Oh, Those Magnificent Ambersons!

Two quotes from V.J. Perkin's book on The Magnificent Ambersons for the BFI Classics series. If I had to pick a favourite of Welles' films, I might well pick this, despite it's undoubted ruined state. I certainly love it more than Citizen Kane, great as the earlier film might be.

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"On paper Welles' ending looks inspired. But everything would turn on the question of tone, the balance between pain and compassion, humour and harshness, bleakness and generosity. It might - though none of the witnesses suggests this - have embraced the complacent despair that so often wins acceptance as the authentication of seriousness and Art."

[We'll never know of course, since Welle's ending was poorly substituted by RKO. It's the wider point that struck me though, since it seems to be a much more elegant formulation of what I was struggling to say in my last post about George R.R. Martin's work. On reflection, what I was really responding to was not the work itself, which as I said, I've neither read nor seen, and nor do I wish to. That part at least, is not really the best thing I've written on this blog. I was trying to respond to an element of the discourse which appears to surround the tv show. And the reason I find it so irritating is probably quite personal. I mentioned in passing the way in which the use of the term 'realism' seems to be replicating the sorts of claims which were made on behalf of the mainstream American comics which came out in the wake of the success of Watchmen and The Dark Night Returns. A typical defence of violence and 'complacent despair' was that it was more 'realistic' than the standard kind of superhero stories they were contrasted with. I worry that I've made that kind of argument myself, when I was younger, since it was in the wake of those works that I became interested in American comics (in the early 90s, around the time DC's Vertigo imprint was established). I worry that I've read work which has exactly the same failings as I imagine that a show like Game of Thrones does. The problem isn't that fictional works should depict violence or despair, or anything bleak or unpleasant, but there's a difference between a visceral presentation of violence or suffering as opposed to a relishing in it's depiction. It's precisely as Perkins says, that such representations are often used as a facile way of claiming seriousness for a work. It isn't an easy line to judge. Indeed, I'm not sure that it can always be so easily separated into the two contrasting approaches. And it's a mistake that seems particularly easy to make when you're a teenager, a mistake which I'm sure I've made on plenty of occasions. I was a very serious teenager. So there's an element of guilt now in my responses to any work which represents violence. An element that wasn't there before.

[This is also of course, related to the way in which genres such as comedy or romance get slighted, seen as something lesser. They aren't serious enough. But that's a separate argument.]

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"Accumulation has it's inconveniences but they are more tolerable than loss."

[Surely every hoarder lives with that contradictory feeling of wishing they could get rid of everything? Or is it just me?]

'Realism' in a couple of secondary world fantasies

Actually, this post was really meant to be a couple of notes I wanted to make about Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, but it's grown, and taken considerably longer to finish writing than I  had anticipated. It was reading a post about the Game of Thrones tv series a few weeks ago that catalysed these thoughts. 

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I'll admit, I've neither read any of the books, nor seen a single episode of the tv series into which it's been adapted. I read plenty of fantasy fiction as a child and teenager. I still do read fantasy, obviously, but my tastes in the genre have changed and I no longer have much interest in the kind of epic or high fantasy into which A Song of Ice and Fire fits. To be honest, Tolkien aside, I'm not sure I even read very much of it when I was younger. It's not just lack of interest on my part though. Honestly, the more I hear about the series (whether it's the books or the tv series), the more both incarnations of the story sound utterly vile.

Yes, obviously, I can be accused of not properly engaging with the thing which I'm dismissing here. So be it, but I'm not prepared to find out if I might be wrong. I simply don't have the patience or inclination to read a series of lengthy novels that I already suspect I'm not going to like. I'd happily waste 45 minutes or so on an episode of the television series, but I'm still not inclined to seek it out. In any case, it sounds as though the tv series actually magnifies the faults the series appears to possess in both incarnations.

Going on the descriptions I've come across from both enthusiasts and detractors of the series in the last few years, my strong impression is that it's a typically medievalist secondary fantasy world consumed with violence, populated with characters who all appear to be utter sociopaths, and with a really unpleasant obsession with rape.

