. Formula fiction is capable of greatness, given a talented author. And in any case: I'm reading fiction which was spun off from a children's science fiction show here. There's no need to be sniffy.

- Granted, some of the TV show was also pretty ropey. There seem to be few stories which are outright hated by everyone, but that's less of a concern in any case. I'm happy to devote a few hours of my life to a film or television serial which is a bit rubbish, but I have less patience with novels. They take a little longer to get through, especially if they're not very well written. This isn't just a question of taste. I've read Sax Rohmer and Ian Flemming, for instance. But I find it almost physically difficult to read something which is too badly written. And faced with 61 books? Or with over 200 if I try and take it all in? I'll just focus on the highlights, thanks. Thankfully there are more than enough fan sites and reviews to help me guide my choices.

- By this point in the 'New Adventures', the Doctor is accompanied by Ace and Bernice Summers. Bernice was introduced in Paul Cornell's Love and War. She was a sufficiently successful character that following the loss of the Doctor Who licence in 1997, Virgin continued the 'New Adventures' with Bernice as the lead character for a further 23 novels. She continues to feature in audios and novels to this day. In All-Consuming Fire she shares the role of narrator with Watson.

- The Doctor is a character who unquestionably has his roots in the kind of imperialist adventure fiction of which Sherlock Holmes is a part.

- A quote:

"The [Doctor] is represented as a restoration of the traditional colonial hero. Even his costumes - Edwardian frock-coats or cricket whites, smoking jackets or Bohemian garb - recall the period of the height of British imperial power. He's presented as the ideal of colonial liberalism: an objective, asexual saviour-explorer - a scientist whose only greed is for knowledge - a man who's out neither for himself nor for a bit of the Other - a post-gendered gunless wonder - an upper-middle-class eccentric licensed by the establishment - a revolutionary who can't change history..." 

Alec Charles, 'The Ideology of Anachronism: Television, History and the Nature of Time', Time and Relative Dimensions on Space, ed. David Butler

- All-Consuming Fire isn't even the first time that the characters of the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes have been juxtaposed.

And just in case we've forgotten this famous television story, on ethat's beloved by a certain generation of fans, All-Consuming Fire includes several references to characters and situations from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Watson encounters Tom Baker's doctor in his Victorian garb in a dream. The 7th Doctor is currently staying with Professor Litefoot. A previous, untold adventure for Holmes and Watson saw them encounter the 'Walking Ventriloquist's Dummy'.

- It's an obvious idea. Only a couple of months later, John Peel's 'Missing Adventure' Evolution would team up with Arthur Conan Doyle and apparently inspire the creation of Holmes. I understand that it's not a very good book, but I love the idea of a self contradictory fictional universe in which Sherlock Holmes both is and isn't real. Holmes and Watson appear in a later 'New Adventure' and several other spin offs. The 2008 audio adventure The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel is apparently something of a sequel to All-Consuming Fire, but I've not listened to it myself.

- In it's first half the novel is essentially an effective Conan Doyle pastiche into which the destabilising worlds of Doctor Who and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos are intruding. Employed by the Pope (!), Holmes and Watson are investigating the theft of several forbidden books which have been stolen from the secret library of St John the Beheaded. These books tell of mythical beasts and gateways to other worlds. The trail leads them to India and the villainous Baron Maupertius, whose plan is explicitly linked with imperial conquest. For the last third of the novel, the novel shifts to the alien planet of Ry'leh. The alien landscape is fairly well imagined, but it's a far less compelling place compared to the Victorian London of the novel's first half.

- Andy Lane is clearly proud of his research. Right at the end, in an epilogue, Ace and Bernice question the Doctor about some of the aspects of Victorian London that Watson mentions in his narrative such as, for example, the presence of strychnine in beer. Yes, the Doctor assures them, it was all true. It has the distinct feeling of an author patting himself on the back. But, to be fair, these details taken from research into the period also gives the sections of the novel set on earth a texture which is lacking in sections set on what is, after all, a made up place.

- It's a version of Barthes' 'reality effect' that's probably common to a lot of historical fiction. Details create the world. One of the eternal problem for any writer of fiction set in the past must surely be the issue of research. How to introduce enough detail into the narrative to convince that the fiction is set in the past without overwhelming that reader with excessive detail, or without it appearing too obviously as research, not fully enclosed in the narrative. Having a native of the period narrate is certainly one way of solving the problem, although of course they're not necessarily going to notice the kind of details that we would. Vithal Rajan can have Watson notice all sort of historical details about India because he's a visitor to the country where much is new to him. In All-Consuming Fire Watson appears to be discovering a social conscience in order that Holmes may lecture him on the condition of the lower classes. It doesn't quite work, but it's a good effort. Later in the novel, once he's encountered Ace and Bernice, Watson compares them to the women of his own time. Unfortunately he seems to be thinking more of the women of modern Victorian cliche rather than what they may have actually been like. Is seems that Andy Lane's research only goes so far.

- It's also a very textual world. Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is fictional, but otherwise this is a world in which fictional characters mingle with reality. The references to Doctor Who's past includes Redvers Fenn-Cooper from the 7th Doctor story Ghost Light. From Holmes' adventures we have Inspector Lestrade (alongside Inspector Aberline and Walter Dew) and the giant rat of Sumatra. There is also Fu Manchu; the lost dictionary of the Khazars (alongside a reference to Fermat's last theorem; it was published in 1994 after all); a smart missile from Iain Banks' culture series; Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger is out of the country but John Roxton puts in an appearance in India; Charles Beauregard is present at the Diogenes Club (and Mack "the Knife' Yeovil feels like it could be a reference to Kim Newman's pseudonym, as well as The Threepenny Opera). It's not as densely referenced as Newman's work, but resides in the same ballpark. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was still a few years in the future.

