The Class Novels
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BBC Books The Class Novels |
| Published | 2016 |
| Synopsis: Further adventures of the Coal Hill Academy gang. |
Bring your books to Class by Stacey Smith? 22/5/26
Class was something of an unmitigated disaster. It had a couple of central problems that the show never really overcame. The first was: who exactly is the audience for this? It was a strange mix of high-school drama with aliens (fine), graphic special effects (okay) and upsettingly visceral violence (less fine). Is this for the teen market who loves seeing legs chopped off, people stabbed, immolated et cetera? Or is it for the grown-up fan of adult material who wants to see a poor-man's Torchwood, only set in a high school? Maybe such people exist, but I'd wager that very few people would have watched this without the Doctor Who connection.
The second problem was: these people are hopelessly outclassed. The Twelfth Doctor turns up in the pilot episode and sets up the weekly format: these kids (plus some neutered aliens) will be fighting alien invasions every week. Do they have a TARDIS? A sonic screwdriver? An immortal time agent from the future? A supercomputer in the attic? Nope. They've got a sassy alien who explicitly can't inflict violence. And nothing else. It's a wonder they aren't all dead by Episode 2. The show has been compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (teen drama coexisting with monsters that the young cast must fight), but there's no equivalent of Buffy herself in the cast in terms of someone with any kind of advantage.
Pretty much every episode of the series as broadcast reinforces this view. The show remained on brand throughout its short run: violent and off-putting, with a hopelessly outgunned set of leads and a side dash of high-school drama. Promising characters are killed off, like the headmaster of Coal Hill School --- who'd been in Doctor Who, so you'd think he'd have made a decent regular --- or Ram's father in the season finale, for no reason other than to up the unpleasantness factor. The only episode that really worked was Detained, the one where the kids are kidnapped while in detention, mainly because it actually had character development.
It wasn't all bad. Kudos to the fact that there were no straight white guys in the main cast. Two of the main characters are queer teenage boys in a relationship, one that doesn't shy away from depicting them as sexual beings. Ram's relationship with his father was excellent, subverting cliches and giving us something that felt very real (which is why his death in the final episode seems so pointless). The child actors were uniformly good, which is a rarity in these sorts of shows. And Miss Quill is an amazing creation, all sass and putdowns, while being unable to use weapons (at least until the last two episodes), which is a really cool character note... just not quite right for a show that involved weekly battles with unspeakable horrors.
But then there are the three tie-in novels.
Released almost simultaneously with the series (they were officially published a week after the first episodes aired, although a batch of signed copies were given away at the Class World Premiere a week early), they're uniformly excellent. What's interesting is that they don't shy away from the series' premise at all, giving us the same level of teen drama, graphic sex and unyielding violence... but it works a lot better in print, partly because we're not seeing legs chopped off on the screen, but mostly because the plots are just better.
My guess is that very few people read these, which is a shame. I only stumbled upon them by chance --- in a bookstore in Malaysia of all places --- and I only bought them because I'm a sucker for Doctor Who--related tie-in novels. But thank goodness I did, as they're fantastic, beat for beat the best tie-in novels since the Virgin Benny Adventures. They're that good.
Joyride tells the story of alien tech that allows people to bodyswap into teenagers and do whatever they want. It's an unpleasant scenario: our main characters get drunk and have sex against their will, while side characters murder their entire families or commit suicide, with graphic descriptions. The opening scene is a visceral depiction of a young girl stealing a car and dying painfully when she crashes it into a shop, depicting a literal joyride to parallel the metaphorical one. We have an attempted suicide jump from the roof of the school and the otherwise-straight Ram paying a male prostitute for gay sex because his body is currently inhabited by a repressed, self-hating gay man. These are not pleasant things to experience, and they bring up morally questionable issues. The idea that someone could leap into my body and do whatever they wanted with it (without my knowledge or consent) is horrific. The fact that this happens to main characters, rather than just guest ones, is a bold move that's very welcome, because it brings home the gravity of the premise.
However, the book is also utterly gripping, largely because the writing is so good. The premise is a brilliant one, and the use of the characters excellent. Quill can only act in defence of Charlie, so she keeps throwing the knife to the villains in order to become a terrifying ninja force of violent retribution. The inversion of the machine against the villain to resolve the plot is masterful, and the payoff for all the rich dilettantes who used it is very nicely done. This is a book that starts strong, maintains interest throughout and ends brilliantly, a rare trifecta in any novel, but an absolutely triumph in the TV tie-in market.
The Stone House is a bit more pedestrian, easily the weakest of the three, but it's not actively bad. It's a fairly bog-standard haunted-house story with a sci-fi twist, but the haunted parts are genuinely spooky in places. It has a bit too much teenage bickering between the main cast, which is realistic for teenagers, but it doesn't make them very fun to read about. It also has attempted sexual assault of minors in a refugee camp --- because the Doctor Who fans demanded it! --- just so you know we're still in Class.
What She Did Next Will Astound You is, well, astounding. James Goss has been one of the standout writers of recent years, starting with the Douglas Adams novelisations and churning out hit after hit since then. This book is no exception. It uses internet challenges (think ice-bucket and tide-pod challenges) to craft each chapter through the lens of a Clickbait article. The chapter titles alone are superb, with such gems as
HE THOUGHT HE KNEW A LOT ABOUT GRAVITY. FIND OUT IF HE WAS RIGHT.THE RISE OF SMART WOMEN AND HOW TO STOP IT
THE FIVE WORDS THAT BROKE HER HEART (SPOILER: ONE OF THEM IS "WANT")
ADVERTISEMENT: YOUR BOOK WILL CONTINUE IN 25 SECONDS
THE TEN BEST ALIEN DEATHS YOU'LL SEE TODAY. #6 IS A KILLER
We see teenagers doing all kinds of ridiculous and often harmful things "for charity", while the book masterfully picks away at the difference between peer pressure stunts and, for example, helping your friend whose mother is in a wheelchair. Halfway through, the book pivots to a combat scenario, where teenage recruits fight aliens. What's brilliant is that the style is kept up, with the attractive influencer commenting on battle stats in the same tone as he does for more mundane stunts. The commentary is biting, and it makes for uneasy reading, even more so today than when it first came out.
The three tie-in novels prove that Class could have worked after all, even with its unlikely premise. They're the only tie-in books in recent memory that I've read more than once, and they hold up incredibly well. By contrast, the various Torchwood novels were completely de-fanged, because they were too cowardly to depict gay sex or unlikely affairs, instead becoming generic sci-fi thrillers in case kids read them (gasp!). The Class novels lean into the structure, and the result is that they work even better than the show itself.
So what's the secret ingredient? Why do these unlikely books hold up so well, when the show didn't, despite good acting and special effects? I think it comes down to one simple answer: they're well written. Good writing trumps everything. If only we'd had some of that on TV, the show might have given us a second season, with a chance to retool. Instead, the surprising legacy of Class is three obscure novels that are some deeply buried treasures, but oh what gems they are! Finally, in the unlikeliest of places, a touch of class.