To repeat, yes, I might be mistaken in my soundbite description there. My point though is that it isn't just an impression given by critics of the series, it's an impression I equally get from it's fans. The central term that seems to get used a lot in it's defence is the one I've put in my title: 'realism'. The horrific behaviour Martin includes in his stories is usually justified on the grounds that it is more 'realistic' than other fantasies of this type.

Yet I wonder if this praise of the narrative's 'realism' isn't something of a chimera. That in fact, whether it's on tv or in the books, Martin's series isn't actually just revelling in sordid and unpleasant behaviour under the pretence that this is 'realistic' in a medieval fantasy setting.

The post I read the other morning was specifically about the tv series and it's adaptation. It received a number of responses in the comments threads which felt like fairly well reasoned attempts at defending the series. Since I've not seen any of it I can't respond to them exactly, but there was one thing that jumped out at me, which also seems to align with this claim for 'realism'. One commentator argued that most people in medieval societies, including all women, would have had very little agency. Now, I'm not a medieval historian, but then I don't imagine the poster was either.

It's true up to a point I'm, but we shouldn't generalise like that. Individual agency is a very modern concept with which to judge the past. My academic field is early modern literature, so I know something about women and gender in that period. There's a very famous essay, which I wish I could remember the author of, which argues that many women actually had less agency in during the Renaissance than they previously had in a high medieval context. It's hard to generalise of course, and the evidence is rarely wholly conclusive, but just because the dominant ideology of a society says one thing doesn't mean that everyone is going to follow it's rules to the letter. Agency surely is something which exists within a social context, then as now, and if for example there is a prevalence of conduct literature attempting to enforce norms of female behaviour, as there was in early modern England, then that might have been in part a response to the fact that women were failing to behave in accord with such social norms.

It strikes me that these arguments about George R.R. Martin's supposed 'realism' are actually profoundly ignorant about medieval society. It's constructing what is actually a very simplistic image of medievalism against which an equally simplistic vision of modernity in which supposedly we all have far greater agency and freedom is then implicitly contrasted. Now, I know that George R.R. Martin has used the Wars of the Roses as part of his inspiration, and that was hardly a very civilised period of English history. No doubt medieval societies could be incredibly violent at times, with some truly vile individuals occupying prominent positions in all medieval societies. But surely we could make a similar argument about any modern society? It's that implicit assumption that we're so much more civilised than they were in the past which seems to underlie this kind of argument. Certainly we're better in some ways, but I wouldn't feel so smug about it.

I'm certainly not suggesting that fantasy shouldn't address issues of violence or power. It isn't the presence of violence in a work which bothers me, but the way in which it's dealt with. Perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire does a better job of addressing these issues than I imagine. I'm just very suspicious when violence is justified on the basis of it's supposed 'realism'. Nor should we forget that in Medieval societies there were very strong forces opposed against such behaviour, cultural forces which attempted to moderate and control violent behaviour. Most obviously in a European context, there was the Church. Much secondary world fantasy seems to not so much neglect as fail to understand the role of religion in ordinary daily life in medieval societies. Despite his Catholic beliefs, Tolkien excluded any explicit reference to religion in his famous secondary world.

Dragons are more fun, I suppose.

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But there's more than one version of 'realism' available in fantasy of course.

As I said above, this post was only meant to be about Unseen Academicals. I'll get to it eventually. Like most people, I'm aware of the competition currently taking place in Brazil. I've plenty of friends who follow and play the game. My wife has been watching many of the matches. This isn't really based on particular dislike. I've just never been able to sustain much interest in the game, either as a participant or spectator. So reading a novel which is basically Discworld does football is my somewhat eccentric way of joining in with their enthusiasm.

