Retrospective: Mark Gatiss by John Seavey 30/4/03
It's rare that an author's debut novel is his or her best work; usually, first-time novels tend towards excess, and it takes a book or two before the writer can stem their tide of over-exuberance and focus properly on those themes and ideas which best suit the individual work. Mark Gatiss, though, proves an exception to the rule; his first novel, Nightshade, is a tightly disciplined, starkly beautiful novel about the themes of loss and nostalgia, while his follow-ups, St. Anthony's Fire, The Roundheads, and Last of the Gaderene, have never managed to recapture that same brilliance.
Nightshade's reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by the novels that followed it; although wonderful, it doesn't have the same following that The Also People or Human Nature does. Partly, this is because of its subject matter -- Nightshade is a bleak, dark work about the dangers of dwelling on the past so much that it consumes you (literally as well as figuratively in the novel). It has a lot of casualties, a relative rarity in Who (every time I read it, I'm surprised anew to discover that anyone at all survives), a Doctor who's weary, sad, and fully feels the weight of his seven lives and nine hundred years of experience, and a betrayal at the end as Ace is press-ganged into continuing her journeys with the Doctor. And yet, for all that, it's utterly wonderful. Gatiss gets into the heads of all his characters, even those doomed to die within the first few pages, and shows us in Crook Marsham just how dangerous it can be to live in the past and forget the future. Everything works towards the same goal, and the result is like a sledge-hammer blow to the chest.
His follow-up, St. Anthony's Fire, tried for the same effect with the themes of the futility of prejudice; this was probably his first mistake, as that particular theme has been so well-trodden by other sci-fi stories (particularly every third 'Star Trek' episode) that it all feels a bit warmed over. To top that off, he over-egged the story to the extent of ludicrousness; in addition to the two alien factions fighting over religion, we also get an evil religious order with high powered laser cannons (who torture kittens, in a bit of non-subtlety), a genetically engineered killer cloud, and an extinct alien race that paid the price for their prejudice. This isn't a sledge-hammer blow to the chest; this is several blows, one after the other, until the point is so far in the ground that only worms can see it. It still tries valiantly; there's some nicely atmospheric moments with the jungle and the oncoming Keth... but on the whole, it seems to be a failure. Even the regulars seem flat and uninterested.
After that, Gatiss departed for TV and the League of Gentlemen, and his remaining two novels were exercises in nostalgia themselves. They're good, for all that -- Gatiss recreates the Second and Third Doctor eras so precisely that it almost seems like he's novelizing unproduced scripts -- but he seems to have abandoned trying to say anything profound with his books. Which is something of a shame, as the writer of Nightshade is still in there somewhere, and I do believe that he's got the talent to produce another book of the same quality... I just don't think we'll see him try.