Customer Reviews

Rags (Doctor Who)

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

 

 

A strange series of violent events surround the tour of an unnamed band through England. UNIT investigate, first in the form of the Doctor and Jo and later, as the scale of events escalates, the troops are called in. But what is happening on the surface is nowhere near the full story...

This book is not what I would normally expect from a Third Doctor, as it contains a large proportion of violence and a relative small amount of the Doctor (I can't imagine Jon Pertwee would except such a relatively small role!).

Set in England in the 70s, with the punk rock revolution occurring, the story is one that is essentially a horror novel with Doctor Who characters involved, but the most pivotal roles go to characters who are introduced in this book.

It is a good enough book, quite readable, but the relatively passive roles that the regulars play is not likely to draw the regular Doctor Who reader in if the story doesn't suit.

An alien force has arrived on Earth, drawn by our planet's natural lines of power. It feeds on anger and unrest, and to this end employs a punk rock band to tour across England's countryside, inciting hatred and violence in the guise of hideous and literal class warfare.

RAGS isn't much of a DOCTOR WHO adventure. The characters from the show (Jo Grant, The Brigadier, and the men of UNIT) barely make an appearance until the final third of the book, and the Doctor himself least of all. Furthermore, his characterization did not evoke the third Doctor - or any Doctor - for me. He does and says very little, and at those times seems out of character.

The story itself is very slow and the situations remain pretty constant from start to finish with little progression in between. If I hadn't been counting the pages, I'd have been surprised I was two hundred pages in when I was. On the plus side, the author does take time to develop his supporting cast into more than just the usual throwaways. But their back stories never quite gain relevance in regard to the main plot. Capped off with an unsatisfying finale, this isn't an adventure I would particularly recommend.

A band of punk rockers and their filthy cattle truck has started a convoy across the South west of England gathering loyal followers in their wake of destruction and murder everywhere they play. With Jo having succumbed to the malevolent pull of hatred from the band and the Doctor lost in some limbo void, it looks like its up to UNIT to solve the problem the way the Brigadier likes to, with all guns ablazing.

You'll find that RAGs is a very different style of Doctor Who, written with a huge amount of horror elements along with very visual violent scenes. This horror element fits in perfectly with the time it is set in, the English countryside atmosphere helping make the tone perfect and feels like it is a JAMES HERBERT novel.

You'll also notice that the Doctor, although he does play a big part in the finale, isn't really around much throughout the novel. He is either procrastinating about whether to do something proactive about this convoy or he is lost in some mind controlled void. Although the author does recognise this in the book, it does seem the Doctor was only a background character. Although the mind trip does involve some of the Doctor's subconscious doubts about himself, which are always good. This book could have easily been written without being placed in the Doctor Who universe at all.

Characterisation is excellent for the Doctor, Jo and all the regulars of UNIT with Mike Yates shining through again as he tends to with novelisations he is in (as opposed to the sorry git he is portrayed on TV.)

Overall, this is a good British horror book that just happens to involve the Doctor. RECOMMENDED!!

The punk ethos enters the Doctor Who universe for the first time since Paul Cornell's _No Future_, where its main function was to sweep the reader up with easy slogans and an unironic sense that conformity to the anti-standard is more noble than conformity to the standard. _Rags_ is the antithesis of that type of easy analysis and comes across as one of the strongest Doctor Who books ever because of it.

This is an ugly book. There are many extremely uncomfortable moments in the narrative, stemming from both depictions of violence to some wholly unsettling imagery. The magnitude of the threat and the way it seems to effortless sideline the Doctor, Jo, and the Brigadier will give you chills. There are passages where you will have to stop reading and close your eyes against the creeping horror that lurks throughout the book. The heart of the story is raw, brutal anarchy wrapped in every evil foible of the human psyche, and when the final resolution comes you will feel relief but you may not be reassured.

Some will argue that the Doctor doesn't have an active enough role in this novel. Personally, I think the Doctor's role was exactly right. I don't think any Doctor whould have a center-stage role in a story like this, but more importantly the final resolution is completely incumbent upon the Doctor's presence. I shudder to think what would have happened had the Doctor not been there at the end.