It might be imagined that the comic fantasy of Terry Pratchett is profoundly opposed to any notion of 'realism' in secondary world fantasy. Certainly there's been a cartoonish feel to the Discworld since the very beginning. It's often knowingly silly, from the very notion of a world that is flat and balanced on top of four elephants and a giant turtle onwards.

Arguably 'realism' as a fictional mode originally develops out of comedy. Certainly it's an argument that can be made, and I think that's why I'm innately suspicious of a work like A Song of Ice and Fire in which the argument about the work's 'realism' is tied to it's worth. The unspoken argument is, "this isn't silly like all those other fantasies". It's an argument that is tied to anxieties about the cultural worth that is attached to modern commercial fantasy. I saw exactly the same argument occurring when I got into American comics in the early 90s. Works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and all the work which came in their wake were important because they were serious. Which I now realise is a very limited sense of what constitutes 'serious'.

In the case of the Discworld, since the very beginning of the series much of the humour has come from the knowing deflation of the tropes of fantasy. The jokes work in part because the characters and situations don't fit our expectations based on our prior knowledge of the genre. This implicitly contrasts the fantasy with a notion of 'realism' by showing how artificial the tropes of commercial fantasy are in contrast to how things really happen in the real world.

As the series develops and the satire shifts from tropes of fantasy to satirically target the real world, elements from the world we recognise are placed within the fantastic setting, and we get a similar kind of juxtaposition between fantasy and the 'real'. It's a fantasy which is some respects highly suspicious of fantasy.

Some of those elements of fantasy that Pratchett is highly suspicious of are also those which A Song of Ice and Fire appears to take very seriously. As he pointed out in the introduction to the revised edition of The Carpet People, at the age of 17 he 'thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I'm inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings.' This notion appears to be behind what is possibly one of the most interesting changes Pratchett has wrought on the series. At least since The Truth, where 'modern' news culture was introduced to the city of Ankh-Morpork, the representation of the city has developed through a number of novels as the city has changed from an essentially medieval city state to one which is much more recognisably early modern.

Arguably the ground work for this was first laid down in the city watch books which initially charted the rise of Sam Vimes, but I doubt there was any particular intention to the way in which the city has developed. The somewhat haphazard way in which it has taken place, across a number of books actually contributes to it's sense of realism. This is how societies develop I think, mostly through trial and error. Now, in Unseen Academicals it's become something that the characters notice. The city is booming, immigrants are moving in and the city is awash with money. We're at the beginning of modernity. There's even a tyrant of the city who's partly inspired by the Medici.

Which is one of the things I find problematic about it, as I've mentioned before. Modernity is always something of a double edged sword. I think Pratchett recognises that. On the other hand, while he might use his fantasy to critique modernity, there's also a sense of acceptance: this is the world we live in now and Pratchett can't imagine an alternative. And because it stands in opposition to the medievalist cliches of traditional secondary world fantasy, he ends up tacitly endorsing many of the claims of modernity.

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'She is a cook Drumknott, not a maid. Show her in, by all means.'

The secretary looked a little resentful. Are you sure this wise, sir? I have already told the guards to throw the foodstuffs away.'

'Food cooked by a Sugarbean? You may have committed a crime against high art, Drumknott.'

So yes, Vetinari troubles me, because he's explicitly described as a tyrant who is forever seen  threatening and manipulating people in order to bend them to his will. He's a trained assassin who, we can only assume, has killed people, and presumably has no compunction about committing murder to ensure his power. He's the stereotype of a Machiavellian Prince dropped into a fantasy world. Which is problematic, because Machiavelli's The Prince, in one interpretation at least, was a satire. It's no longer very funny to me when such methods are shown to actually work.

