|
|
The Book of the World |
|
| Author | Lawrence Miles |
| Published | 2008 |
| Synopsis: A script Lawrence Miles posted on his blog in 2008 to show how he'd do a Doctor Who reboot. |
Brilliant and Unloved by Hugh Sturgess 26/9/20
There was a tiny, fleeting time around 1999 and 2000 when Lawrence Miles was one of the most important people in the Doctor Who universe. If you actively followed what was then the official, ongoing future of Doctor Who (right at the time that future was fracturing with the arrival of Big Finish), you had to engage with Miles without choice. Bursting into a line devoid of ideas with a vast bag full of ideas made Miles the Cornell or Orman of the range, an author who singlehandedly changed what the series was going to be about through the strength of his initial novel. Unlike Cornell and Orman, Miles did not have an editor who knew where they wanted to go with those ideas. Miles just browbeat editor Stephen Cole into adopting his ideas with next to no institutional plan of where they were going and mostly without fellow authors who shared his predilections (with the exception of Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham's The Taking of Planet 5, there are no Miles-esque books besides Miles's).
It isn't going too far to say that Miles bears more responsibility than (say) Cole or Justin Richards for the fracturing of the unity of Doctor Who into contradictory strands in different media. The EDAs embraced, without any planning or good sense, radical change, while Big Finish ostentatiously decided to focus on producing decent, entertaining Doctor Who more like the way you remembered it on TV. Nothing could have been better planned to polarise the fanbase. That's not being harsh on Miles. He never wanted to turn his chief idea - that of the Time Lords locked in a vast, reality-cracking war some time in the eighth Doctor's future - into the central arc of the series. That was always intended as a kind of background detail, a tableau against which to set future stories. But the EDAs were so lost and aimless that they pinned everything on a man who explicitly did not want to explore the war or the identity of the Time Lords' enemy, and put it in a narrative structure that virtually required both those things.
The first destruction of Gallifrey ended Miles's brief period of influence, only for his next novel, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, to inadvertently launch yet another EDA arc, the equally ill-fated alternative universe cycle that he never returned to. So there, it might be assumed, ends his story, but in 2005 he burst back onto the scene with a long and vitriolic screed against The Unquiet Dead, accusing it of echoing xenophobic paranoia against asylum-seekers in its depiction of the Gelth as murderous monsters hiding behind pleas for assistance. Emerging as one of the new series' most eloquent critics (both in the capital-C sense and the vernacular), Miles eventually succumbed to taunts that, if he knew so well how Doctor Who should be written, why didn't he give it a go? The result was The Book of the World.
The script was written in 2007 but released in 2008, after Miles found out that Steven Moffat was writing a story about a gigantic library and decided to release his own story about a gigantic library first so no one would think he was copying him. It explicitly comes from what Miles would do to reboot Doctor Who, making it, like The Eleventh Hour or Rose, more important for what it's trying to do than what it is doing.
The first thing that leaps out at a reader now is how familiar The Book of the World seems. Not, I hasten to add, because it is a well-worn story that was old when Miles wrote it. Rather, Miles prefigures to a remarkable degree the tone and concerns of the Moffat era, in a way that would undoubtedly enrage Miles to the point of a breakdown. What prompted Miles to publicly post the script on his blog was the discovery that his bete noire Moffat had also written a script set in a library. That it features as its villain a fanatical religious cult called the Quiescence (meaning "silence") is rather interesting in this light. The script keeps circling back to the Moffat era, seeming like an homage to it rather than something that was written three years before it began. It displays the kind of mythologising of the Doctor (he can "hide the sun in a box" and "conceal whole armies on the head of a pin", a list of boasts eerily similar to River Song's "armies turn and run" monologue in Forest of the Dead) that Miles would criticise Moffat for. The Doctor here is a trickster god, which is as good a description of Moffat's Doctor as "mad man in a box". Even moments like the Doctor peering at inconclusive bio-scans of his young female companion in the TARDIS or saving another companion from a fatal fall by materialising the TARDIS around them ring with echoes of Moffat stories like Day of the Moon.
Miles wrote the script so that the Doctor could be played by David Tennant or someone else, but it is hard to mentally separate this bearded, dishevelled Doctor from Matt Smith. While there are moments that are clearly written for Tennant, there are just as many that seem rather uncharacteristic. The rather nice running gag of the Doctor saying aloud how many Library attendants have asked or told him a particular thing, culminating in the moment when Calum finally asks him something he's never heard before and he just says "one", has more in common with Smith's more eccentric performance than Tennant's. It's also a definitive Moffat-y moment, when something introduced as a throwaway gag is used to change how we view the story.
