| STRANGE ENGLAND by Simon Messingham |
| Story 29 Synopsis: The TARDIS lands in a peaceful wood, where odd things start to happen. A girl is attacked by a strange insect, and the Doctor and Bernice struggle to get her to the safety of a nearby house. Ace finds herself transported to Wychborn where she falls foul of the local thugs, and together with a new ally called Richard Aickland, is taken to see Dr Rix. The Doctor and Bernice find the people in the house living a strange existence, and they suspect they're not on Earth after all. Rix is mad, concerned only about his sick son. Ace finds that the Manor where her friends are is a construct, to which she travels with Rix. Bernice meets a strange man called the Quack, who pursues her to the Manor. The Doctor realises the Manor construct is breaking down, and tries to get back to the TARDIS. Ace and Bernice are aghast at leaving their friends behind, but he explains that it was their fault that everything went wrong anyway. He tracks down the TARDIS that created the Wychborn bubble they entered, and finds Galah, a Time Lady he once knew, attached to her console, sustaining the pocket world. He enters it mentally, to find that Rix has assumed command. Ace and Bernice find a way to physically re-enter the dreamscape, and find Aickland. Rix believes himself a god, and tries to consume the Doctor. With help from Galah, he shows Rix what he has done, and is able to stop him. Ace, Bernice and Aickland are saved. Galah is dying, but the Doctor helps her transfer her mind into Charlotte, a construct from her world, whom Aickland asks to marry. He later writes ghost stories. |
| Review:- A strange haunted house tale with some quite brutal attacks by nature... A friend of Mark Gatiss, Messingham's first book here pitches the TARDIS team into a seemingly familiar world of summery English times. But it soon transpires that things are far deadlier than they seem. Ace is cast out, whilst the Doctor and Bernice fail to save a girl from a cruel death. And then it starts to get much worse... There is a lot that feels cliched about the book, certainly in the fake world in which the Doctor and Bernice get lumbered. However, that turns out to be deliberate, as they're only constructs of a supposed type, so the butler is dutiful in spite of all the terror, the maids are mute as would be their place etc. Balancing this out is the violence - the cook who gets eaten, the gardener swallowed by a tree, and so on. In Ace's adventure, there is more violence, but of a more factual nature - broken fingers, gunshots to the head, broken necks etc. This is tied up in the tragic figure of Doctor Rix. Rix has suffered for leading a God-fearing life and having a son born with deformed legs. Despite his medical background, he cannot cope with this, and wishes to mete out his anger on the rest of the world. Thus, he has established a crude control over his village, who fear him as much as any thuggish overlord. He cares little for the pain of others, only concerned about his son't misfortune. So, not only is he believably motivated, he sees nothing wrong in his decision-making. It is only via the fluke of Arthur's unnatural power that Ace survives a broken neck, and broken fingers. This plot contrivance rankles a bit, since her fate is only of concern because she is a regular character. Others don't fare so luckily. Once Ace leads Aickland and Rix back to the pseudo-reality where the Doctor and Bernice are, then the story limps to an early conclusion, the Doctor having come to the unusual conclusion that their arrival caused all the trouble, and the best they can do is go away and hope for the best. As Messingham said in an interview after to DWM, this great ending was never going to be acceptable, so he instead adds on the rise of Rix, and the reveal of Galah, yet another old Gallifreyan associate of the Doctor, but one of the nicer ones. Always nice to know that there are some Time Lords who aren't power-mad nutters. So, all it then needs is to show Rix the error of his ways, and wind up the dream, allowing Galah a new future married to Aickland, whose sole point of the novel is to reference Robert Aickman, a writer I personally have never otherwise heard of. Hey ho... I struggled with this book on the first time I read it, but coming to it again years later, I find it a lot better. The brutal country house motif would be revisited to better effect just 3 books later, in Falls The Shadow, but with the compelling villain of Rix to drive this, it still sustains the interest to the reader. The regulars don't get much depth, merely being placeholders for the plot, which makes a change. On the whole, there's a decent little tale here. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy of this book. |