As the series has gone on, Vetinari has also evolved into a hyper-efficient individual. Actually, he was pretty efficient to begin with, if memory serves. He appeared in the very first Discworld novel, threatening Rincewind. The cowardly, incompetent wizard hasn't headlined a novel in the series for years now. He does appear in Unseen Academicals, as part of the Unseen University staff, but gets all of half a dozen lines. The point of Rincewind's character, the obvious reason why he's so funny, is that he's an inversion of the stereotype of the all powerful wizard. Although he does eventually get to save the world in The Light Fantastic, he remains pretty much the same throughout all his appearances. He's the prototype for the typical male character who appears throughout many of the early Discworld novels, from Mort to Teppic (Pyramids) and Brutha (Small Gods). They're all character in flight from anything resembling the stereotype of traditional masculinity that you find in so much fantasy, whatever it's quality. They're physically unprepossessing, often cowardly, and somewhat inept. They probably functioned as stand-ins for many boys and young men in the audience. They fit the stereotype of the typical science fiction/fantasy fan, however unfair that stereotype might be.

In his initial appearances Ponder Stibbons appears to be a character of a similar type. A wizard who's a parody of a stereotypical geeky science student. In Unseen Academicals it's revealed that he's now effectively running Unseen University on the basis of all the positions he holds. Like Vetineri, like many of his characters, he's evolved in a hyper-efficient individual, responsible for keeping everything running. You see the same thing in characters like Granny Weatherwax (who, in fairness, never lacked for confidence) and Sam Vimes. In his first appearance, Vimes was a washed up alcoholic. The point of Guards! Guards! was to celebrate the nameless soldiers who normally get cut down indiscriminately by the hero of a typical fantasy adventure narrative. Carrot, the actual hero who in another narrative would have been the one killing the men who in the parody become his friends and colleagues, the lost King of the city, ends up as just another working stiff. Since then, Vimes has kicked the bottle and married into the aristocracy. In the process he's been revealed as a genius for managing the police of Ankh-Morpork.

Whilst its certainly admirable to want to move the concerns of fantasy away from the concerns of 'battles and kings', what actually seems to have happened is that the Discworld novels are still full of exceptional individuals who get to save the day, even if they aren't kings. You see this in the exchange between Vetinari and Drumkott about Glenda Sugarbean, Unseen Academicals' beating heart. She's not only a cook, but a Queen of cooks, one who has inherited her culinary prowess from her Grandmother. It's an 'aristocratic' dynasty relocated to a lower class. And yet again, she's a hyper-efficient individual who's running the lives of everyone around her.

Inevitably perhaps, Glenda eventually learns that you can't always run other people's lives for them, learning that she can't control the life of her beautiful friend Juliet Stollop. This growth of her character is also tied to her seeing through the illusions supposedly perpetuated by the reams of cheap romance fiction she consumes. If this plot doesn't quite work, it's because she seems so grounded from the beginning, that it's hard to believe that she'd be so taken in by such illusions. In general, Pratchett's female characters have always been strong personalities, the ones who are actually running everything. It's yet another of his inversions of the gender stereotypes found in plenty of commercial fantasy.

But to try and conclude a piece that has already become far too long, I want to come back to this term 'hyper-efficiency' I've been using to describe his characters. It's also a quality that the cultured savant (and Orc) Mr. Nutt possesses, tied to his desperate desire to acquire what he describes as 'worth'. Whilst there is something comic about the way his desire becomes a desperate need to please the people around him, his hyper-efficiency is never really challenged as ineffective. He's respected, aquires 'worth', in part because he is competent.

Why does this focus on his characters' efficiency bother me? Because I don't believe in it. For me, it's a far more pernicious fantasy than many of the tropes Pratchett has mocked elsewhere. Here in the real world it seems that every indignity, every tyranny, can be justified in the name of the desire for efficiency. It's a small part, perhaps, of the set of discourses which has served to justify the still ongoing program of the privatisation of the state's activities in Britain and the associated praise of the private sector in contrast to a beleaguered public sector. The problem really is that, somewhat counter intuitively perhaps, efficiency is such an abstract quality. It becomes an unattainable myth, because it's impossible for anyone to be as efficient as the modern world so frequently demands. I'm not trying to argue here that I want to live in a world in which everything is falling apart and inefficient. Only of course, since inefficiency so often appears to the - hopefully unintended - consequence of so much of that which is justified under the name of 'efficiency', that I can't help wondering whether it's really a quality which is actually worth chasing after.

