Island of Death
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BBC Books Island of Death |
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| Author | Barry Letts |  |
| ISBN# | 0 563 48631 7 | |
| Published | 2005 | |
| Featuring | The third Doctor, Sarah-Jane and the Brigadier |
| Synopsis: The Doctor finds himself on an island... of death! |
A Review by John Seavey 17/8/05
It's finally happened. Somebody has made the perfect generic Doctor Who novel. There is not a trace of anything, anything at all original anywhere in this entire book, from start to finish -- it is in its entirety, a Frankensteinian assemblage of bits taken from other Doctor Who novels and badly stitched together. It lurches to a grotesque parody of life, shambles around for a while, and then realizes it has no point or purpose and gives up.
I honestly can't think of a single nice thing to say about this, at all, anywhere. Every single one of the regular characters has been reduced to a one-dimensional, slightly brain-damaged caricature of themselves. The plot stops on page 50 and doesn't pick up again until page 200, and even then, it's got one beat and no twists. The writing would insult the intelligence of an eight-year old, and if you took the exclamation mark off of Barry Letts' keyboard, he'd have no idea how to end a sentence. Jeremy Fitzoliver turns in his absolutely most irritating appearance, a major feat for the character, and realistically speaking, criticizing any of the rest of the story would assume that there's a story to be criticized. It's not even interestingly bad, like Divided Loyalties. It's a damp squib.
Buy it only if you're a sad completist like me, read it only if you're a masochist like me as well.
A Review by Finn Clark Updated 5/5/20
Low in confidence.
More competent than some of
Letts's books, but dull.
Be afraid... by Joe Ford 30/8/05
Good old Barry Letts. For far too long now we have been inundated with seriously dull titles for our Doctor Who stories. Look at the TV series this year. Rose. How exciting. The Long Game. Yawn. Bad Wolf. Stop it, I might pee myself with anticipation. What about the books... The Gallifrey Chronicles (if there was ever a book to have a less inspiring title you let me know). Match of the Day (ooh, a book about footie!). Winner Takes All (who cares?). Even Big Finish have been lacking. Three's a Crowd, Catch-1782, The Game... I shan't try and be witty with these titles as it would be a waste of talent (ooh ego). What has happened to the good old campy Doctor Who titles? Terror of the Zygons! The Ice Warriors! The Android Invasion! Thank God we still have old hacks like Barry Letts on board and this time he has thought up a real humdinger... Island of Death! Who wouldn't want to read a book with that title? Island of Death, man! Even if it was by the same writer who gave us The Ghosts of N-Space you wouldn't care... Island of Death as an appetite whetter just rocks!
Unfortunately this is one of the ugliest written Doctor Who books ever. Barry Letts just cannot write prose to save his life and it doesn't matter if his ideas are shatteringly original (which they are not) or the plot is ohmiGodElisabethSladenisgoingtobeinseasontwo exciting (which it isn't), if the book doesn't read well you have lost the battle. Island of Death is chock-a-block full of horrible, unreadable sentences that left me gagging at the sheer incomprehensibility of them. I was always distracted away from what was going on because I was trying so hard to understand exactly what I was being told. This was particularly hard during the sailing scenes where Letts goes off down memory lane and starts dissecting the ship from port to stern and explaining every little rivet along the way. The only people who will get anything from these scenes are sailors or those who are on a cruise so they can check that Letts knows what he is talking about. For the everyday layman (ie me) it is just dull old nautical facts.
The book also tries far too hard to give its characters personality and is full of internal exclamations. Just like this! And this! Godammit! Sarah is particularly guilty in this regard and the Brig even starts getting in on the action during the tenser moments. Golly blast! I could imagine them mentally thumping a table every time they had one of these thoughts, dagnammit!
And worse of all is how the characters keep remembering their pasts, like Mr Letts is trying to build up a picture of who these people are but cannot find any other way of doing so but have them recall what Granny told them once or comparing something to what Mama used to do or maybe just recalling their own illustrious career so far. At times the Brigadier reads like a list of military facts rather than a person and he doesn't seem to be able to manage anything without his usual motley UNIT gang. It feels horribly forced, Letts is telling you these people have had past rather than revealing it through the plot.
I'm afraid the plot is hardly inspiring either. A demon-worshipping cult? Cor, that's original, how long it take you to think up that one? It wouldn't matter so much if perhaps the book bothered to examine the cult in any great depth but the entire first half of the book is taken up by an extremely protracted chase sequence (so just like the Pertwee era there then) and features the heroes of the book guessing about the whole ghastly setup. Besides any book, which threatens to get rid of Jeremy Fitzoliver, should be an open and shut case surely? He's gone. Gobbled up by a demon-worshipping cult. Let's throw a party. The end.
What made this book almost bearable were the magical moments Letts scatters about every now and again that remind you that his head might still be in the game. I loved the funny business in the TARDIS early on, it reminded me of The War Games in all the best ways. And there was a fabulous scene with the Doctor and Sarah awaiting rescue looking up at the stars. Even Lethbridge-Stewart comes up trumps when he punches out one of the sailors. But these special moments do not crop up enough to take my mind away from the woeful mischaracterization and terrible dialogue.
