Virgin Publishing The Menagerie

Author	Martin Day
ISBN#	0 426 20449 2
Published	1995
Continuity	Between The Space Pirates and The War Games

Synopsis: On a planet where strange mutations appear to be occuring, the Doctor is sent on a mission to find a menagerie that might contain clues about this mutation. Meanwhile, Jamie is held prisoner and Zoe is sold to the circus.

• A Review by Sean Gaffney
• A review by Stuart Gutteridge
• A Review by Finn Clark
• Attack of the Evil Lab Mice by Jacob Licklider

A Review by Sean Gaffney 12/8/99

Well, my first impression of this book was a shellacking of a review that it got on The Velvet Web. I then read Paul's article that Martin seemed distraught about it.

Well, Martin shouldn't worry. It's a very good book.

Briefly: GOOD POINTS ABOUT THE MENAGERIE:

1) The plot. This is very well thought out, and all of the threads actually manage to work together, which is more than I can say for some MA's beginning with E and ending in volution. The book actually seemed to know where it was going, and got there. Wow!

2) The secondary characters. These are also well done, from the successive excerpts of the priests' books to the weary city guard.

Now: Stuff I had problems with:

1) The Doctor. This has been mentioned before, so I'll just say that I didn't see the Doctor as Patrick Troughton. Either of the Bakers (well, maybe not P&J) would have fit better.

2) The "Come back to my room" bit with Jamie and the girl at the end. No.

Any-way! (Pronounce like Miranda Richardson)

To be not-so-brief, good book, tweaking of the era would have been better. 7/10.

A Review by Stuart Gutteridge 1/8/00

The first MA to feature The Second Doctor is certainly not the best, a hard trawl to be accurate. Advice for Martin Day "Must try harder."

PLOT: Interesting enough to keep the pages turning although the abundance of monsters, whilst notorious for appearing in the Troughton era go into overkill here, with only the Mecrim (featured on the cover) given any sort of description.

THE DOCTOR: This is Patrick Troughton by numbers. Some of the dialogue is perfect, a lot jars;with no real capture of his mannerisms and inflections which characterised The Second Doctor.

COMPANIONS: Zoe is actually very good if underused, falling into the captured by the monsters cliché does her no favours. Jamie is terrible, however, not playing the hero nor the romantic lead (if Jamie can be described as that) enough.

OTHERS: Actually a lot better than the regulars. The Knights of Kuabris for example, are given real motivation and are identifiable as characters.

OVERALL: Not bad, the plot is worthy, the characters variable. Martin Day really needed to do a bit more homework before starting this book. 5/10.

A Review by Finn Clark 16/8/04

The Menagerie is dreadful, but not in any of the usual ways. It doesn't have any single flaw that you can point at, but is simply a dull mess by someone who apparently wasn't yet ready to write a novel. Martin Day's subsequent books have been so much better than this that it's hardly fair to make comparisons. The plot here isn't terrible, but the execution makes it a chore to read. You struggle through 264 turgid pages and then immediately forget it all, just like Shadowmind or A Device of Death.

There are relative high points. The high-tech scenes are good. I liked Jenn Alforge and her mutant mice, but unfortunately she's only around for seven pages and after that we're stuck with knights, mages, castles, towers and halberd-carrying soldiers. In this world science is forbidden. This notion actually has potential and could have made for an intriguing setting, except that: (a) everything's so predictable, (b) it's immediately obvious how this world came into existence, so there's no mystery, and (c) there's no real attempt to explore this low-tech world anyway. Apart from the science-hating Knights of Kuabris and someone who claims the title of mage, it's just another scummy sub-medieval peasant world with nothing we haven't seen a million times before.

The precise connections between past and present are clever, particularly one revelation. Unfortunately the characters inhabiting this plot are cut-rate third-stringers with hardly half a brain between them. Zaitabor is supposedly the villain, but he's barely "henchman" material. In any other story he'd be the baddie's sadistic, thuggish sidekick, the stupid one who keeps goofing up and dies conveniently in episode three. Cosmae is a worthless excuse for a man and I yearned for his death. (Even Jamie gets irritated by his whining on p98.) No one's really a player in the story. The Knights, Defrabax, the peasants... everyone just blunders through without much of a clue about anything. Basically they're all stupid.

Then there's the clumsy storytelling. Important plot elements are de-emphasised or thrown away, making it hard to keep track of events. The most important people in the book die offscreen halfway through. Then most obviously there's the problem that the book's climactic threat is a bunch of dumb monsters on the loose. Yup, that's it. I kept waiting for the real threat to show up.

There are specific plot problems. The homunculus is really stupid on p241, torn as it is between: (a) the death of one annoying git, and (b) the deaths of everyone, including that same git. Even the Doctor explains this a few pages later. Worse still is the massive cheat at the end. Various people are caught in an explosion. The (indestructible) baddies all die, the Doctor isn't even scratched and his two friends are pulled alive from the rubble in time to say some dying words. And the explanation? Check it out, from p256:

"'He and the Mecrim took the full force of the blast.' The Doctor pointed towards the largest pile of blackened stonework. 'I'll explain later.'"