It's also a link with the work of Charles Dickens, a writer Pratchett has been compared to by at least one of the quotes which has regularly appeared on his dust jackets. Despite the social criticism contained in his work, Dickens never seems to have wanted to challenge the underlying principals of Victorian society. He just wanted to the system to be run better, more efficiently, as though that was all that was needed to solve the problems his work highlighted. That this blind spot is shared by two writers who were and still is in the case of Pratchett, despite his illness, incredibly productive, incredibly efficient in their chosen field, is perhaps not surprising.

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To try and drag this back to the point from where I started out: probably all fictional secondary worlds are engaged with 'realism' in some way. It's not that their writers are trying to delude their audience into believing in the existence of a world which is transparently fictional, but they do seem to require some justification for their existence. Hence the focus on maps and fictional histories, even made up languages. I suppose that what I find particularly interesting with Terry Pratchett's Discworld is the way in which it's 'realism' gestures outside the text, even if I find some of the ways in which it seems to intersect with real world concerns occasionally troubling. It may even be that I'm mistaken to label this as 'realism'.

The barbarians have always been with us, it seems...

Published in 1925, and yet it could be describing the present, as we're still assailed by exactly the same forces, making the same, tired, appallingly trite excuses:

"Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to 'show results' that was undermining and vulgarising education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing 'to give the taxpayers what they wanted'." 

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

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[It's years since I last read something by Willa Cather, and the novels I read then were the early ones of American midwestern rural life. Oh, Pioneers!. My Antonia. A.S. Byatt's introduction to the Virago edition of the latter is possibly the first piece of writing I read by her as well. Which is interesting to me, because one of the things I felt about the writing of The Professor's House was that it's style seemed to have much in common with Ms. Byatt's style. There was nothing I could put my finger on exactly, but since she has clearly thought long and deeply about Willa Cather's art in her introductions to most of Virago's reissues of the novels, it's perhaps not too surprising to feel something of the influence. It's a matter of sensibility, perhaps? They both seem to combine a sensuality and asceticism in their depiction of the world and their respect for all of their characters, an awareness of the ways in which dailyness fills up our lives, and an effort to look at the world as it is exactly.]

In Ankh-Morpork...

'A third proposition, that the city be governed by a choice of respectable members of the community who would promise not to give themselves airs or betray the public trust at every turn, was instantly the subject of music-hall jokes all over the city.' 

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

'Narrative plenitude'?

For a second there, I had wondered, naively no doubt, if I hadn't inadvertently stumbled over a new critical term. One that might even have some use. Alas, it seems not.

Oh, well.

'Narrative plenitude'?

A simple google search will find plenty uses of the term, going at least as far back as Laura Mulvey's seminal 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975) and Frederick Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), both works that I know only by reputation. From the brief scan which is all I have time to give them at present, it would seem that I meant something different by the term. It appears that a sense of narrative plenitude is used in a Freudian context, set against a narrative 'lack'. Plenitude here appears to be in line with the first definition of the word as it is defined by the OED:

"Fullness, completeness, or perfection; the condition of being absolutely full in quantity, measure, or degree."

'Narrative plenitude' is referring to a narrative which conveys a sense of satisfaction, of completeness. It's a narrative which satisfies all the conflicts and issues which have been brought up throughout it's duration. It's a sense of narrative 'rightness' which can of course be construed as a form of mystification if one is so minded.

I apologise if I'm repeating myself a bit there, but I'm trying to get a hold of this. 'Plenitude' of course has another sense, of abundance and excess, and that also seems to a be a way in which it can be used. It can be used in terms of analysing melodrama, where part of the satisfaction of the narrative is  surely precisely in that excess of emotion or style which the form provides. In other contexts, 'plenitude' refers to the excess of multiple narratives that postmodern or consumerist culture confronts us with.

