The Coming Of The Terraphiles

It took me longer than I had anticipated to read The Coming of the Terraphiles, almost a week in fact, but I finally finished it last night. It's another Doctor Who book - obviously I'm quite fond of reading those - so here's a sort of reviewy type thing.

The plot of the book is actually quite difficult to pin down, which I'll get to in a minute, but basically the 11th Doctor and Amy receive a mysterious message, that summons them to the planet Peers in the year 51007. Quickly they discover that the Arrow of Law - a legendary, mythic device which maintains the stability of the universe - has been stolen, and is now available as the top prize in the Terraphile Tournament; a sports league which consists of 're-enacting' old Earth sports, with distorted versions of games like Cricket, and so on, in the spotlight. The two of them join 'the Gentlemen', one of the competing teams, and set off to retrieve the Arrow before it can fall into the wrong hands, which could ultimately cause the destruction of the universe.

It's an odd book to say the least. First and foremost is the writing style; the whole thing is penned in a very unusual way. Micheal Moorcock (the writer) seems to revel in writing everything in an overly-complex, overly-verbose manner. I'll give you an example. There's one scene, quite early on, where one of the guest characters (Mr. Banning-Cannon) is describing his phobia of spiders:

"These said creatures were inclined to fill him with a mixture of nausea, dizziness and an irresistible tendency to race into the world cawing like a rook and tearing off all his clothes until he had located a small, dark place into which he could lock himself and give vent to his inevitable diarrhoea."

See what I mean? Now, once or twice in a book, I understand why writers would use this sort of over-elaborate style of writing, and in small doses it can be quite amusing and entertaining to read. But when great swathes of the novel are written like that, it can become almost a chore to figure out what the writer is trying to say, and ultimately I began to hope the prose would just revert to something more simplistic and functional as the book went on. It didn't. I'm all for writers having their own distinctive flairs and styles (See Neil Gaiman for an example of an author with a great writing style), but when those styles are as confusing as this I'd rather they just kept it simple. I can see why Moorcock is so lauded as an author, as the text is well-crafted, but it just isn't as reader-friendly as it could be. If your writing is so complex that the reader is having difficulty understanding it, you've gone too far, and I think Moorcock is pushing the boundaries of 'understandable' in this book.

Then there's the plot, which is interesting if a little vague. After a rather hazy start, which flicks between several different characters, the book gets going proper around 40 pages in, with the Doctor kicking off his involvement in the Terraphile re-enactment tourney. From there the whole thing seems to meander through the tournament at a really leisurely pace; 50 pages, give or take, are spent solving the mystery of a stolen hat. There is a valid reason for the mystery, and it does become more important later in the novel, but considering that the 'Arrow of Law' is at stake, and the Doctor only has a finite (if undefined) amount of time to get it before the universe begins to collapse, it seems ludicrous that he would just go along with the hunt for clues. Surely he would stand up and say 'Look, the whole of creation is at stake, can't we look for the hat later?' but instead he merrily sits back and chats with his fellow team members of the Gentlemen. That seems to be the case for much of the novel, with the Doctor happily accepting any delays the team suffers on it's journey to the finals of the tournament, whilst at the same time ominously intoning how little time they have left. It's a bit of a pacing problem, I think, and it makes the story feel padded and dreary.

This would be a good time to link in to the characters in the story, who are a mixed bunch in terms of quality. I mentioned above the Doctor's willingness to sit back and let the tournament take it's course; why doesn't he just park the TARDIS right next to the Arrow, and steal it, if it's so important? Yes, the Arrow is in a 'Time Vault', which will only materialise when the tournament is over, but as the TARDIS can go anywhere in space-time it wouldn't be too difficult to just land at the reward ceremony after the finals, and nab it then, would it? The Doctor's reasoning against this - and against using the TARDIS is general in the book - is because it would risk inciting the attention of 'Frank/Freddie Force and the Antimatter Men.' Now, they may sound like some sort of band, but actually they're the titular villains in this book, or so it seems. Frank/Freddie Force are two brothers forced into one body (for reasons I won't go into here), hence the flip name, and they and their 'Antimatter Men' are beings from a different universe, one composed entirely of antimatter, who have travelled across into our reality to steal the Arrow.

