Books: Doctor Who: Verdigris By Paul Magrs (2000)

 

“High above London is a ship the size and shape of St Pancras railway station. On board, the Doctor and Iris Wildthyme are bargaining for their lives with creatures determined to infiltrate the Earth in the guise of characters from nineteenth-century.” Or if that is not enough, we get this from the Doctor himself near the end of the book: 'Let's see. We've got the disappearance of all UNIT personnel, excluding the Brigadier, and Mike Yates, who has turned into a cardboard shadow of his former self, we've got a spacecraft full of very irate, hand-bag worshiping aliens hovering above the planet, we've got a forest of deadly trees on fire, a mysterious green man who seems to be our sworn enemy, and, on the other hand, we've got killer robot sheep and the safety of Jo and Tom to account for. Is that a fair summary?"

Paul Magrs Verdigris is an attempt at all out comedy of Doctor Who, in particular the early 1970’s version with the Third Doctor (set sometime between the serials The Daemons and The Three Doctors). It’s a send up of post-modernism that tries to explore what made this version of the Doctor tick. It introduces Iris Wildthyme is a time traveling adventuress (a Time Lord or Time Lady, depending on your POV, and a potential early version of River Song), who travels the universe in London double-decker bus, which seems smaller on the inside. Iris is the Doctor’s self-proclaimed paramour, with a fondness for alcohol and cigarettes (I kept thinking of Amelia Ducat, the eccentric artist that helps the Fourth Doctor in the serial The Seeds of Doom). She, and her assistant Tom, is here to help the Doctor, but in all fairness, she seems to muck things up, including telling him things that have yet to happen to him.

This book also tries to parody The Tomorrow People, called The Children of Destiny, but while there are a lot of great ideas here, the book only works for me sometimes. I appreciated some of the in-jokes, with Iris making fun of the Third Doctor –after all, he is most establishment, the most authoritarian, the most sanctimonious of all the Doctors- as well as the idea that the top people of UNIT, the Brigadier, Benton and a cameo appearance by Liz Shaw all work in a grocery story is a hoot, but most seem a bit silly. It is a very silly novel, I guess.

I did find it interesting that the Doctor had a home outside of UNIT and his TARDIS, something the series never really explored. But a lot of the tale does not get explained, especially Verdigris and his “Green” magic, which is apparently different from Black and White magic. The fact that Doctor Who has avoided the supernatural is because explaining magic is complicated on a science fiction series.