If you like horror novels, you have absolutely no excuse for not reading this book. It's fantastic.

"Rags" is certainly not for everyone's taste. It's moody and gruesome and contains almost intimidating amounts of British extreme culture as sampled in the mid-1970s. Certainly many references to punk band I'm quite sure I've never heard of. Nominally a story featuring the Third Doctor (long seen as a figure of the Establishment), the bubbly Jo Grant, and UNIT, this book views our heroes through a glass very darkly indeed.

Rampant references to punk culture, Stonehenge, and Doctor Who's private angst -- how's that for a combination? Well, 1994's "No Future" got there first, but "Rags" is far more extreme and gritty, and sans the happy, fluffy ending.

Still, if you can stomach the constant stream of blood and cynicism -- first-time DW author Lewis doesn't seem to be taking anybody's side, and the only character with a happy ending has to leave our "dimension" to achieve it -- you'll find this to be a harrowing, intelligent read in the style of some of Stephen King's darker hours. Surely if Richard Bachman were British this is the kind of book you might reasonably expect to see him write.

Obviously "Rags" cannot be recommended to everyone, but it's written in a bold style and tells us that this is a story the author *really* wanted to tell. Since we so rarely see such storytelling passion in our DW novels these days, "Rags" certainly brightened my month. In a dark way.

Inventive, imaginative and nightmarish! This is a great book for the Doctor Who fan who has a bit of imagination and likes it when Doctor Who goes off the track into unfamiliar territory.

Mick Lewis is a visual writer, and his images are both haunting and disturbing which really draw the reader into his world of moor-ish terror.

I'll admit to Dr. Who books as being somewhat of a cheap thrill for me. I loved the show growing up and found out a few years ago that, while times have definitely changed, I still do. And the books are great fun. Normally...

Unfortunately Mick Lewis chose to use an insane amount of violence and gore in Rags. Not that I object to that kind of thing as long as its appropriate to the story. But in this case it wasn't. I'm used to a Dr. Who with cheesy monsters, maybe a few chills and surprises and certainly, bad things do happen. A few of the Dr. Who books have been quite graphic but this takes the cake.

What bothers me most is that the author did this to the Third Doctor and Jo - my favorite combination. If you don't have to read this one, don't. If you absolutely must, don't say no one warned you of possible dissappointment.

This definitely isn't a "feel good" novel. A lot of people are going to be (and probably were) turned off by the rather extreme amount of violence and gore in this novel. On just about every other page we're subjected to something horrible happening to someone, or a piece of rather disturbing imagery, or maybe both at the same time if the book is feeling bold. It's about the most "adult" feeling of the Who novels to come down the pike in some time, going for a horror tone that wouldn't have been out of place during the Tom Baker era, if not for the fact that it's so graphic. Considering that in recent books we've been subjected to poorly done homages and outright going through the motions, this is a welcome change of pace, even if it doesn't get everything perfectly right.

It does get quite a bit right, however. The idea is that a group of punk-mummers are roaming around the countryside playing songs filled with hate that manage to get the audience so riled up that hideous acts of violence commence, generally involving a bit of class warfare, between the more well-heeled members of society and the working class, neither of whom can really admit to liking the other. To do this he brings in a rather large supporting cast for one of these novels, at the risk of shoving the main characters aside, but manages to give them all detailed histories and personalities. In doing so he manages to create a situation less "Doctor Who" then a story where the Doctor happens to wander in and gets immediately shunted off to the side. Leaving everyone to their own devices lets go of the notion that the Doctor is just going to saunter in and save everyone like he normally does. The class warfare stuff, the punks and the hippies and the royals are handled much better than in Eighth Doctor novel "The Space Age" managing to not keep repeating the same arguments over and over again. The descriptions, in their own way, achieve a kind of macabre beauty, with an intensity that we don't normally see from this line. The whole scenario feels grimy and gritty and horrifying, and in tone feels like a spiritual cousin of sorts to George R. R. Martin's "The Armageddon Rag", where the unifying power of music can be used to cause a great deal of harm.

