Novel Review- Doctor Who City of Death

It would be easy to look at the recent Doctor Who novelization City of Death and ask, “What’s the point?” The original televised version from 1979 is one of the most well realized and highly regarded of the original twenty-five year run of the show. And it is unanimously hailed as the best of Douglas Adams’s (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) run as script editor for the program. It features great end-of-episode reversals, a good monster, a superbly villainous antagonist, and a great conjunction of Adams’s humor and Tom Baker’s performance as the Doctor. It also has all the old school hallmarks like clunky Sci-fi set dressing, straight faced solemn voiced delivery of lines like, “Scaroth last of the Jagaroth,” and wobbly walls, all leading up to a legendary John Cleese cameo. So who exactly asked for a novelization? 

The impetus likely came from the success of the 2014 book adaptation of the Douglas Adams penned episode Shada, which was only partially filmed before being interrupted by a BBC strike and then never finished. The book proved the potential of combining the Douglas Adams and Doctor Who brands. It’s a very effective strategy, a fact of which I am proof. Even though it long ago became a tired ploy to associate the deceased Adams’s name with a property so you can pawn off a mediocre book, and even though it is a notoriously painful experience to read someone who is not Douglas Adams try to write like him, still I picked up the book after only one or two eye-rolls.    
         
The book argues for the legitimacy of its existence first by the mere fact that we can never have too many fun science fiction adventures to read. Second, this book has the benefit of the robust story from City of Death to build from. There is plenty left to envision and speculate upon that there is naturally not room for in a TV show. Particularly well realized is the inner life of the Doctor’s companion Romana, whose spunky, sarcastic, and energetic presence is expounded upon into the perfect self-confident yet youthfully insecure foil for the Fourth Doctor by writer James Goss.      
     
It is also fun to have a long time in which to observe and envision the villainous Count Scarlioni and his wife. There are parts that are expounded upon beyond requirements though. The persons of the pretentious art patrons from the end of the fourth episode, which provided the fantastic visual of John Cleese in an episode of Who and also worked as a biting and memorable throwaway joke, get a superfluous and distracting back story that intrudes on the action of the novel and adds nothing important or enlightening to their presence in the story. It might seem like an ok idea for a fun in-joke for people familiar with the episodes but it slows down the book and dilutes the original joke.    
    
The book is a fun read for just about any Doctor Who fan. People who know the episodes will get the pleasure of lingering over one of the show’s genuine classics, and people who haven’t seen it will get to discover one of Who’s best story lines: high stakes, fun characters, multiple levels of mystery and wry humor. The ideal reader is someone who likes the Doctor Who brand generally but is trepidatious about the old episodes because of their notoriously poor ‘worth it/not worth it’ ratio. This one is worth it, read the book first, that way you can do your own editing and special effects.

Novel Review: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a long book. It is a long grim book. It tells the story of a seminary student in 18th century Copenhagen who eventually becomes a missionary to Greenland. Copenhagen in the seventeen hundreds is a dirty, crowded city that contends with months of persistent darkness and profound cold. Yet its portion of Prophets of Eternal Fjord is the cheeriest slice of an interminably dour story.

The Copenhagen section is at least lively. All that happens in it is mournful and grotesque. Even the flowering of young love swerves toward the perverse, but it all happens briskly with the aid of enlightening self-reflection on the part of the main character. In this initial stretch of the book it is even possible to be lulled into a complacent sense that you are reading a book deserving of the laurels heaped upon it in its initial European run. It has the moribund humor about society and religion one associates with Voltaire and the oppressive fatalism of Thomas Hardy.

As the Copenhagen section of the book ends and the main character boards a ship for Greenland one might even look at the five hundred or so pages remaining with a twinge of masochistic pleasure, sure the proceedings are bound to get worse, but what if the book maintains its tone of sardonic fatalism and it turns out to be a masterpiece?

It does not and it is not.

Once the section on the boat is over we are thrown ahead in time six years. We are shown the aftermath of the missionary’s time in Greenland, all his sufferings and misdeeds are either spoken plainly or darkly hinted at and we see him as a broken man. This is a credible device that makes quick work of a long passage of largely empty time.

But then we are thrown backward again to his recent arrival and left to parse through the tedious business of watching unfold all the events of which we have just seen the result. This stretches for the length of a reasonably sized novel and one in which the character we’ve come to know disintegrates within a nearly void environment.

This could be seen as commentary on the necessity of other people against whom to define ones self or even a courageously lengthy takedown of political and spiritual colonialism as endeavors that seek to change the outer world but only destroy the inner being. The effect of reading it however is of being lost in a story in which the author lost track of what he was writing or why, and just began using his characters as hat racks upon which to hang elaborate and pointless misfortune.

Again, this might all be salient to the author’s point and message about the emptiness and desultory nature of human existence but it provides no reason why we should be made complicit in the heaping up of misfortunes. Even to the extent that we become just another of the author’s victims and ever finish reading this shambolic and meandering laundry list of miseries.