For the most part the 2nd Doctor is merely poor, but he gets a few baffling moments. Apparently the Doctor and the Master are the same person (p58), while the Doctor can send out his mind to pick up telepathic images from different times and places across the planet (p61). One line he 'hears' was said many centuries earlier. Another oh-so-convenient superpower for the Doctor! What a load of bollocks. I haven't seen anything so daft since "soul-catching" in Devil Goblins from Neptune, co-written by... ah, yes. As for the companions, Zoe is unlikeably pompous while Jamie is 100% finest cardboard. He gets plenty to do, though, including an entertaining scene with a hovercar.

I was interested to see that Martin Day does well by his female characters, though. There's plenty of sex, with Kaquaan being a working prostitute, but unlike many NAs it doesn't come across as yet another sad male fantasy. These scenes take a female perspective, with the men being the ones who end up looking pathetic. Come to think of it, the book's best characters are women. Kaquaan is practically the heroine while I liked Reisar and Raitak; my favourite scenes were those set in Diseada's freak show.

There's a motif of freaks (Diseada's show, the Menagerie, Defrabax's homunculus, etc.), though it doesn't go anywhere much. I liked Jenn Alforge's emails, which broke up the prose and gave me something to focus on. Um, I think that's everything I liked about this book.

Sadly, this novel is sub-standard in every way. Reading it is like wading through treacle with little to reward you, but Martin Day's subsequent work has improved on this beyond recognition and it would be unfair to regard The Menagerie as anything but atypical. I imagine most writers have perpetrated rubbish like this at some point, but most of us are lucky in that our early stumblings never left the darkest, most shameful recesses of our hard drives. The Menagerie is just such a learning experience, but unfortunately it got commissioned.

Attack of the Evil Lab Mice by Jacob Licklider 27/4/19

Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor gave a screen performance on television that is just difficult to replicate. He famously improvised a lot of the comedic bits of scripts with Frazer Hines on the spot knowing there would most likely be no time for a second take. This heavily improved even the weakest scripts he was in by a lot, but, for Martin Day, that posed a problem as his personality and mannerisms are just difficult to replicate accurately. This proves a problem, as Martin Day's debut novel, The Menagerie, relies heavily on the Second Doctor being active in the events of the story, but Day simply does not know how to write for the Second Doctor, which causes large portions of the book to be quite boring, as the Doctor comes across closer to the Fourth Doctor or even the Sixth Doctor but not the Second Doctor. Day also remains inconsistent with which companion team he is writing for, as The Menagerie features Jamie and Zoe but there are points in the novel that feel like they were written for Steven and Dodo, Jamie and Victoria, and even Ben and Polly, which really makes the effect jarring. Zoe gets the worst treatment of the three, as she feels like stock companion, which just shows how Day didn't get her character. It is understandable why the characterization is off as, at the time this was written, only The Dominators, The Mind Robber, The Krotons, The Seeds of Death and The War Games existed in the archives, but that doesn't explain how he knew about The Space Pirates and a lot of the earlier missing Troughton serials so this isn't forgivable.

Day also writes a story that on the surface looks interesting, with the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arriving in a city where science is feared and there is a mythical Menagerie and conspiracies afoot. The plot, instead of doing anything interesting, is trying to do a base-under-siege story without having a base and the under-siege portions only start to happen in the final quarter of the novel. The villains that do attack are interesting, as they are pretty much giant mutated lab mice, but they don't have any sort of character or fear factor, as you can tell when they are going to attack from a mile away. Day does do some interesting things with the twist of how the city is actually built on top of a scientifically advanced ghost town, which helps explain why people have fear of science, even though they have electricity, which is still science.

The novel is also full of subplots, with Zoe being forced into the circus as a slave, which goes nowhere and Jamie trying to rescue the Doctor and Zoe from prison but failing, which also doesn't go anywhere. Day tries to keep us invested by putting in points of the mystery and filling the novel with a lot of characters who really have nothing to do in this novel. Day does kill off some characters in what can be considered slightly emotional scenes, as he kills off a child in gruesome detail, which is a bit difficult to get through, but most of the characters are there just so the main three characters have someone to talk to. The society Day builds is in great detail, which is a plus, as this is a medieval society with knights, alchemists and kings, with a description on the back cover that will entrance everyone, but Day doesn't do much with the premise. The Mecrim are the villains, who have no character, as they cannot speak and just rampage. We do get a lot of backstory involving just how they came to be in a laboratory, supported by the Intergalactic Mining Corporation, and had their DNA given to the Butler Institute from Cat's Cradle: Warhead, which gives some nice continuity and commentary on animal cruelty, but, other than that, there is nothing to sink your teeth into.

To summarize, The Menagerie had so much potential to tell an interesting story from a first-time author. The novel, however, is written in a very amateur way that just doesn't make me stay interested in the events taking place. He writes for the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in a very inconsistent way that feels closer to some of the later Doctors, with too many supporting characters who make no impact and some subplots that are only there so Day can write in a lot of dialogue, which just shows you how amateurish Day is and how the writing doesn't flow from scene to scene. The idea is a very good one, and there are some things to like about this story, but you could do a lot better at finding something to read. 32/100