Retrospective: Neil Penswick by John Seavey 23/5/03
When Neil Penswick's first and only Doctor Who novel, The Pit, was released, it was heralded almost immediately as a new nadir for the series. Even today, some ten years onwards, it's widely considered by fans to be the single worst novel in the series. Penswick has been roundly reviled for authoring it, and his reputation has no doubt suffered. But does he really deserve the heaping derision visited upon him? Is The Pit really that bad?
Unfortunately, the answer is "yes."
The first, and most insurmountable problem, is the prose. The Pit reads like it was written by someone who learned English as a second language -- no, scratch that. The Pit actually reads like it was written by someone who wrote it in English, translated it into Dutch, then gave it to someone who wasn't entirely familiar with either Dutch or English to translate it back. All the characters speak in a similar, oddly stilted and formal manner (William Blake, at one point, greets a chestnut seller with, "I am glad to see you. What is the cost of your food?") and idioms seem oddly mis-phrased and out of place, exactly the result that would be expected from a bad translation. If someone told me the original text was in Arabic, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
In addition, it's monotonous as all hell. Penswick almost never uses any punctuation other than the period; when a semi-colon, comma, or exclamation point shows up, it's almost a cause for celebration. Admittedly, first-time writers can over-use these things as well, but coupled with his tendency to formalize sentence lengths (long sentence, short sentence, short sentence, long sentence) it creates an atmosphere of almost hypnotic tedium. If this were an audio-book, it'd be narrated by Rain Man.
Characterization is almost totally lacking as well; the Doctor here is a brain-damaged idiot who wanders through the book doing nothing, and Bernice is a mean-spirited bitch. Blake is dull (and that's an achievement in itself -- making a poet who hallucinated angels and demons, and who wrote some of the finest poetry of his age, into a dull character), and everyone else is pretty much zero-dimensional. Only Kopyion has any interesting facets to him; one quickly suspects that the book was written as a vehicle for Kopyion, and the plot coalesced around it.
The plot's not much either, here; we see the Doctor sidelined early and often, and had the TARDIS crew not arrived, events would have unfolded in exactly the same fashion as they did with them present. Penswick is frequently sloppy; in one scene, a character inside a spaceship laments the lack of external monitors, while in the very next scene, a character outside the ship comments that the ship has external monitors, so the person inside should know he's there. Sure enough, she does -- consistency being a hobgoblin of little minds, I suppose.
I could complain about characters doing stupid things to further the plot, but that would be inaccurate, because they do stupid things that never further the plot at all. Bernice walks into a patch of quicksand because she's in a hurry (to get to where, or do what is never specified), then is rescued by a random person (possibly Kopyion, although that's never specified either) and continues on her way. Ditto the Doctor, who wanders into a brothel, plays marbles with a girl, asks about Jack the Ripper, and leaves. Even the characters, after a certain point, start asking why they're doing such idiotic things.
Those few defenders that The Pit does have point to its themes as redeeming it; they claim that it asks searching and penetrating questions about the nature of existence. This may, to some extent, be true; I will point out, however, that a) asking, "If there's a God, why does He let bad things happen?" is not in and of itself profound, no matter how many people ask the question over the course of the novel (I'd guess about once every five pages.) Coming up with an answer, that's profound. And b) it's not exactly as though Penswick is the first person to come up with it, is it? I mean, I could go copy some Plato out of a book on philosophy, and then have every single character in my novel repeat the phrases verbatim, but it doesn't make me deep.
The Pit does do a few interesting things with ancient Gallifrey and the Yssgaroth which other authors developed better, and in fact in some of its themes (the Doctor being an arrogantly naive fool in the eyes of the ancient Gallifreyans, things outside the universe let in by Rassilon) it's a template for Interference. But one need only read Interference to understand just how much better those themes and ideas could have been developed in The Pit. While it's possible that Penswick has improved as a writer over the last decade (certainly he got loads of constructive criticism after his first novel), I can't say that it's worth the risk of getting another Pit just to see if he's gotten better, and I think the range as a whole is better for his absence.