After sixteen years of the novels being the major line of
Doctor
Who material, the return of the
series to TV screens caused an inevitable change in the status quo.
While we expected the novels to become more standalone, playing
second fiddle to the TV series, what we got was still a massive
comedown. From monthly novels that, for the most part, told strong,
mature
Doctor Who stories,
the range was cut to a mere six books a year, released in batches of
three. What's more, despite denials from BBC Books that the range
would dumb down, the
Doctor Who novels
were shortened, become more standard TV tie-in affairs, and at first
seemed to be aimed strictly at the eight-to-ten-year-old demographic.
Not there's anything wrong with writing for that market, but with the
new TV series balancing the adult and child audiences so well, the
ninth Doctor books were a missed opportunity.
Except for one, a single novel
out of the six that came close to matching the standard set by the
NAs and EDAs.
Only Human is
by far and away the best of the ninth Doctor releases, marrying
genuinely funny comedy with an engaging adventure that, unlike its
stablemates, actually feels like it's a part of the TV series that it
accompanies. Were it not for the enormous budget required, it would
be easy to imagine
Only Human being
adapted for television, starring Eccleston, Piper and Barrowman.
Gareth Roberts was, strangely,
overlooked when it came to the initial round-up of writers for the
revived TV series. While Russell T. Davies recruited his fellow New
Adventurers who had moved onto greater things, Roberts, author of
some of the best regarded of the Virgin novels, was overlooked. In
time, he wrote for
The Sarah Jane Adventures and
some supplementary material for the series, before finally getting
onto the regular writing staff in time for Moffat's tenure as
showrunner. To begin with, though, he provided
Only Human,
and it's hard not to see it as something of an audition piece for his
TV
Who work.
Perhaps part of the reason for his not
being included from the off is that he is often regarded as one of
the more old-fashioned authors in the range. His particular talent
when writing for Virgin was recreating the Tom Baker era of the late
1970s in prose, only improving upon and updating it. However, his New
Adventures generally tried new things, and even the ones that weren't
particularly successful were at least interesting. And anyway, Mark
Gatiss got a gig, and he's even more old-fashioned.
With
Only Human,
Roberts writes to his strengths. There's a strong core concept here –
two, in fact – around which he hangs a funny, diverting tall tale.
As part of the second trio of new series novels,
Only Human
features the ninth Doctor, Rose
and Jack, a TARDIS team we never really got to see on TV (in
The
Empty Child Jack was a
pseudo-villain being introduced to
Doctor Who,
in
Boom Town Mickey
was part of the team, and in the finale, the characters were forcibly
separated for most of the run time). While we do get some good
moments for the trio at the beginning, Jack is soon separated from
the other two and given his own strand of narrative. This works well,
since the Doctor and Rose's plot would have struggled to support him
as well. Perhaps this goes to show that a regular
Doctor
Who adventure doesn't have room
for both Jack and the Doctor.
All three characters are
perfectly recreated on the page. It's one of those books that speaks
with the characters' voices, with no effort required to fill in the
gap between page and screen. The initial hook is the unexplained
presence of a Neanderthal man in modern Bromley, which is batty
enough juxtaposition to be both a perfect example of a new series
concept and a Roberts one (Roberts's first book,
The
Highest Science, featured a
double decker bus stranded on an alien planet, a concept he
resurrected for
Planet of the Dead).
The Neanderthal in question, Das, is the triumph of the book, a fully
fleshed-out, believable character. Unable to return home due to the
deadly nature of the “dirty rip” time engine that brought him to
the future, Das has to make a new life in 21
st
century Britain. Roberts chooses to relate this through diary
entries, both those of Das and of Jack, who is assigned to help him
assimilate. These provide some of the funniest moments of the book,
and easily the most poignant, as Das slowly learns to be happy in the
modern world.
The Doctor and Rose, meanwhile,
travel back 28,000 years to find out how Das was thrown forward, and
discover the other big concept for the book. The stone age has become
a base camp for a group of humans from somewhere around the year
438,000. an unexplored part of the vast expanse of human history in
Doctor Who, people
from this era have no access to electric technology and have instead
become masters of biology. In a plot strand that would later be
co-opted for the episode
Gridlock,
people of this time suppress their negative emotions with a cocktail
of drugs, with the exception of a few stubborn “Refusers.”
The actual plot is fairly perfunctory,
with an ingenious mastermind creating a species of mutated human
predators called Hy-Bractors, as a replacement for the human race.
While the Hy-Bractors are pretty generic, the plot does the job of
getting the Doctor and Rose into a series of misadventures that keep
the story moving. The Doctor gets to converse with the n while she
explored his brain, while Rose fares even worse, finding herself
married to a hunky if distressingly primitive cave boy, before
getting her head lopped off. She gets better though.
That's just the sort of weird
imagery that this book is full of. Scenes that will stay in your head
for days, ready to jump back in front of your eyes and make you smirk
when you least expect it. Not many authors could get away with the
Doctor wandering about in a drugged stupor, and still have him manage
to outsmart the villain, or handle Jack's smutty adventures with
nothing more than a mildly suggestive comment that leaves no doubt to
what he got up to. Meanwhile, Roberts uses the interaction between
the various subgroups of humankind to make some harsh observations
about the human capacity for hatred and cruelty. While it's hard to
believe that Neanderthals were quite as unfailingly good-natured as
they are portrayed here, the
Homo sapiens involved,
prehistoric, contemporary and future, do not come of well in
comparison. Yet,
Only Human manages
ultimately to become a story about different sorts of people finding
a way to live together, if not harmoniously, then at least with the
minimum of conflict, and shows that human beings really are capable
of being quite incredible when we have a mind to be. The Doctor
despairs of humans throughout the novel, but at the end of the day,
we're still his favourite species.
Only Human was the novel
that showed that the
Doctor Who books
still had something to say, and proved they were worth keeping
alongside the new series.
