Retrospective: Daniel O'Mahoney by John Seavey 23/4/03
Whatever else you might say about Daniel O'Mahony, he's certainly made an impact in Doctor Who. His output of novels and novellas has been small (Falls the Shadow, The Man in the Velvet Mask, The Cabinet of Light), but they've been memorable; they've also polarized fan opinion to a great degree. In fact, O'Mahony seems to combine all of the different ways that Doctor Who authors have polarized fans of the series.
For one, he's one of the more stylistically off-beat Doctor Who writers. In fact, it's not an exaggeration to say that his style is remembered much more than his actual stories are. While The Man in the Velvet Mask has some interesting ideas, to give an example, it's not radically different in substance from The Domino Effect, Blood Heat, Inferno, or any other "alternate reality" story that's come down the pike in Doctor Who (or in sci-fi in general for that matter.) No, what's remembered is the use of the Marquis de Sade, of the Hellfire Club using literal Hellfire, of Dodo deliberately contracting a venereal disease as a memento of her soon-to-be-unhappened lover, and of the way the novel gets inside the Doctor as he prepares for his first, and most important, death.
O'Mahony saturates his work with moody, atmospheric prose that at times skirts that narrow boundary between the poetic and pretentious, but definitely never presents an ordinary view of the world. Everything is filled with meaning; the moon becomes a goddess, blades of grass silent sentries, doors and rooms mythic and archetypal. Setting the scene with the appropriate grandeur, the gothic trappings of myth and legend is just as important as the events of any given scene if not moreso. If you're not in the mood for it, this style can seem self-indulgent in the extreme, but at times, it catches you with amazing intensity.
But as with other authors who evoke mood through vivid and detailed description of ordinary events, this does mean his plots sometimes suffer. Falls the Shadow is about fifty pages too long, and The Cabinet of Light about fifty pages too short. Only with The Man in the Velvet Mask does he seem to find a balance between over-indulging his penchant for descriptive prose and under-explaining the story. Coincidentally, The Man in the Velvet Mask is also the only story that features a large role for the Doctor, who gets sidelined in the other two stories. All three books, though, feature vivid characterization... both for better and for worse. Lechasseur, the protagonist of The Cabinet of Light, is one of the best-realized characters we've seen in Doctor Who, while Gabriel and Tanith, the villains of Falls the Shadow, were so bleak and unpleasant that even their deaths didn't give any satisfaction.
In the end, what I admire about O'Mahony is the authenticity he brings to his writing. The people, the events he writes about seem real and unforced; their lives and deaths seem to be their own decisions, rather than those of the writer controlling them. I'd love to see another novel by O'Mahony, and although I doubt we'll see it through the BBC, it wouldn't surprise me at all if one of the many spin-off lines of books decided he was worth commissioning again.