- There's a wonderful sense of plenitude present in all of these works. Narrative plenitude. That's something I need to think some more about.

- The pastiche even extends to the inclusion of illustrations. This calls back to the way in which Sherlock Holmes was first published, in the Strand magazine, with illustrations. It also alludes to the 'Target' novels, which similarly came with illustrations. Unfortunately, they're not actually very good.

- Placing Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor together in a narrative which also takes them to imperial India is a fairly explicit attempt to confront the unpleasant aspects of that narrative tradition. Unfortunately, as Philip Sandifer has already pointed out on his blog, Andy Lane's attempts to do so really amount to little more than excessive liberal hand ringing and piety. For Sandifer it "feels like [the novel]’s trying to pay lip service to the fact that Victorian England was a deeply and horrifyingly flawed culture mostly so that it can enjoy the trappings of the culture in peace."

- Sandifer of course, appears unable to see Empire as anything other than it's accumulated imperialist horror and oppression and "scarred over wounds". Which isn't a terribly inaccurate judgement, if perhaps a little simplistic.

- Andy Lane's fiction revels in the trappings of a culture of whose worst parts he purports to disdain. He achieves this latter by having the Doctor, Ace and Bernice make thumpingly unsubtle comments about the evils of empire and colonialist expansion. As another commentator to Philip Sandifer's post points out, however reasonable some of the comments they make might be, it's done so awkwardly that they end up coming across as insufferably smug and self righteous individuals. When for example, Watson makes a point about how impressive the Suez canal is, the Doctor responds with an unpleasant rant about the small minded nature of 19th century imperialism. It's not just that this is a needlessly unpleasant response to an innocent remark that the journey to India has been made shorter by the canal (which is just a fact, whatever your feelings about 19th century imperialism). It's also problematic because the Doctor's method of putting Watson in his place by arguing that other cultures made the same achievement only ends up praising the acts of older empires of antiquity. Imperialism is fine it appears, when it's ancient and not perpetrated by the English.

- It's also not helped by the fact that Bernice is just a little bit racist. In her parts of the narrative, she first complains about the heat of India, and the smell, which is apparently worse than that experienced on any alien planet that she's ever visited. Which isn't wrong exactly. The heat was certainly the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane for my first visit (but then it was also the beginning of summer). But it's all so unsubtle: that's what everyone first notices! She also compares lower caste Indians to unfortunate accident victims, and the crowds about their trains in rail stations to cockroaches. Lovely.

- In Bernice's potted history of the country (unsurprisingly, she thinks it's a huge place - an oft encountered cliche), she mixes up Hindu and Muslim strictures about food. As Philip Sandifer rightly points out, an error such as this takes on a greater significance in the context of a novel which is also obsessed with pointing out the evils of imperialism. It undermines the point you're trying to make when you can't be bothered to get a simple thing right such as the fact that Hindus don't eat beef and Muslims don't eat pork.

- It could be an innocent error. These things do happen. Yet it appears in a book where Watson also casually claims that "Most Indian rulers are either Hindu or Muslim," as though the two faiths are interchangeable. The ruler they meet, Tir Ram, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, which is both a nice point about how the elite of the country were implicated with the colonial oppressor, and an attempt at undermining any stereotypes about colonial subjects. It's problematic though, because he's supposed to be the Nizam of a Muslim province (Jabalhabad), so why then does he have a Hindu name? I've read somewhere that it may be a reference to the villain of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - more intertextuality - which is not exactly unproblematic either.

- Really the depiction of Hinduism in this novel is pretty appalling. Apparently some fans were put out by the way in which a number of the Doctor's old foes are equated with particular old ones from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It is a fairly pointless retcon, adding little to the narrative. Personally though, I can't get very worked up about it when a religion that has over a billion adherents, which includes my in-laws, is also being insulted. The chanting of Cthulhu cultists is explicitly compared to Indian "tribesmen" by Watson at one point. Thuggees were actually worshipping Lovecraft's old ones. They mistook the alien planet of Ry'leh for the realm of Shiva because, you know, Indians are just ignorant savages who wouldn't know any better.

- On reflection, perhaps 'pretty appalling' is rather shrill? Any insult is clearly the result of carelessness rather than any active malice. Nothing here is especially offensive unless one is particularly earnest about these things. It only appears more offensive than it might actually be because the author is intent on both foregrounding his research and attempting to make a point about nineteenth century British imperialism. Which is perhaps only to restate what Philip Sandifer has already said on his blog. He is, after all, the Doctor Who expert.

- So yes, this is a novel that is an awful lot of fun in places if you like the kind of material/tropes with which it is playing. And I admit that I do. You can have a great time with at least the first half, as the insanity of Lovecraft and the mischief of the Doctor intrudes into the utterly rational world of Sherlock Holmes. There's a proper appreciation of how both of those worlds just don't fit into the rational scheme of Sherlock Holmes (consequently Holmes goes to pieces once the characters follow the villains to Ry'leh). But it's also a novel that, in attempting to confront something important, has swallowed some really unpleasant material. Whilst elsewhere it's good intentions are just clumsily handled. Perhaps Andy Lane just wasn't up to all of the challenges he set himself with his novel. Or it may just be that some of these problems are inherent in the material itself.

- It could just be that this kind of popular fiction isn't the best place to explore the legacy of British imperialism in India. Only, of course, we have the example of Vithal Rajan.