Retrospective: Simon Messingham by John Seavey 9/3/13
The collective Doctor Who works of Simon Messingham (Strange England, Zeta Major, The Face-Eater, Tomb of Valdemar, The Infinity Race, The Indestructible Man, The Doctor Trap) are a bit like an ice sculpture. They're absolutely gorgeous, lovely things, and you can't help but admire them...but at the same time, there's something cold about them, something that tells you the last thing you want to do is get close and cuddly.
Messingham's Doctor Who novels are impressive, some of the most consciously literary of the range. He has a number of themes running through his work regarding dualism, subverting the standard Manichean model of morality that Doctor Who presents by developing settings in which two equally problematic factions struggle without having a clear "good guy" or "bad guy" anywhere involved. Tomb of Valdemar, for example, takes as its villain a religious fanatic who wants to free the entombed god... but when the government agent, Hopkins, shows up pursuing him, he turns out to be an equally sadistic and fanatical secularist, and is every bit as much a danger to the Doctor as the madman he rescues him from. The Doctor is presented as a lone light of empathy in a cold universe, constantly struggling against dogmatism of any sort.
That word, "struggle", is key to Messingham's conception of morality. He really does put the Doctor and company through all kinds of hell in his books; Jamie winds up suffering a psychotic break, Zoe has just accepted a marriage proposal when her fiance is shot dead before her very eyes (by agents of PRISM, the nominal defenders of Earth - as with Tomb, the good guys are every bit as ruthless and vicious as the ostensible villains) and the Doctor winds up with a catalog of injuries both mental and physical. Yet it is the ability to persevere through all this pain that is the thing Messingham most admires about the character. In his very first novel, the Doctor describes goodness as "a verb, not a noun", and his vision is contrasted vividly with the beautiful purity of the House, a goodness so pure and perfect that it bursts like a soap bubble the second it's touched by reality.
It's clear that Messingham isn't interested in "nice". He has no real desire to write about normal, pleasant, happy people. (Which may be why The Infinity Race is his weakest novel; it contains first-person material from Anji and Fitz, two people who are way too nice to be in a Simon Messingham book.) Messingham is more interested in writing about the damaged, the broken, and on some occasions the out-and-out shattered. His villains are some of the most vivid and intense characterizations in the novels; from Doctor Rix to Helen Percival to Kristyan Fall all the way to to Sebastiene, he specializes in terrifyingly realistic psychotics and sociopaths. Moreso, he specializes in showing the way they react under pressure; Helen Percival's disintegration under the stresses of running a colony is distinct and uniquely differentiated from Kristyan Fall's gruesome determination in the face of the abhorrent requirements of mining Zeta Minor for anti-matter. (Which may be another reason why The Infinity Race is his weakest novel; as ruthless and brutal as Sabbath was, he's still not quite damaged enough for Messingham.) It's almost as if Messingham uses trauma as a lens on the worlds he creates; The Indestructible Man is more or less a charming romp mixing the worlds of Gerry Anderson and Doctor Who, as seen by a writer who can't accept anything he can't take apart to see how it works.
Even his (rare) sympathetic characters are damaged in their own ways; Ben Fuller is an alcoholic, Jake Leary is misanthropic and belligerent, and Huvan is a moping, pathetic distillation of the worst elements of puberty made flesh. But as with the Doctor, they are presented as better simply because they refuse to give in to the worst instincts that define all too many of Messingham's other characters. Leary is nobody's idea of a hero, but he never lets himself become a villain. To Messingham, that's something worthy of celebration in and of itself.
To go on with Messingham's excellent use of theme and subtext, though, is to neglect the intricate and experimental style of his prose. Tomb of Valdemar makes brilliant use of the unreliable narrator, concealing a major revelation about the main character by presenting the whole thing as an old woman's tavern tale, while Zeta Major mixes transcripts, newsletters, and in one absolutely brilliant moment a fourth-wall breaking sequence in which two characters sit down and watch an episode of Doctor Who. His humor is frequently gallows humor, but it's also frequently funny humor.
The fact that Messingham is one of the very few authors still writing from the New Adventures to the New Series Adventures is impressive in and of itself. The fact that he's still writing cogent, intelligent, rich works of actual thought-provoking literature and I'd be happy to see his next book is by far more impressive. It might not be a good idea to warm up to Simon Messingham's novels, but that doesn't mean they're not impressive.