It's this last which is closest to what I was trying to get at, and it might be argued that there isn't really any need for a new term. But then, what am I trying to get at?

It's a form of intertextuality. Professor Challenger isn't just referred to in All-Consuming Fire. Although he doesn't actually appear in the narrative, what is clearly being posited is a fictional world in which he and his published adventures are all as much a part of the fictional reality as are the adventures of Holmes or the Doctor. It's part of the 'reality effect' of the novel, even though what's being referred to is fictional. This effect becomes clearer in works like Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics or much of Kim Newman's fiction (Anno Dracula obviously, but also the Diogenes Club stories), where characters from multiple fictions are actually interacting with each other. I've not read any of Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton' work, but that might be earliest example of what I'm talking about (there's also a little known short story by Maurice Richardson, 'Unquiet Wedding' from 1948, and other examples too no doubt, but that's more of a burlesque, which is not quite what I'm trying to describe here). It's a sense of multiple narratives interacting, that behind the scenes of the novel which we're currently reading, there is a wealth of narratives currently invisible to us. But there they are, happening out in the same fictional landscape.

It could be argued that we already have the perfectly serviceable term 'crossover'. I wouldn't wholly disagree, but that feels rather too mechanistic to me, a simple description of what it is. In a more academic context, Umberto Eco has proposed the term 'transworld migration' which can be taken as the technique of borrowing a literary character from another work. Again, this feels to me like a structural term to label a technique. Whereas what I'm trying to describe here is something that is more affective (assuming I've got the right term there), a sense of how it works, of what it actually achieves. Which will inevitably be somewhat subjective. It's a quality rather than a description.

Consequently, whilst I think that these narratives which bring fictional characters together from multiple disparate works are at the heart of what I'm thinking about here, I would also broaden it to include other works. Michael Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories, especially the 'Second Ether' trilogy, also seem to have something of this quality. Then there's the storied landscapes of the superhero universes owned by Marvel and DC. The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who and all their many spin offs. The many spin-offs of Sherlock Holmes. Again, no doubt there are plenty of other things I'm currently unaware of at present.

What all of these fictional narratives have in common is that they have multiple authors. This is most obviously the case with Marvel/DC and commercial spin-offs, but it's also the case in a work which combines characters from the work of other authors.* It's also, unless one is a complete obsessive, practically impossible to read or see or hear everything that makes up most of these narrative worlds. I'm never going to read every DC comic, or every Doctor Who spin-off, or the original appearance of every character that Kim Newman includes in Anno Dracula. Life's too short.

So the sense of narrative plenitude or excess which I'm trying to define here also encompasses narratives that I'm never going to experience. I'm sure this is the case for most readers. So that sense of narrative excess actually entails a lack, which might in turn account for the obsession with continuity which so many fans of this kind of fiction exhibit. It's the hope that somehow this excess of narrative can be contained and made to make sense. Since the very reality of multiple authorship also means that there will inevitably be contradictions in these texts, there is obviously something rather quixotic about such a desire, but it's a desire which is clearly a response to that initial sense of narrative excess and plenitude.

Once you get away from that anxiety though, what we have is a sense of seemingly boundless possibilities, of narratives bumping up against each other, braiding together: a plenitude, an excess. A joy.

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So that's an initial rough sketch of what I think I'm trying to get at here. Now I just have to decide on what to call it.


* It might be argued therefore that Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories don't fit here, since there there is only one author. And most of the characters Kim Newman crosses over in his Diogenes Club stories are of course his own creations. It does seem that where an author's work falls into discrete series there is then the opportunity for combining characters so as to produce an effect which is otherwise more commonly found in works which have multiple authors, or which borrow characters originally created by others.

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.

"...suggested an English surrealism..."

The light fittings all suggested an English surrealism; cast iron bouquets of garden flowers, enamelled to pale and powdery colours, the whole construction appearing to float from the powder blue ceiling.

Michael Bracewell, The Crypto-Amnesia Club