But beyond that, both Miles's script and Moffat's era have a storybook feel. Calum, a Library attendant and one of Miles's proposed companions, narrates sections of the episode fleshing out some of the details of the Earth's mysterious disappearance, and the script specifies that these scenes should not feel wholly literal. Even the script's most striking aspects, such as the conceit of the TARDIS disguised as a shelf full of blue-bound books (ponder the visual similarities with River Song's diary), share a similar approach to Doctor Who, planting their roots in a Victorian tradition of British fantasy like C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll rather than science fiction or the more contemporary feel of the Davies era.
The irony is that Miles became increasingly critical of Moffat's Davies-era stories, culminating in a denunciation of Silence in the Library and outright hostility to his entire era. This began a rapid process of disillusionment with Doctor Who in general, declaring it in 2013 to be not worth caring about except in the context of the time it was created. His hatred for Moffat, stemming nominally from an awkward and (to Miles) unpleasant series of encounters in the 1990s in which Moffat came off as patronising, reached almost pathological levels, including dubbing Moffat "the Beast", declaring that he could "piss Blink in my sleep", calling Matt Smith's Doctor "a deformed, half-human abomination" and also committing a drive-by shooting of Sherlock and Jekyll (including insulting their casts), despite implying he hadn't watched either.
All of this hyperbole was done with his tongue somewhere near his cheek, but it still speaks to a kind of psychological injury that is honestly a little sad to think about. Miles has stated that he is "on the spectrum" and also has some kind of social phobia and has expressed a degree of regret for the things he has said about his fellow writers, but he seems more content to fall back on his mental illnesses as an excuse for his behaviour rather than something to work past. The idea that we should forgive him for saying deliberately offensive things (including accusing Paul Cornell of being a feminist only so he could have sex with more women and making a crack about Kate Orman and "sacred cows"), apparently because being nice to people is too much effort, is frankly offensive to the millions of autistic people who do not act like this. But we should keep it in perspective: this happened around twenty years ago and literally every writer he has insulted is now happier and more successful than he is, and the only one to truly suffer for his behaviour is himself.
Of course, the similarities between Moffat's vision of Doctor Who and Miles's are completely coincidental for obvious reasons. Miles was wont to make the deliberately provocative claim that Doctor Who is not science fiction, though he generally declined to say what it actually is. But it's easy to imagine Moffat saying the same thing. For most of Doctor Who, in fact, "science fiction" has mainly been a licence for complete artistic freedom, as in Terry Nation's statement that science fiction means you can write whatever you like without worrying about the realism.
So, given all the eery parallels between The Book of the World and Moffat's Doctor Who, which speak to a very similar conception of what kind of story Doctor Who is and how it should be told, it's no wonder that Miles came to hate Moffat so much. Moffat's version of Doctor Who, which presents as a warped mirror of Miles's own, naturally enraged him more than Davies's did. In the blog post that introduced the script, Miles said that one of the challenges he set for himself was that it had to be as different to Davies's Doctor Who as possible and that it had to follow what he had previously said the show should do. The fact that Moffat, it seems, had almost exactly the same ideas would understandably have been infuriating. Miles was free to dispassionately view Davies-era Who as a cultural artefact. Moffat Who broke into his house and stole his stuff. Steven Moffat succeeded in doing what the Quiescence in The Book of the World seeks to do: steal the future to ensure it happened the way he wanted it to.
Today, The Book of the World is itself a cultural artefact, not a statement of intent by a known curmudgeon and gadfly of Doctor Who. We don't have to pretend it's vastly superior to the broadcast program or it's a pile of garbage written by an attention-seeking git, depending on our opinions of Miles himself. So it's fair to say that as a pilot episode, it's "quite good" but still seriously lacking. What most other reviewers have latched onto first is the over-reliance on CGI in the script, to a degree that would clearly be infeasible on the BBC's budget. Miles realises this, acknowledging in the script that the episode would echo with the "creaking of a CGI budget under massive strain". But in practice, it goes without saying, a glib joke in the stage directions will not magically make CGI free. Many CGI set pieces, like the Quiescence's method of entry into the Library or the hovering gondolas used by the Library attendants, are unnecessary extravagances that could (and, in the hands of an experienced writer like RTD, would) be cut. Keeping them in is a bizarre and unforced error on Miles's part, an easy excuse to dismiss the script as unserious. Knowing that CGI is not free is not enough; Miles had to write a script that acted on that knowledge.
The "first episodes" of the Davies and Moffat eras - Rose and The Eleventh Hour - construct their "offer" to the audience around a single, compelling dynamic: the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. We are filled with excitement at the path out of common drudgery offered to Rose, or enchanted by Amelia Pond's chance to undo a cynical adulthood. Characterisation was never Miles's strong suit, and the companions he creates - two Library assistants named Calum and Melissa - are bland in the extreme, though it's possible talented and charismatic actors could have made them entertaining. Calum appears to be nervous, bookish and awkward and Melissa more worldly, sarcastic and cynical - a dynamic shared by a dozen other boy-and-girl pairs in fantasy fiction, most memorably for me right now Angie and Artie in Nightmare in Silver. It's predictable, though I won't say that it could never have been enjoyable. Calum and Melissa are also "concept companions": Calum's status as the last human carrying the world with him in a book is pretty good, though as unique selling points go, the mystery of "which species does Melissa belong to?" doesn't sound like it would put the audience on the edge of their seats.
