Customer Reviews

The Scarlet Empress (Doctor Who series)

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

 

 

Pual Magrs' first foray into the Whoniverse is written very competently. In fact, I didn't notice any glaring grammatical errors. This is probably the nicest thing I'm going to say about this book.

I don't have a problem with magic realism; in fact, I absolutely adore _The Blue Angel_, Magrs' second book with Jeremy Hoad. However, this one just doesn't work. The reason why is simple; Magrs is so busy coming up with neat little ways to describe things that he forgot to include a coherent plot in the novel.

The plot loosely revolves around a quest. The Doctor and Sam meet up with a figure from the Doctor's past named Iris, a batty Time Lady who looks a little like the town librarian and seems to be quietly appropriating the Doctor's past adventures for herself. Along the way, they meet up with four terminally uninteresting characters and ramble around in a haphazard manner, fiddling around with various denziens of the planet Prospero and generally being useless. Things culminate in a showdown which completely removes any credibility from the quest. The characters wander off in seperate directions and the reader is left with the shell-shocked feeling that the author is screaming about his cleverness into the reader's ear with a megaphone.

Paul Magrs needs a co-writer to be effective; in _The Blue Angel_, various ideas are tossed at the reader all at once, only to be stitched into a coherent picture by the end. The overwhelming feeling left at the end of _The Scarlet Empress_ is, "Um, is that it?"

This is not a book for anyone who does not *really* enjoy reading, as it is as much a story *about* story-telling as it is a story in itself. Full of digressions, fillips, curlicues, dead-ends, jumps in the narrative, illogicalities, oddities, eccentrics, and just plain weirdness, it is also not for someone expecting a straight-forward adventure tale. The Doctor is as much spectator or participant, the plot is rather thin (until the end), and the prose style dense and ornate. But if you stick with it and savor it for what it is, rather than reject it for what it isn't, you will find it engrossing, delectable, unique, and unforgettable.

Imagine throwing in the pure inventiveness of Grant Morrison, the best fanciful idiocy of the Doctor Who television series, and an army of shaved bears, and you may get an idea of the joy Paul Magrs has delivered with 'The Scarlet Empress'. It's been said almost to the point of cliche that this is a 'strange' book--and it is. It's also a delight, moving the good Doctor fully into the possibilities of the narrative imagination. This is not your generic Doctor Who--no running through corridors, no whiffy time mechanics, no playing it safe. This is a Doctor Who adventure that grabs you by the lapels and gives you a big Groucho Marx kiss. Then, when you least expect it, it can break your heart.
You've been warned. If you love Doctor Who being pushed forward, then why are you still reading this? Order, my child. Order.

It's Doctor Who because it's completely unlike anything that Doctor Who has ever done before. Better than that, it's good Doctor Who because it doesn't just stop at pushing the multi-faceted envelope; it's entertaining and interesting at the same time. It even stops at a few points for some interesting self-aware passages that offer some thoughts on the nature of story-telling that were well-written enough to stop just before they became too pretentious.

It's a very complicated book, with many jumps in the narrative from different viewpoints, sometimes several within the same page. This can be a little difficult at times, but it's very rewarding overall. The perspectives from different characters and cultures are very rich and detailed, and all of them are treated with a good degree of respect.

There are one or two weak points. At some places, the plot almost disappears and these sections tend to drag a bit. There are other spots where the suspension of disbelief that was required was just a more than what I was willing to give. I can forgive one or two little coincidences, but there are some in here that are just so great that I felt they hurt the overall quality of the book.

On the whole, this is one of the best EDAs that I have read and is well worth a second read.

Oh boy howdy is this a change of pace. One thing that's nice about this series is just when you think they're starting to settle into a rut of telling perfectly nice but utterly pedestrian stories, they go and throw you a curveball like this. According to Magrs' notes toward the back of the book, he's written quite a few "real" books (i.e. not "Who" novels) and brings a slightly literary sensibility to something that normally is fairly silly. The narrative that gets draped over the plot is quite ornate, detouring for little aside stories and perspective tricks, shifting from omniscient third person to first person to the story seen through the lens of a camera. He's clearly given a lot of thought into the way you tell the story.