Book Review: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

                                 
Salman Rushdie is one of our most agile and original fantasists. In a time when the popular imagination seems evermore stranded in ruts dug by each medium’s greatest successes Rushdie continues his pattern of building his fiction from historical influences, particularly those of the Arabic/Persian/Hindu east as he has entire career. Even as his style has become less dense and more accessible his subject matter remains free among the winds of time. The powers, structure, and assumptions he invokes are refreshingly alien to a world mired in the formulas and assumptions of comic books and young adult novels.

Novel Review: The Race for Paris

 World War II melodrama The Race for Paris works as a series of emotionally charged snapshots of the culture of journalism at a moment when truly mass media was being born. At its best the book moves at an exciting pace and weaves battlefield calamities, professional ambition, and personal feeling into its most resonant scenes.

The main character, Jane, is a newspaper correspondent from Nashville, Tennessee and arrives in France after the D-Day landings to file stories from a field hospital. Women are restricted to very specific assignments and at the hospital are expected to craft stories of heroic doctors helping soldiers recover on their way to ultimate victory.

Novel Review: American Meteor

                                         

Norman Lock’s American Meteor is a brief and engaging meditation on American identity. Its hero is petty, violent, gullible, and impulsive. But he also shows sparks of empathy and is capable of learning. He makes for a trustworthy narrator and Lock presents his flaws as facets of a uniquely American personality.

The story operates by means of historical signposts. The main character begins the story in the lower Manhattan slums of the 1850s where he meets Walt Whitman. From there he fights in the Civil War, works with famous men, and is present at great occasions like the meeting of the Transcontinental Rail Road and the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Future News: 2016's 1st Presidential Debate (Clinton vs. Trump)

note- I wrote this in 2012. It's fun being cynical, but not when you end up being right.

 

October 3rd 2016:

The 2016 election season is officially past its sell-by date as last night marked the first ever MTV Presents RealiVote Presidential Debate.

It was a disastrous success as only MTV can produce. A cross between The Super Bowl Halftime Show and a Jersey Shore Reunion, it had all the voter-information value of televised rhinoplasty. A surgical procedure that fortunately took up only a small portion of the night’s events when Lady Gaga interrupted candidate Trump’s drunken screed in favor of the deportation of Muslims to have a barely abmbulatory Ke$ha make the initial incisions of Gaga’s long threatened nose extension surgery right there on stage. Moderator P. Diddy cut them short though, throwing to commercial while security was called in to contain the blood.

The condescending manner in which the producers interspersed pre-taped candidate responses with well-known MTV personalities encapsulating the statements in simplified, “youth-speak,” seemed to resonate with the audience.

For instance, when Democratic hopeful Hilary Clinton responded to a question about healthcare with a considered if vague party line about government responsibility, MTV cut to a scene from the set for their hit reality show High School Bathroom, which never moves from a shot of bathroom stalls while you hear teenagers saying and doing horrible things to one another.

Main heartthrob Kevin entered the third stall, dropped his pants and while clearly taking a noisy dump, clarified Clinton’s statement, “Bitch thinks you should go to the doctor!” The rousing response from the crowd scored it as a small victory for the Clinton camp.

While neither candidate can declare last night’s piece of fluid-drenched political theater a complete success, both have plenty to build upon as they move forward. Donald Trump presents Donald Trump as Your Republican Candidate ™ won the crowd over with expensive pyrotechnics and his obvious rapport with moderator Diddy. Clinton won a lot of support from the crowd when Pink! challenged her to flaming shots and she got four in before vomiting.

 As with any MTV production the music was a relatively small portion of the event and secondary to the horrors on show.  But the Candidate Karaoke segment did manage to connect with those in attendance.

Trump moderately rocked his version of Free Bird while Former Secretary of State Clinton chose the dance option and brought out her husband, former president Bill Clinton, to join her in a dispiritingly sexual pantomime behind Kanye West’s live rendition of the diVinyls’ Touch Myself.  

MTV pulled in its highest numbers of the season for the debate and used it as a lead in to launch their new property Criminal, a fresh reality show that shows you the pressures and everyday concerns involved with being a remorseless killer.

Minority Opinion: Gangster Movies are Uninteresting and Trailers are Not Art

I do not much plan on seeing the gangster film Black Mass, as it is a gangster film and I feel as though by saying those words I just watched it in its entirety in my head. The formula is so embedded, from ambiguous charismatic anti hero, to slightly wormy but sympathetic g-man, to rise, to fall, to obligatory ritual comeuppance, that I never have to watch another gangster film again unless it's directed by Martin Scorcese starring Meryl Streep and Whoopie Goldberg in the story of the bloody three decade turf war between Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey (co starring Leonardo Dicaprio as Donald Trump and Matt Damon as Dr Phil.)