The Drosten's Curse
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BBC Books The Drosten's Curse |
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| Author | A.L. Kennedy |  |
| ISBN# | 1 84990 826 1 | |
| Published | 2015 | |
| Featuring | The fourth Doctor |
| Synopsis: Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers' Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch - owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word. Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he'll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground - and it's starting to wake up... |
'Tea and Cake or Horrible and Increasing Danger' by Niall Jones 6/7/23
Golf has never had a big role in Doctor Who. The Third Doctor may have played it while visiting the Master in prison in The Sea Devils, but it has always seemed too slow-paced and rule-bound for most other incarnations of the Doctor.
The Drosten's Curse, a 2015 novel by Scottish writer and comedian A. L. Kennedy, rectifies this absence by transforming golf from a genteel, perhaps even snobby sport into something altogether more deadly. Just how deadly becomes clear in the novel's opening page. It begins by stating that 'Paul Harris was dying', which is certainly unpleasant for him, but perhaps not too surprising for readers. Afterall, many Doctor Who episodes begin with minor characters being killed to illustrate the story's stakes. Paul Harris's death is unusual, however, as it involves being 'eaten alive by a golf bunker'.
While death by golf bunker may seem a unique fate, Kennedy wasn't the first writer to highlight the hidden dangers of popular sports. In Douglas Adams's 1982 novel Life, The Universe and Everything, killer robots invade Lord's cricket pitch and steal the Ashes. It is even revealed that the game of cricket is in fact a faded memory of an ancient intergalactic war. Interestingly, Adams based the novel on an unproduced script he wrote for Doctor Who, and The Drosten's Curse does have a similar tone to his contributions to the series. Kennedy even includes a subtle nod to these contributions by naming a character David Agnew, the pseudonym under which Adams wrote City of Death.
As well as providing an intriguing hook into the novel, the opening of The Drosten's Curse highlights Kennedy's skills as a writer. In just four pages, she creates a rounded character and provides incisive insights into Harris's own mental world. The wry observation that death 'wasn't something his afternoon's schedule was meant to include', presents him as someone for whom order is of the greatest importance. In fact, Kennedy goes on to describe him as never having 'been at all curious about those aspects of the world which didn't benefit him directly'. This ironic, distant narrative style is applied to all the novel's characters, while pithy details provide revelations into their personalities. For example, David Agnew is 'a man who purposely ate octopus whenever he could'.
The effect of this kind of narration is often humorous and the novel is indeed very witty, with passages of outright comedy. There is, however, also darkness to it. The Doctor arrives in 1970s Arbroath, a town on the east coast of Scotland, without a companion and is described as experiencing 'almost unimaginable and inhuman isolation'. The characters who effectively take on companion roles for the duration of the novel are Bryony Mailer and Putta Pattershaun 5, a frustrated hotel receptionist and an incompetent, but friendly, alien bounty hunter respectively, both of whom feel underappreciated and unloved.
The Drosten's Curse never explicitly states which iteration of the Doctor appears within its pages, but it doesn't need to. When he walks into the Fetch Brothers' Golf Spa and Hotel and meets Bryony for the first time, he finds her ruminating on the cul-de-sac in which her life has become stuck. 'Oh, I wouldn't worry terribly much about that, you know', he says to her, in 'a friendly, velvety kind of voice'. These lines give a good sense of which Doctor has just walked through the doorway and reveal just how well Kennedy has captured the voice of her chosen Doctor. If there was any doubt, then this description clears it up: 'he appeared to have been designed by a committee, possibly a very drunk committee', and was wearing 'an immense and disreputable scarf with a life of its own'.
While the novel is largely written in the third-person, Kennedy also narrates her characters' thoughts, including those of the Doctor. The Doctor's thoughts entertainingly highlight his own self-confidence and are peppered with amusing non-sequiturs and incidental details. By providing insights into the minds of even quite minor characters, Kennedy creates a multitude of perspectives and invites empathy, even for characters who, on the face of it, don't seem at all sympathetic.
Kennedy's use of polyphony is more than just an engaging literary technique, however. While the novel's action takes place mainly on the greens and bunkers of the hotel's golf course, its most important location is the landscape of the mind. Ordinarily, voicing characters' thoughts in a novel creates an illusion of mind reading, but in this novel it's not just an illusion. In The Drosten's Curse, the internal world of the mind is given physical power: thought becomes action, fear and forgetfulness are utilised as weapons, and memory becomes a prison. By taking the internal and making it external, Kennedy develops an intriguing and inventive set-up that both reflects on what it means to be human and drives an action-packed plot.
Another intriguing feature of the novel is the way in which it presents the TARDIS. Like the landscape of the mind, the TARDIS straddles the border between different types of reality. It is both a physical place and a character, shifting and changing according to the pressures placed on it and acting both as a place of safety and of danger. That it is seen through the eyes of Bryony and Putta allows it to be far stranger than is usually the case in Doctor Who.
In my review of The Wheel of Ice, I commented that its success lies in the way in which it reimagines a past era of Doctor Who from a twenty-first-century perspective. The Drosten's Curse does something different. While the tone of the story --- witty, but with a serious core --- reflects mid-to-late 1970s episodes, such as The Sun Makers, the fact that the Doctor is without a regular companion means that the novel isn't closely tied to any particular era. Instead, it stands as a tribute to the series' endless potential for imagination.