Customer Reviews

The Blue Angel (Dr. Who Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In the beginning, I was bored with this story. By the middle, I was intrigued. By the end, I was irritated. I guess it all depends on how you like your Doctor Who. If you like it with the Doctor actually working as a main character, this book probably isn't for you.

There are really two stories at work here. The A-story conjures up fantastic images of wintery landscapes and bizarre aliens, but ultimately does little with them. The A-story also doesn't make much use of the Doctor. Instead it's an Iris Wildthyme story. If you like Iris, you'll like this. To me she's a one note character. I buy Doctor Who books for the Doctor. There's little done with the companions either. The A-story also features a take-off on Star Trek that isn't particularly insightful. Finally, the ending is awful. Postmodernism is no excuse. The B-story, which should have just been a short story instead of juxtaposed with the rest of the tale, is much better. It's a very strange take on what may or may not be an alternate Doctor.

A confuzzled doctor, a bonkers story, a TARDIS disguised as a red bus, owls, an impetuous Iris Wildthyme and an original narrative style all combine to make reading this book an experience that shouldn't be missed. If you like your books to be straightforward and easy to follow, don't bother with "The Blue Angel". If, however, you enjoy having your imagination teased, stretched and twisted, then this is the Doctor Who story for you! We are as much in the dark as the poor old Doctor, who isn't really sure whether he's coming or going. His old friend, (not to mention "old flame"!) Iris Wildthyme is in the spotlight, as she hurtles into another ridiculously dangerous escapade. The characters were well realised, the scope of the story wide, the style employed in writing the novel fluid and inventive, particularly the atypical ending. It's safe to say that I loved this book and I'm going to read it again!

I was underwhelmed by Magrs' first DW book, _The Scarlet Empress_. It seemed to be trying so hard to be a magical, mystical journey that it forgot to include a point. Fortunately, by his second book (and with the help of Jeremy Hoad) he has managed to do the impressive feat of going further out into left field AND remembering that there should be a point to the story.

Casual readers should be warned: this is not a straightforward narrative. The Doctor, despite his best efforts, rarely gets more than a passive role. What really drives the book (for me, at least) is the question of _why_ the Doctor is being forced into a passive role and who is doing it. It's fascinating reading, particularly near the end when the sleepy cottage scenes begin to dovetail with the apocalyptic battle scenes and you start to get an inkling of what's really going on...

If you like the unusual, go for this book. Parts of it won't make sense without a passing familiarity with Doctor Who continuity and at least one character's motivations will seem bizarre unless you've read _Interference_, but all in all it's a very fine book, indeed.

Paul Magrs, with Jeremy Hoad, returns with his second eighth doctor novel entitled the Blue Angel. After leaving Earth and saying goodbye to Sam and Sarah Jane, the Doctor, Fitz, and Compassion travel in the TARDIS only to land on board the Galactic Federation starship NEPOTIST. The crew treats the Doctor and his companions as guest and everything seems to be normal until the ship runs across the legendary city of glass, Valcea. It is ruled by a tyrant named Daedalus who has fooled the glass people into believing he has their best interest at heart. Meanwhile, Iris Wildthyme, in a brand new incarnation, runs across Daedalus' lost son Icarus who was adopted by an older earth woman. The Doctor and Iris meet again but the end to this adventure causes a rift to form between the Doctor and his longtime friend Iris. There was a balance of dialogue and narration in this novel but the method in which the Magrs and Hoad divided the paragraphs is most unusual. This can cause the reader to lose track of the story very quickly. The Nepotist's captain and its crew are an obvious mockery of Star Trek and Capt. Blandish himself is a mockery of William Shatner's character, Captain James T. Kirk. This satire brought out the humor Magrs and Hoad were trying to show. The imagery of places such at the City of Glass and Iris' TARDIS were crisp and vivid. In addition to the poor divisions of the paragraphs there was excessive narration used that was not necessary. There were times that Magrs was trying to overcompensate for those who did not know who Iris Wildthyme was if they did not read her first appearance in The Scarlet Empress. The final chapter entitled, twenty questions, was fun but served no relevance to the plot or the subplots. Magrs and Hoad could have illuminated more on what the obverse was and why Iris could not tell the doctor about it. The interludes of the Doctor, Iris, etc. having tea at her house should have been cut. While these interludes were the future and the story itself was the past this can make reading the novel difficult. The reader may lose track of what is the past and the future. 3 stars out of 5 for The Blue Angel.

Right away, I knew this book was fun. Probably due in part to the writing style;several sections are first-person viewpoint accounts, while others are third-person present tense. The book
is fast-paced.
One storyline has the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion living in an English town house, where Our Hero cooks, spends time in his garden and dreams strange dreams of adventure. We also meet Sally, a journalist friend of many years, and her talking dog,
Canine.
Elsewhere, we find The Three aboard the Federation ship Nepotist.
Captain Blandish and his crew have encountered an anomaly in the
form of Valcea, home of the Glass Men. Valcea should not be where it is. The Doctor, the Captain and 3 other crew members go planetside to investigate. Once in the city, they meet up with
Daedalus, the local benevolent despot. (Any resmblance to a certain Enterprise crew is strictly tongue-in-cheek).
Finally, we meet once again Iris Wildthyme (from Magrs' "The
Scarlett Empress"). Iris has placed the Doctor "someplace safe",
where he dreams of Glass Men and a place called Valcea. Meanwhile, she herself is rescuing a couple of women, Maddy and
Big Sue-and Maddy's son Ian- from giant white owls.
We are not told what happened immediately after the events of
"Interference, Book 2", wisely. Would have been a distraction.
More than ever, Iris seems a Doctor wannabe/groupie. What is her connection to Daedalus? The authors end the book with a post-story Twenty Questions. Can you say follow-up? Hopefully.
"I remember something about passion flowers. Something specific
and horticultural. Abit of general knowledge, which pleases me, too, because lately it's been as if I know nothing about anything
at all. I, who used to be such a storehouse if impossible facts.
Now I'm a well of endless fiction."