All, however, is not perfect, as much as I enjoyed the premise and presentation. The initial setup, while interesting, winds up getting repeated over and over again as the band sets up, plays some songs, stands around while murder occurs and then moves on to the next gig, with more followers. It doesn't give us much forward momentum in the pages, and if not for the vast amount of side characters and their stories, it would seem awful static. The Doctor doesn't come across as a man with wise decision making skills either, letting the proceedings go on for far too long before deciding to do something about it, even though people are getting brutally murdered left and right, with the band as the only common denominator. Also, leaving Jo Grant behind to keep an eye on things winds up being a gob-smackingly terrible decision, as she already seems to be falling under the music's thrall before they part and winds up essentially getting brainwashed (and becoming slightly Sapphic with Chinese Punk Girl, for those interested in that kind of thing). Meanwhile UNIT mostly stands around and either does nothing or the more gung-ho members of the team wish to start putting bullets in everyone. You would think after the first circumstance, they would throw a cordon up and just shut down the whole affair, instead of following along blindly.

The Doctor, of course, gets sidetracked in an extremely surreal thread where whoever is in charge of the band is clearly doing its best to mess with him, although we do get treated to an image of a young Wendy Padbury in the nude, again for those interested in that sort of thrill. This also seems to have less to do with the plot than to keep the Doctor from solving things too early. Amusingly, the character who comes off in this the best is Mike Yates, despite his terrible disguise winds up being the most effective out of everyone is terms of getting stuff done.

Some people are going to have a problem with the ending, which I can't blame them. For one, you have beloved UNIT regulars succumbing to music-induced bloodlust and just slaughtering hordes of hippies, with the last chapter or two of the book so blood drenched it puts all the previous chapters to shame. And then the alien (?) behind all of this gets defeated on like the last two pages but in a very vague fashion and then the book just ends. Everyone wakes up covered in blood, has a second to feel horrified and then it's off to the next exciting adventure. It's not a real grand climax so much as the book just needed to end somewhere. The force behind all the mummers isn't very well defined either, it clearly wants to just kill everyone but why would an alien know how to use the medium of Earth music, which it probably doesn't understand. We don't get much of a sense of it anyway, other than a discussion between it and the Doctor before it turns into a ranty "Yoouuu cannot stop me!" type of alien. Before they shoot it.

So, yeah, it's flawed. But in terms of ambition and sheer going for the gusto it has more to recommend it than the more colorless books that proceeded it. It's bloodthirsty and horrifying and extreme, all the things that Doctor Who normally isn't, and for that notion alone I kind of like it.

This is a very difficult review to write. I can see that the book is well written. The idea of an alien feeding on the social rage inside a society is actually rather interesting. The Doctor, while not really doing a lot in the book, is instrumental in the resolution, so there isn't even that complaint to make against it.

This book just was not enjoyable to me, and it wasn't interesting enough to overcome that. It's Dr. Who meets Punk Rock on acid. It's a very violent book, and it doesn't pull any punches in the description of said violence. It's almost over the top in that aspect. It certainly didn't offend me, but it did become a bit old-hat and stopped affecting me. I remember in a review of Showgirls, Roger Ebert (or maybe it was Siskel) said that there were so many naked breasts in it that, after a time, you stopped even noticing them. It was much the same way with the violence in this novel. Page after page is filled with it. It gets the point across, but it was just a little too much for me.

The Doctor is characterized pretty well, but I had a little problem with Jo. She seemed even more secondary than usual, existing only to be taken over by the entity. She didn't really add much to the plot. I know that happens often in televised Who, but it shouldn't in the books.

The book *is* well-written, though. It is certainly a horror novel, and if you're into that sort of thing, you will probably like it. Personally, I didn't like it and found it a real struggle to get through. But I can see the book underneath, and thus have to give it 3 stars. For me, personally, it's a 1 or 2 star book. If you really like horror, or you really like reading about rage and violence, it could easily be a 5 star book. So let's settle for 3.

I am ashamed to say I read this book to the end. I kept hoping that the nightmare was just that- a nightmare. No, the blatent violence and gore of this book should never have been allowed to be published. Terminator or Aliens would be more restful reading!