I do appreciate that Sarah is treated as a working girl, so many writers forget that this is the ideal "on Earth" companion because of her journalism background and Letts forcibly reminds us here that during her first year on the show she was still living a normal life, earning a wage and only helping out the Doctor part time. But some of the lines Letts gives Sarah are shockingly bad, as though she was some kind of cockney wideboy. Without Elisabeth Sladen on board to make his dialogue sound plausible (and let's face it, she could make any dialogue sound okay, she even got through Revenge of the Cybermen unscathed... just!) Sarah reads like an amateurish, melodramatic flapper, one who is shoehorned into the role of the useless victim. Unforgivable.
The Doctor is even worse though, a far cry from the dignified gentlemen Pertwee used to play and this is an unfair interpretation of Letts' own Doctor. The tension with the Brigadier had all but vanished come season eleven so why do they squabble throughout like a pair of naughty schoolboys? Why does the Doctor spout nothing but technobabble, sounding as though he has swallowed a textbook for half the novel? The third Doctor was always in control during his stories but he stands at the periphery of Island of Death and remains redundant until the climax. And I know Lethbridge-Stewart could be something of a buffoon at times but he was never as idiotically naive as he is during stages of this book. When he is treated to a tour of a picturesque island he is utterly convinced that the Skang cult is all above board. If anything was going to convince they were up to know good it would be this kind of squeaky-clean behaviour!
The sad truth is, it doesn't look as if Letts has changed his storytelling techniques at all in thirty odd years since he was the producer of the show. Terrance Dicks can get away with it because his writing is so energetic and his characterisation spot on but this type of cliched rubbish was out of fashion in the seventies and I cannot imagine anyone enjoying the simplistic and deathly slow plot of Island of Death in 2005. If Justin Richards was trying to kill of the PDAs this would be the way to go, with Gary Russell up next, I can only imagine things will keep going downhill (although I live in hope that Gary Russell has one truly fabulous Doctor Who novel in him). It also looks as if Letts has not read up on any of the criticisms on his previous work because he is making the same mistakes that he did with Virgin.
If you are going to work with these kinds of stereotypes you have to do something fun with them. Or take the piss out of them. But Island of Death is a deadly serious novel and that is the final nail in the coffin. There are very few flashes of humour and the whole thing reads like a strained lecture. Remember kiddies don't go joining any demon-worshipping cults now!
Action must be taken. Being generous this book would scrape a barely acceptable and I'm afraid in this day and age (where there is so much more Doctor Who merchandise available) that just isn't good enough.
Almost unreadably poor.
Five Out Of Ten by Jamas Enright 23/4/06
Obviously being on DVD, and helping to write Deadly Reunion has inspired Barry Letts to try the Terrance Dicks track of churning out novels, being ensured of getting published because of his status of being a Doctor Who bigwig... but that's not to say that is the reason he got published, and it might be because Barry Letts can actually turn a good word... but can he?
Looking to his first solo Doctor Who work since novelising his audio plays, we find out that this is what the navy life was like for Barry Letts. Certainly it made an impression on him (in fact, the Brigadier spent some time in Barry Letts' half of Deadly Reunion on a boat as well), and it can't help but make an impression on us as well. Why's that? Oh, maybe because most of the book is spent on a boat as it sails from one port to another. We are treated to descriptions of life on board, the ship in the ocean waves, the excitement of watching someone consult a chart... this certainly isn't the first book to spend a large part of the story traveling from one point to another (say 'hello' Eye of Heaven, which also used a boat), but that so much time is spent on board just shows up how much little plot there was to go around.
Which brings us to the Wirrn... I mean the Skang. The plot revolves around a cult of the Skang, which at least makes a change from the typical 'religion du jour' that Letts usually writes about, but there isn't really much here to distinguish the Skang from any other typically generic alien invader, another than maybe some rubbish about gravity waves. And the cult's big hook? A feelgood drug. Wow, that's new...
Ah, but who needs a decent plot when you have decent characterisation? And given that he was The Man back in the day, who better to get it right? I have to give Barry Letts one thing: they are indeed called the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and they are, in order, an alien scientist, a journalist, and a soldier. But despite the large amount of time we spend with them, they just don't feel like the crew we knew back in Season 11. Since when is the Brig such an alcoholic? Since when did the Doctor try to talk to animals? Since when did Sarah Jane actually take photographs? And did Jeremy ever have a personality?
Yep, that's right. Jeremy Fitzoliver, beloved character (by Letts at least) from Letts' two radio plays The Ghosts Of N-Space and The Paradise of Death (and you'll better have heard them because they get referenced more than once in this book). In here, he's more 'spoiled rich kid' than ever... but that was about it. Even an entire book doesn't help make him even one-dimensional.
Not that the other characters fair much better. I had trouble working out who was who on the boat, and the only two names I can remember of the 'baddies' are Hilda and Alex, meaning at least they had an impact, although the only descriptions of them that stick in my mind are 'uselessly kind' and 'stupidly ambitious', as the events of the book show them to be.
If Letts does return for another outing, I'm predicting it'll involve a long segment set on a ship, and long drawn-out events that don't really go anywhere. Certainly has proved to be a working formula so far.