Customer Reviews

Hope (Doctor Who)

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Never before have I seen a Doctor Who television episode or read a Doctor Who book with so many fight scenes. Of course, coming from a reviewer who reads a lot of Richard Stark and Mickey Spillane, you would think that I wouldn't mind the violence. Unfortunately, it just seems out of place in Doctor Who.

Usually, the Doctor likes to work problems out with his mind, and ensnare the villans in clever traps. This book is just overloaded with situations where he has to fight his way out. There is blood everywhere, trying to fuel the story.

The best thing about the book is that it deals with Anji's mental anxiety over her dead boyfriend Dave. It finally brings her closure. The book also features a very fitting, Who-esque ending with a clever trap that Who fans will enjoy.

Clapham's writing is never dull, with good dialogue and great description. You get a real feeling for the dreadful city of Hope, as well as the emotion involved with all the characters. Some drawbacks but also many good points make this novel worth reading.

The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji find themselves in the city of Hope, on the planet of Endpoint, far in the future, separated from the TARDIS, which has sunk to the bottom of the poisoned, polluted sea beneath the city. The Doctor sees the city as violent, crime-ridden, and amoral, and wants to leave as soon as possible. However, in order to recover his ship, he is forced to make a deal with Silver, ruler of Hope in fact, if not in name. Silver has a problem: a mysterious assailant is decapitating the citizens of Hope, and the ongoing crimes are weakening the perception of Silver's control. While the Doctor and Fitz investigate the murders, Anji considers making a different sort of deal with Silver, one which could destroy her friendship with the Doctor . . .

Mark Clapham, co-author of three previous Doctor Who-related novels, makes his solo debut here. After the epic scope and momentous events of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and the madcap post-modern antics of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, I found Hope to be a refreshing change of pace in its conventionality. In terms of plot and storytelling, Hope is a comfortably traditional Doctor Who adventure. The Doctor and his companions arrive in a strange place, they encounter a mystery, eventually uncovering a villain behind everything, and the Doctor saves the day. The plot unfolds in a fairly straightforward, linear manner, the prose focused on clear storytelling rather than literary experimentation.

So, I hear you ask, if the plot is so straightforward, what's the point in reading it? The point, I reply, is in the characterization. In many ways, this is Anji's book. She doesn't see as much action as the Doctor or Fitz, but we get a good look inside her head. Her character turns a major psychological corner in Hope, although new readers should be aware that this book provides enough information for them to understand what Anji is dealing with. Similarly, we get some insight into the Doctor's new role as humanity's champion following the changes brought about in Adventuress of Henrietta Street. He still remains something of an enigma, just as he always should, but it's also clear that he certainly isn't the same renegade Time Lord he used to be. Before die-hard fans start panicking, let me point out that these changes are natural developments coming out of the events of recent books. They've helped make the character more interesting and unpredictable, but at the heart, he's still the same Doctor fans have loved for almost 40 years.

The novel isn't perfect. The revelation of the ultimate villain should come as no real surprise, and his motivations aren't all that subtle or groundbreaking. The book also introduces two groups of supporting villains, one of which pretty much comes to nothing, the other of which isn't developed all that deeply. Having said that, however, I think the line of eighth Doctor novels needed this sort of story. After all the big events of the last few years, from Interference through Shadows of Avalon, The Ancestor Cell, through the Doctor's century trapped on Earth and his memory loss, on through his time on Henrietta Street, it's good to see him in a very traditional adventure. It reminds us and reinforces the fact that despite everything that's happened, he's still the same hero, never cruel nor cowardly, always ready to fight evil and oppression wherever he finds it.

A TV critic, once writing about one of Rod Serling's lesser "Twilight Zone" scripts, noted that the episode had just two kinds of characters: those who made speeches, and those who made speeches while shouting.

Welcome to "Hope".

"Hope" is very much in the "Parallel 59" style of "Doctor Who" drab. It's set in the far, far future, on a perpetually overcast planet divided into remote, fortress-like cities. The military and the poor coexist uneasily. There's a lot of bar-fight violence (casinos still exist in the far, far future) and two headless bodies in the first 30 pages. Some characters make speeches. Other characters make speeches while shouting. The Doctor makes speeches. The Doctor also makes speeches while shouting. You get the drift, I think.

