Retrospective: David Banks by John Seavey 14/6/03
When Virgin Publishing commissioned David Banks for his (to date) only novel for the Doctor Who line, Iceberg, it's hard to escape the conclusion that it was something of a "stunt" commission. After all, Banks was best known not as a writer, but as an actor, long-established as every single one of a long succession of Cyber-Leaders who've confronted the Doctor. His best-known previous work was a chronology of the Cybermen, and Iceberg featured the classic Doctor Who monsters... how could it be anything other than something of a gimmick?
As it turned out, Banks was less than successful in his novel-writing endeavor. Even describing it charitably, his prose never moves past "functional"; it's clunky, with very little interesting dialogue or descriptions (in addition, he falls into Neil Penswick's trap of following up one long sentence with several shorter sentences with no verb. An annoying habit. Tiresome. Like a deranged haiku.) Likewise, his plot is an utter mess; not only does the Doctor not show up for the first half of the novel (a trademark of the Virgin line), but the Cybermen don't show up for the first half either. Most of the book focuses on the ostensible red herring, the hidden level of the SS Elysium where Lord Stanley Straker and Mike Brack are planning, as it turns out, to sculpt things for charity. Most of the novel is devoted to this faux plot, and Ruby Duvall's attempts to uncover it, and the whole "Cybermen attempting to conquer the Earth with the Doctor stopping it" seems an afterthought.
Thematically, Banks seems a bit uncertain as well. He's mixing in Lao Tzu and 'The Wizard of Oz' as his two major influences, and it's interesting in some ways to see how the two rebound off of the plot and each other (in addition, for some reason, he decides to have the Doctor speak almost entirely in Taoist quotations, a distracting but not uninteresting decision); however, he hammers home each reference with the dedication of a fanatical woodpecker. Ruby's name being a subtle reference to the ruby slippers Dorothy wore, and hence linking her to the main character of 'The Wizard of Oz', would be more clever if he didn't include a scene at the beginning where Ruby thinks of the ruby slippers as being just like her!
Even so, Banks manages to do something very clever that a lot of Doctor Who writers don't manage to pull off, which might be why his novel escaped some of the ire heaped upon David McIntee or Chris Bulis. He doesn't kill off his characters.
It's odd, I know, to think of this as a courageous decision, but it's only when you read Iceberg that you realize how high the body-count usually is in Doctor Who. In Banks' novel, only two minor characters die (well, apart from loads of Cybermen, of course) and things, in general, end happily. Most of the characters are a bit cliched, but they're decent people (and Ruby is actually well-drawn and likeable, a genuinely nice person who I was glad to see return in Happy Endings), and Banks wisely decides not to kill them all off for the shock value. In a series that promotes the idea that sometimes the innocent suffer, this is a pleasant rarity.
Of course, Banks also takes the time to flesh out his Cyber-mythos in the novel, which is interesting in a fannish sort of way. He's clearly thought out every detail of the Cyber-race with an almost obsessive intensity, and although it lies somewhat outside the scope of the retrospective, I do recommend his book Cybermen as a chronology of the Cybermen. It explains away just about every element of the Cybermen from the TV series, even the costume changes, and remains probably Banks' most substantial creative contribution to the Who mythos. Thankfully, though, he doesn't linger overmuch on it in Iceberg. (Although, considering that he instead lingers over Mike Brack agonizing over his twenty-year-old hit and run accident, we could maybe have gotten a bit more Cyber-mythos...)
Overall, I'm not sure that Banks really has any more to say in Doctor Who, or that he's improved his writing enough to be able to convey it effectively. He does have the instincts of a historian, though, and it might be interesting to see him take Lawrence Miles' tack and write a Doctor Who novel in the style of a history text. It'd have to be an improvement on his attempts at writing a novel, I'm afraid.