The problem I have with Frank/Freddie is that the threat they pose seems very half-baked. They are set up throughout the book as the bad guys, the evilest of the evil, the Ones Who Must Be Stopped. The Doctor is constantly worrying about them, and what they might be up to, and as I said above he is very reluctant to use the TARDIS in case they notice him and realise he's trying to stop them. You would think, therefore, that Frank/Freddie Force and the Antimatter Men would pose a very tangible threat within the novel, constantly opposing our heroes in their mission. Nope. Actually they're barely in the book. Despite the constant name drops from the Doctor, Frank/Freddie and co get exactly one scene in the entire novel. It's not even at the climax of the book; it's near the middle, and they don't even have much to do in it. They basically just argue with the Doctor for a bit, and then get sent packing by a well-fired arrow (not the Arrow of Law, just an ordinary one - Archery is big with the Terraphiles), threatening to return to get their revenge at a later date. When they do show up again, they've been captured and imprisoned, 'off-screen' as it were, by a group of side characters called the Bubbly Boys, who I won't go into detail about. It's not a very climactic end for the big villains of the book, and since the real threat is that of the universe's imminent collapse, I got the feeling that Frank/Freddie existed purely to give the Doctor a reason for staying in the tourney, instead of nabbing it with the TARDIS as I suggested. They basically just seem to exist as a convenient plot device for the author.

Some of the other characters fare a little better. Captain Cornelius, for example, is a charming and intelligent character who gets some great scenes with the Doctor, and establishes himself as both an old friend and an old rival very quickly and efficiently; his dialogue is often where Moorcock is at his finest, writing-wise. I'm still a little confused as to why Cornelius features in the blurb of the book - after appearing in the prologue, he's almost entirely absent until past the 200 page mark, and plays very little part in the story overall - but I'm willing to overlook that small problem as it isn't really important. Some of the other guest characters are even better, with Robin 'Bingo' Lockesley and the Banning-Cannon family standing out as particularly well written characters. Bingo is sympathetic, amusing and his relationships with the other team members and characters were a joy to read. The Banning-Cannons, meanwhile, were a posh, upper-class family on holiday, and their scenes are the only places in the novel where Moorcock's over-the-top style fits and seems natural. As a result, reading them was often more fun than reading any of the other characters, including the Doctor and Amy.

And so, at last, we come to the heroes of the piece, 11 and Amy. Sadly, the two of them are not at their best in this story. The book seems to have been written before series 5 had aired, and the author quite clearly didn't have much access to scripts or character specifics. As a result, the 11th Doctor lacks his quirky sense of humour, and seems to have been written as almost the archetypal Doctor. I read somewhere that his mannerisms in this book are very reminiscent of the 4th Doctor, Tom Baker, and I agree with that. Amy, similarly, lacks the kookiness that she so often displays in the show, and most of her lines could probably have been said by Rose, or Peri, or Jo, or Sarah Jane, and you wouldn't have been able to notice the difference. In fact, save the names and the odd description of their appearances, you could probably read this as a 4th Doctor/Sarah Jane book and never notice anything was off.

Overall, I don't think The Coming of the Terrahpiles is one of the better Doctor Who books out there; perhaps you have to be a Moorcock fan to really get it, or something. I definitely don't think it justifies the £17 retail price. You'd be much better off buying two New Series Adventure books with that money instead.

I was in Liverpool today, and I bought three new books that I'm very much looking forward to reading; Borrowed Time, a Doctor Who NSA book; Anansi Boys, a Neil Gaiman book (I'm a huge fan of Gaiman); and How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe, an extremely unusual looking book by Charles Yu. I'll probably review all of them in due course, but next up on the firing line is The Girl who Played with Fire, the sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I lent it almost a week ago now and I still haven't started reading it, so I need to get started on that one sharpish. I'll write a review as soon as I'm done, but until then, I guess it's bye for now!

PS: I just had the pretty brilliant idea of inserting a picture of the book I'm reviewing into each book review; it would have been better if I'd though of it before I'd started reviewing, but I can just go back and retrofit all of the old reviews. There's only about two of them.