Miles is an ideas writer, and ideas are clearly the chief attractions for him in The Book of the World. Disguising the TARDIS as a shelf of books is one of those wonderful ideas that no one has thought of before and yet seems totally right. The central piece of background detail, the Doctor's theft of the Earth and hiding it inside a book, is similarly brilliant, and serves Miles's oft-stated preference of avoiding present-day Earth as a location. (A decision also taken by Moffat through the simpler expedient of simply not setting stories there.)
The Quiescence, probably the most intriguing of the ideas introduced in Miles's script, suggests a more interesting background for the Monks than we got in The Lie of the Land: one of the many, many things humanity could evolve into, seeking to take control of the world so that they are the one and only thing humanity becomes. The Drudges, hooded figures whose mouths are sewn up, eyes padlocked closed and hands gauntleted, are one of the few parts of The Book of the World to feel like something that would actually be a defining moment in a hypothetical broadcast version of the story. They are a grotesque creation that echo children's games like Blind Man's Buff in much the same way that the Weeping Angels recall What's the Time, Mr Wolf?.
The "message" of the Quiescence, who blind, bind and mutilate their own followers so that they will not encounter anything that "offends their dignity", is a fairly obvious one against religious fundamentalism. The most likely reading based on Miles's stated politics is that this is a classic piece of Bush-era concern at the influence of American evangelicals and reactionary moralism generally. There are, however, two rather less pleasant readings. My memory of 2007 isn't sharp enough to know if this was as much a concern at the time (though my instinct is that it wasn't), but today, a religion that believes its followers need to be protected from ideas that will offend them seems like a right-wing attack on political correctness, with Cardinal Ossivar an unlikely Social Justice Warrior. In the current climate, the people who say that their enemies want to ban everything that makes them uncomfortable and that being offended is actually good are invariably right-wingers seeking social licence to be as obnoxious and rhetorically cruel as possible. Given Miles's own obnoxious and rhetorically cruel behaviour, and various statements that could be construed as in support of libertarianism (his political beliefs appear to be anti-authoritarian and leftist in a directionless sort of way, though he strongly supported Jeremy Corbyn), it's a conclusion that would undoubtedly be drawn were the episode written and broadcast today.
Another potential reading of the Quiescence is, if anything, even less pleasant. Religious fundamentalists who hide their faces and burn books sound like a caricature of extremist Muslims, and the Duenna's collaboration with them becomes a story about the West betraying its heritage while Calum literally rediscovers his and resolves to fight. If the inadvertently anti-refugee reading of The Unquiet Dead mattered in its political context, it matters just as much if Doctor Who had actually broadcast an episode in 2007 (or '08, '09 or '10) that could be taken to warn that Islamic fundamentalism was the biggest threat facing western civilisation. (This was Christopher Hitchens's central contention after all, and in 2007 he was at the peak of his influence on impressionable young minds, including yours truly.) It's more than a little amusing imagining some acid-tongued, emotionally unstable blogger writing a vitriolic screed denouncing The Book of the World and the Quiescence as "racist, xenophobic shit" exactly as Miles had condemned Gatiss.
These readings are almost required, because without them the shallowness of the moral point becomes too obvious. This is the politics of Richard Dawkins or Penn and Teller, a kind of lifestyle classical liberalism that takes as the world's greatest crimes a list of personal annoyances or compilations of "Top 10 silliest laws". The idea that Miles created the Quiescence because he thought it was ridiculous that people wanted to ban To Kill a Mocking Bird from school libraries is so banal as to be eye-watering. Given the angry radicalism of The Beast Below and Oxygen, it's another thing Miles thought of that Moffat did, and did better to boot.
The Book of the World was Miles's last high-profile intervention in the course of Doctor Who. His final piece of Doctor Who-related fiction was an audio series based on his Faction Paradox idea that ended in 2009. (He edited the Faction Paradox book range for a time.) The fact that he seems to have written nothing else would seem to indicate that, although he grew increasingly distant from Doctor Who as most of its fans would understand it, he could never really break free from what he occasionally called his "native mythology". It's interesting that the last thing he wrote and shared with a wide audience to actually be called "Doctor Who" was an earnest attempt to return to the more contained format of "the Doctor and the companions have an adventure" he had tried so often to break out of in the wilderness years. His influence is so long gone that it feels churlish to put the boot in too hard here, and frankly it isn't needed. As a script by a writer with no professional TV experience, The Book of the World is very good, but the incredible freshness it had back in the Davies era has been lost. Miles published this script because Moffat had written Silence in the Library and stolen Miles's future. He couldn't have realised just how much of it he stole.