Oddly enough, this is probably the best candidate to follow "Interference".

That previous book (or books) was so shifting in terms of where it could potentially take the "Who" universe that trying to continue the trend with a regular run of the mill Who adventure would have just been seen as backsliding, or at least shying away from the things that Miles was trying to do. And yet, it was too early for another adventure of the scope or impact of "Interference".

So instead, they decided to go somewhere completely different, to paraphrase another British institution.

Magrs' first novel for the BBC line, the rather excitingly bizarre "Scarlet Empress", saw someone attempting to approach the genre SF TV-tie in series with a literary eye, shifting perspectives and techniques, giving us a taste of magical realism in a universe that always paid lip service to it . . . and generally not making any sense. I enjoyed the journey but had to admit that some of it was just plain incoherent, more concerned with dazzling us with the artiface than with the meat of the story.

He remains just as distinctive and strange here, but the addition of Jeremey Hoad has both sharpened and refracted his work. There's no overall surface difference, the writing is just as strange as it was the first time but the addition of Hoad does seem to add a certain amount of focus. The story concerns nominally the new TARDIS crew of the Doctor, Fritz and Compassion getting caught up with a starship crew on a mission. Who runs into a giant glass city in space with a variety of aliens and a dictator with a strange complicator plan of his own.

Meanwhile, Iris Wildthyme is running around a shopping mall with a bunch of women, one who has a son who may not be her son, and is helping them do their best not to get attacked by a swarm of giant owls. Yeah. For a series that has often prided itself on oddball, this is decidedly off-kilter.

Magrs tends to make this work better than it should be being sure of his craft. The odd imagery seems more solid this time out, so that the giant owls and the men in glass chairs and so on feel more like actual aliens than Things That Are Standing for Something Else. I don't mind metaphors in my novels, but at least give me something solid to grab onto, hm? But much like his other novel, he shifts perspective to first person, switches up technique, and in this instance also decides to alternate the actual series of events with a story of another Doctor who might be our Doctor in a different universe, to presumably serve as counterpoint to the tale that's going on.

The problem with this is partially the same problem that plagued "The Scarlet Empress" . . . namely, a lot of literary things are going on but for the most part we don't know if it means anything or he's just having some fun. It doesn't help that the Doctor is mostly sidelined and ineffective, Fritz is constantly playing catch-up and Compassion is still kind of a cipher at this point (although hilariously mean, which is a nice change of pace . . . at least Turlough was a coward to explain his personality traits), we're stuck with the starship crew, who are a not so thinly veiled parody of "Star Trek" either because Magrs feels that he's making a serious point of why a starship crew likes theirs does not work in a Who universe or simply because he thinks its funny. The only problem is that their general uselessness becomes distracting, and frankly kind of absurd. And that's even before one of them turns into a giant squid.

The rest of the plot gets handled by Iris, who is as love-or-hate as she was back in her other appearance. I don't quite love her as much as Magrs seems to, she spends most of the story fulfilling the typical role that the Doctor plays, often knowing what's going on and generally making a hash of things. She does tend to dominate and while her presence isn't entirely unwelcome, I'm still not so enamoured of her that I want the entire book to focus on her.

All of this is supposed to come together on a glass city called the Enclave where a giant elephant-like alien rules over everywhere and has a plan that borders on the incomprehensible. So you have a bumbling starship crew being useless in a city filled with weird aliens, while Iris moves the plot forward in an obtuse fashion while the Doctor wanders around blindly and a separate narrative dares for us to make some sense of it. We're lucky any of this is even remotely coherent.

Yet, it remains entertaining because of Magrs' verve and command of the story. Even when things clearly aren't making any sense to us, you get the feeling that he's doing it all for a reason. Those reasons might be empty post-modern reasons but at least there's some thought process going on and it's nice to see someone daring to be different. It may not be entirely his fault that the alternate Doctor or whatever it is section winds up being the most intriguing of the novel, but it has a sense of mystery that the alien plot doesn't. For all its weirdness, it's just a bunch of aliens.

But all these little ticks end up adding up to an interesting, if not entirely satisfying experience. He's clearly trying to think outside the format, or at least find new ways to work within the format and as I said in the review of "The Scarlet Empress", I would rather take an interesting misfire over a standard and rather boring tromp around the corridors anyday.

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.
-----
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.

This new story has the Doctor,Fitz and Compassion attempting to solve the problems of a king and his kingdom! The old friend of the Doctor's Iris Wildtyme returns too in this book! The first half is easy to follow the second is very confusing! I'd recommend this (and use my real name) if the second half was not confusing! Buy this book only if you need to catch up on the series ,otherwise skip this mess of a new adventure with the eighth doctor!

I've now read three stories (two novels, one short story) with Isis, and my opinion hasn't changed: poor writing, convoluted, nonsense plots--no more! The Blue Angel had a couple good moments (the Star Trek parody was fun--to a point), but it was basically another "Isis saves the day" novel, with the Doctor playing catchup. Writer wish-fulfillment, maybe?

As an avid Doctor Who fan, I was appalled by this sad attempt at a story. Filled with chaos and nonsense, the authors evidently knew absolutely NOTHING about the Doctor. What's with the homosexual references? And the Doctor's mother? Do Hoad and Magrs know anything about the Doctor's history, or where they drunk when they wrote this?

Thanks, guys, for messing up the continuity.

I have read all the books in the 8th Doctor series. Some I liked more than others. This one I DESPISED.