Unfortunately, there's not much story on top of that, which may bother some people. The Doctor and Sam land on Hyspero, a place that is pretty magical and wind up joining in the misadventures of fellow Time Lady and Doctor-fan Iris Wildthyme, who has been forced into a quest by the Scarlet Empress who rules the planet, tasked with putting together an old band of four heroes in order to retrieve something dear to her.

And that, children, is the plot. Yeah, I know, not much. If not for Magrs' gift in telling the story, his imagination and ability to make loopy ideas seem perfectly natural, this would be utterly dull. As it is, it starts to fall apart under close inspection but when you're inside it does the job. "Who" at its very best was able to construct whole worlds that were alien to what we knew and were functioning just fine, until the Doctor and company showed up to wreck things. Suggesting a world just beyond the borders of the screen. This story comes close to doing that, even if we never get a real sense of the world of Hyspero as anything other than a random collection of fantastic elements. But he tries.

The other big addition to the Who canon is Iris Wildthyme, apparently one of Magrs' old characters that he adapted for the book. I'm not sure how I feel about her, on some level she's fun and on another level she feels like a commentary on fan-fiction and its propensity for Mary Sue characters, when the author basically writes him or herself in as a perfect person. Iris co-opts the Doctor's adventures for her own, seeks to live his life and is in love with him. If that's fan commentary, it's a brutal subtext. But she remains a nice way to reference old events without drowning the reader in old continuity references and works in Magrs theme about telling stories and who they're true for ultimately.

And not for nothing, he writes a pretty good Doctor and Sam. Even when they're acting like the only sane people on the planet or just reacting to events unfolding around them, he makes them both fairly useful and gives them actual personalities instead of (in the Doctor's case) coasting on folk memories of how he should be or (in Sam's case) doing his best with what little the books have given him so far. He even makes the "in love with the Doctor" thing not so embarrassing and almost sweet.

If the plot was stronger (and the resolution is basically: "and we clicked our heels and it all got better") this would a near Who-masterpiece. As it is, it's a much needed breath of fresh air, not a paradigm shift like "Alien Bodies" but the sound of someone blowing the dust off the concept and going, "Let's try something different." He doesn't totally succeed, but I'd prefer a dozen failures like this than yet another exciting adventure with the Cybermen.

Once I got used to the writing style, I enjoyed the book very much. It was the first 8th Doctor book I'd read and I identified with Iris and her feelings for #8. Sigh.... Ahem, I digress. The characters and setting were like something out of The Arabian Nights. And Iris' TARDIS was smashing! I would like to see more stories featuring Iris and the past Doctors. Paul, are you reading this???

Having already read Magrs' novels MARKED FOR LIFE, DOES IT SHOW? and COULD IT BE MAGIC? I was already familiar with his style (and with Iris, who appears in all his books) and this book proves both a valuable addition to the canon of his works and to the canon of DR WHO books. This is definitely the best DR WHO novel since Virgin's LEFT HANDED HUMMINGBIRD by Kate Orman, and I'm looking forward to Paul's next, which he is writing with his boyfriend Jeremy.

Dear oh dear, this book should never have been printed. The setting is childish. The characters are immature and unbelievable and Iris Wildthyme is just plain annoying. As for the eighth doctor... well, not too bad, but it didn't feel like Paul McGann. If anyone intends to read this book I suggest they stop at the blank line on page 98. Before that I quite enjoyed the desert setting but afterwards the events descend into a greatest hits compilation of cliches. If you'd stopped after 98 pages it may have been an OK book. As it is, I'm afraid, it's overlong and boring.

This book is a big disgrace to the Dr. Who World and waist of valuable reading time. I got so bored reading this book, on many occassions I fell asleep while reading. The reason why I continued reading until the end is that I did not want my money to go to waist. I enjoyed seeing Iris' return, however, that did not even spice the book up. This book sadly lacked a sense of direction in it, and should be recalled from all book stores where it is sold.

I'll keep this simple by just saying I completely enjoyed this imaginative story. It's characters are unique and the story is one well paced jaunt. Here, the Doctor travels cross-country on a distant planet and on a doubledecker bus to carry out a mission with several companions his old friend Iris, a fellow Timelord. Iris alone makes this book worth its value--she's a character like no other and one we can only hope will pop up again sometime soon! This 8th Doctor is just getting better in every book and here he proves he could easily become a fan favorite.