Customer Reviews

The Wages of Sin (Doctor Who Series)

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

 

 

At a bantamweight 250 pages, David A. McIntee has finally churned out the svelte book we've been waiting for since his 1993 knockout debut effort White Darkness. This hard-hitting look at the death of Rasputin pulls no punches, and we're left with a winning historical novel.

That's right, a pure historical. Oh, it doesn't seem that way at first -- this book opens in Tunguska in 1908, a scene familiar to those who've read the right DW novels and seen the right X-Files episodes (interestingly, McIntee was also the first DW writer to reference X-Files in his fiction). But happily, the novel stays focussed in and around palace intrigue in 1916 St. Petersburg. There is romance, religion gone awry, and, as this is nominally a 3rd Doctor novel, a Bondian subplot.

Since it's short and has large print and wide margins, Wages of Sin is almost entirely about G. E. Rasputin and his effect on the ladies of the TARDIS. He and the Doctor share just one brief, mute exchange, through a sheet of ice (and it's a marvelous visual). The Mad Monk also flirts with Jo and verbally fences with Liz.

The choice of companions is unique -- Elizabeth Shaw returns from Cambridge after Season 10, but shares little if any page time with the Doctor. Or perhaps this is not peculiar; Caroline John and Jon Pertwee had a similar lack of chemistry during their lone year together. Liz, and Jo, are well-portrayed and used here. Jo falls for Rasputin, but isn't made out as a dimwit; McIntee appears to have sympathy for her point of view and even the Doctor condones it. And Liz's scientific ruminations mirror the dry, lecture-prone writing, but that's preferable to Liz's other first-ever journey through time (Eye of the Giant), in which all she wants to do is wash her hair.

The lone fault of the DW historical is that we already know what happens, and the Doctor usually isn't there when it does. This time, he has to run halfway to Finland just to miss out on most of Rasputin's exquisite 30-page death sequence. Jo and Liz are the actors here. Thankfully Pertwee is very faithfully rendered while he's on the page.

The attention to detail is fine. There's a dandy explanation as to how no poison surfaced in Rasputin's corpse, in spite of the copious amounts Yusopov (or Youssopov, &c. -- McIntee has a smorgasboard of transliterations to choose from with all the factual characters) fed him. There's no postscript, unfortunately -- a longer novel may have taken us to the real-life Yusupov's final days, which include a high-profile American lawsuit against a Rasputin TV movie. Or could have used the fickle memory of the blind old man as a framing tale. But in Wages of Sin, we get just the assassination plotnothing but fact, avoiding the fanciful or silly, and it's a nice change of pace from the norm.

At the end of 'The Three Doctors', the Time Lords had returned the secrets of operating the TARDIS to the Doctor in thanks for his role is saving the universe. At the end of that story, he talks about repairing and testing the TARDIS before haring off around time and space. The next televised story, 'Carnival of Monsters', appears to take place after this maintenance.

David McIntee's novel takes place in the period between the two stories. The Doctor has repaired the TARDIS and decides to take a safe test flight into Earth's past. He invites Professor Elizabeth Shaw, who was his assistant at the start of his exile on Earth to Join he and Jo on the flight and they head for a point in history of Liz's choosing - the impact on Earth by a extraterrestrial body at Tunguska in 1908.

However, things never go as they were planned, and the Doctor, Liz and Jo end up in Russia in 1916, up to their eyeballs in the intrigue of the court of Tsar Nicholas and the strange influence of Rasputin...

An interesting historical, far more successful than Mr. McIntee's own inclusion of the Marquis de Sade in 'The Man in the Velvet Mask'. The general details around Rasputin's life and death are probably known to many, so it is interesting to see this represented in the Doctor Who format.

The best part of the book occurs at the very end of the book, reaffirming the view that "you can't rewrite history; not one line!" in a very dramatic fashion.

If you don't like Doctor Who historicals, avoid this one. But if you are happy with such stories, this one is interesting.

Jon Pertwee is probably my favourite Doctor of all time and this story is worthy of his incarnation. Set in Russia during the reign of the the Romanov's, it is a compelling story that doesn't need Bug eyed monsters and mad men trying to take over the world to make it exciting. And how Liz Shaw takes to the Doctor's current companion Jo Grant is very good. And for those who have seen or at least heard about the film Nicholas and Alexandria, you will really enjoy the appearance of the Mad Monk Rasputin and the author's take on his personality. I've been very pleased with Mr. McIntee's past novels and I feel that The Wages of Sin is probably the best novel he's done to date. Writing a book based on Historic Facts (although for the most part this is purely fictional) is a very difficult thing to do and I feel that he's done a very fine job with it in this book. Pick it up when you have the chance.

One of the things I miss from the television series of "Doctor Who" is the absence of the "pure" historicals. I know it sounds odd but once upon a time the Doctor travelled to periods in Earth's past and got into trouble that didn't involve werewolves or aliens or the like. The original conception of the show was to teach children, so the plan was to have them wind up in different times and thus everyone would learn about history and new cultures. Which meant the show probably would have lasted about two seasons. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Daleks showed up and they had a bit of a rethink.