The plotting is also all over the place -- first it's a murder mystery, then it's a story about a war between the citizens of "Hope" and the out-of-time Earth scientists (with names like Stephen and Castillo, in the far, far future). Then it becomes a 1960s-style Marvel Comics adventure. Really, if you boil all the plots down to their essence, this is a character study about a cyborg named Silver. Mentally reference him as the Captain from "The Pirate Planet", and he works quite well. It really feels as if Stan Lee wrote the final chapters. "Remember, kids, absolute power corrupts... absolutely!". The villain is dispatched bloodlessly, and the surviving Hopesters gaze hopefully (ha!) into the morning sunrise.

Clapham writes a good potboiler here. There are some heavy continuity references to the Doctor's recent physical trauma, and a very portentous dream which feels as if the editor literally threw that page into the presses as the book was entering its first print run. The human element -- Anji's continuing pining over her long-since-departed boyfriend -- gives this book a little bit of flavor, and as far as run-of-the-mill DW novels go, this one is very tolerable.

Hope is an adventure starring the Eighth Doctor, Anji, and Fitz.

Mark Clapham's first solo novel is a slightly intriguing, though extremely flawed effort. He shows that he has a wonderful handle on the main characters of the series (the Doctor and his companions), but he doesn't bring us anybody interesting to have them deal with, with the exception of Silver. It says something when there are very few characters in a book, and yet you still can't really tell them apart except by remembering their names and their job descriptions.

The Doctor and crew arrive on the planet Endpoint after having taxed the TARDIS to its limits. The city of Hope is a twisted mass of steel situated on a vast, acidic sea. Upon landing, the TARDIS quickly falls into this sea and sinks to the bottom, leaving our heroes trapped. Silver, the most powerful man in Hope, offers to retrieve it for the Doctor, for a price. Thus, begins a whodunnit, and the Doctor must solve a series of murders in order to restore his freedom. While he does that, one of his companions is doing something else that could make this mystery academic.

The plot of this book is divided into two parts, with a fairly boring joining of the two. The book starts out very well, with an interesting concept and a good introduction to Silver. You really find yourself wondering what is happening, who is committing these murders. The idea of Hope is good, and Clapham sets the scene wonderfully. You can feel the desolation of Hope, a city with a toxic atmosphere resting in a toxic sea on a poisonous planet.

However, the book quickly devolves. Silver, while being a well-rounded character, is described in almost comic book terms, even given an origin story. I could see the panels of the comic as his past was being described. A whole chapter is devoted to this (and even given the name "Secret Origins!") and it brings the book to a grinding halt that it never recovers from. While he does have an interesting origin, the way this origin is told is simply tedious. It's a shame, too, because Silver is ultimately the most interesting character in the book.

The rest of the characters aren't nearly as good. Clapham only creates three or four other characters, and they're still not memorable. One of them doesn't seem to have any purpose. He's only in two brief scenes, and while his first scene hints that he'll be more important to the plot, he ultimately just disappears. One could say that he's there to represent the typical citizen of Hope, but if so, it's not done very effectively. Miraso is a bit more interesting, but she's still very one-note. Powlin is a cliched tired cop. There are a couple of characters introduced later who are also pretty basic.

The Doctor and his companions, however, are extremely well done, and they save the book from being a boring morass. Anji finally gets a meaty role, as she has to make some decisions that could very well affect the bond that has formed between her and her friends. Watching her agonize with her decision is very interesting, and Clapham writes her well. A follower of the Doctor Who series could wonder why it's taken her so long to deal with some of these issues, but that's not a problem in the book itself. The Doctor is also very good, with his curiosity and drive to help people very prominent. The only one who suffers a bit is Fitz, as he's not given a lot of any consequence to do, but what is there is good. He goes off on a brief diversion that ultimately doesn't have much to do with anything but keep him busy.

I haven't spoken much about the plot, and there's a reason for that. There isn't really much of one. The book is very short for a Who book (249 pages) and yet it still feels padded. There are 10 pages of Silver's origin, there's Fitz's side plot, and then the rather lengthy link between the two parts of the story. Silver's origin isn't the only thing that feels like a comic book, as he is introduced in a hail of bullets, with everybody looking on him in awe as he presents himself. It just didn't work for me. The initial story is kind of interesting, but the second part of the book sinks into cliché and becomes very boring. Anji is the only thing that keeps the reader's interest at all.

Ultimately, it's a good thing that the book is fairly short. Even as short as it is, it still took me awhile to get through it. Once I got past the really intriguing set up, I was fairly bored. Thankfully, every time I got near the breaking point, Clapham would do something really neat with one of the regulars, or have some little character scene that was all too rare, and the book would pick up again momentarily. It was enough to keep me going, and enough to earn it three stars (probably 2.5 if half-stars could be given). There are signs that Clapham has a good book in him, but unfortunately this isn't it.

For the most part, HOPE is a fairly generic book that doesn't do much in the way of pushing the boundaries. The plot is familiar, and feels uninspired. Only a handful of things try to pull the story out of the standard conventions. And while those hopeful moments are very good for what they are, they aren't quite enough to pull the entirety of the book out of the wastelands of mediocrity.

The setting for HOPE is a result of some fantastic pieces of writing, and one wishes that the plot that took place in this location could have matched it. Hope, a city in the far distant future on the planet Endpoint, is a gigantic metal structure, constructed on the top of massive metal legs that keep its inhabitants relatively safe from the poisonous, acidic seas of the planet below. It's a city of twisted girders, metallic walkways and ominous shadows. The people who live there believe they are among the last vestiges of humanoid life in the universe. With only a few exceptions, they are poor, they are hungry, they steal what they can get, and protect what they steal with their lives. Hope is a gritty and strange place. It, of course, looks absolutely nothing like the New York Sitting On A Layer Of Toothpicks image that for some reason made it onto the front cover.

A major flaw in HOPE is that the break between the two primary parts of the story stretches on for slightly too long. While reading, it seems that everything has been solved by page 170, and even the TARDIS regulars start remarking on the fact that they should have moved on by now. It takes far too much time for the next part of the story to begin and this error could have been so easily avoided. The story doesn't bounce back quickly enough, and as a result, the book suffers for it. And, unfortunately, when the book does come sputtering back to life, it's far less interesting than it was before. The main secondary character goes from being an interesting person and concept in his own right to being a clichéd and tired villain that we've seen many times before.

The plot is really too lightweight to support that kind of breaking up of the action. The book begins as a relatively engaging whodunit that starts off with a lot of potential. Doctor Who usually does this sort of thing well, and the atmosphere that's created here does a lot to inspire confidence about the eventual progress of the book. Unfortunately, while the mystery is appealing, it's not overly complicated, and is therefore not able to be sustained for the entirety of the book. The Doctor solves the mystery at about the halfway point, and the plot quickly degenerates from there.

On the other hand, Clapham executed a handful of small moments so expertly, that one wishes that the entire book had been made up of these little gems. There's a two-page section near the end told from the point of view of a lowly evil lackey. Near the beginning, a casually discarded apple core in the Doctor's pocket helps revive a long dead species of fruit. Anji faces a difficult decision, and her reaction to is handled amazingly well and with quite a lot of maturity. She manages to become a realistic human being, and one who isn't overwhelmed by sentimentality. The choice that she makes reflects careful calculation, albeit one that's obviously being tempered by some serious emotions. It would have been extremely easy for this sort of thing to turn out horribly (indeed, when I saw what was coming, I began to brace myself) but it's managed with extreme confidence and care.

It's a shame that these moments that I mentioned are only moments and not the tone of the whole story. Had the entire book been written at this level, then we would have been looking at one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. Unfortunately, these are only brief looks at a greater work that we see through the cracks in HOPE. The flimsiness of the plot means that the story feels as though it were stretched far past the author's ability to adequately pad. HOPE probably would have made for an excellent Telos novella, but as a full-length novel, it just doesn't quite work as well as it should.