I still miss the historicals though, for one the BBC did costume drama very well and two, not a lot of the classic ones survived the BBC's purge of the tapes back in the day. Want to see "The Massacre" . . . well, better hope someone finds it in their basement. But I'm sure the BBC has kicked themselves for that over the years so I'll refrain from saying anything else. Plus, I should be reviewing a book.

One thing the novels have been good at is bringing us back to the days of the pure historicals, freed of budgets or producers saying that what the kids really want to see are more aliens, we get occassional romps into other time periods. Here, the Third Doctor (interestingly, the one who brought the current concept of the historical back into play, when a Sontaran showed up in the otherwise straightforward "Time Warrior") with Jo and Liz go on back to Russia at the turn of the century. They've arrived because Liz wants to see where the meteor/comet/focus of conspiracy theories went down in Siberia but instead of arriving in 1908ish like they're supposed to, they wind up landing in 1916 Saint Petersburg instead. Late December as it turns out. If you know anything about a certain man named Rasputin, you might know where we're going with this.

McIntee does a great job capturing the charged atmosphere of Russia at the time. The peasants and the aristocracy were at each other's throats, the anarchists waiting for the revolution to start and the next few years really weren't going to be pleasant for anybody. Just about everyone has some kind of agenda, including all the foreign spies that are lurking around the city. And through it all saunters Rasputin, flawed and fascinating, attempting to sleep with anyone who might be a woman and exercising undue influence over every person he comes into contact with.

It all works so well that you wonder why McIntee even bothered to write a Who novel. One of the problems with the historicals is that when they include famous people and/or events things have to progress in a certain manner because nobody is about to wreck known history. Done properly, this can show the futility of interefering with events and give you a close up view of a different time (the aforementioned "Massacre", where everyone roams around until they realize what's coming and then have to get the heck out of the way before its too late).

But the opposite end of the spectrum is where the pull of history is so strong that you wonder what the plot needs the Doctor there at all for. As much fun as all the running around is and all the verbal sparring between Rasputin and just about everyone else in the cast (Jo gets to not act like a ditz for once and Liz demonstrates why I like when the Doctor is paired with actual adults) . . . once you realize that Rasputin is not making it out of the book alive, you're sort of just marking time until they get around to murdering him like they're supposed to. The Doctor and company really can't affect events, so it leaves him and the ladies are sort of window dressing until the main event finally unfolds.

Don't get me wrong, McIntee appears to have done his research and gets the details right. But other than the standard "Doctor Who" tropes (oops, someone took the TARDIS again!), it feels like a chamber opera that a older man in velvety clothing and his attractive companions happened to waltz in on. The story doesn't really need them and while this doesn't diminish the story, it does make you wonder what the point of it all is.

Coupled with the fact that the novel seems much shorter than the others (only two hundred and fifty pages, with slightly bigger print and large margins . . . if my teacher noticed when I did that in high school, I'm going to notice now) it does make the whole affair seem rather slight. However, we are left with a fine account of Russian intrigue leading up to the death of Grigor Rasputin and if we're lucky McIntee has a great novel about Russian history in him somewhere. And I'd be perfectly okay with him leaving the alien with the magic blue box at home and doing just that.

In my other review of this book, I called it slow and plodding. I'm back to make a better review of it.

The book starts off very slowly. It seems as if McIntee is just going through the motions. It starts to pick up after Jo meets Rasputin (it's not a spoiler, it's in the blurb). Things begin to get interesting. McIntee tries to take us into the mind of Rasputin, and does an admirable job. Liz has her part in it too, and does pretty well

The Doctor, however, is pretty much detatched from Jo's and Liz's problems. He's trying to get the TARDIS back, and has a bit of an adventure on his own.

The climax is, of course, the death of Rasputin (it's not a spoiler, it's in history books). McIntee tries to explain how hard it was to kill Rasputin using one of the companions, which I found stupid. But we won't go into that. Then the Doctor does something that amazes me. Something that wowed me. Want to know? Get the book.

All in all, this is better than I said before.

To say that this book is anything other than brilliant is a smack in the the face of all things WHO. For a fan of the historical stories this is great.

I have never been a great fan of the third doctor and Jo(with her passive style of companionship),but she is balanced out by Sarah. The book is filled with political intrigue and makes good reading.

All three of the characters do things that are unexpected, in roder to keep the timeline in order, and in turn have to make decisions on the sanctity of live.

And if nothing else McIntee did the impossible, he made Rasputin and the oppressive Russian artistocracy seem alright.

There is no aliens in this book for starters!!!The plot involves the russian revolation and rausptien(sp?). It moves at a snails pace .I would only buy this book if you are fan of the author and like stories like the Doctor Who stories"Black Orchid","The Crusades" ,and "The Aztec" otherwise skip this missing adventures. Maybe next time the author will give us some aliens or alien invasion instead. Please Next time you write do something more sci-fi like the fans will like you better for it!!!

This book is extremely hard to get into, and goes very slowly. The main characters are very boring. I would not recommend this to anyone.