Retrospective: Gareth Roberts by John Seavey 16/5/03
The New Adventures, in their initial "mission statement", spoke of wanting to do stories 'too broad and too deep for the small screen'. They wanted to do mature, adult stories that crossed the boundaries of Doctor Who as a children's program, dealing with adult themes, and acting as serious works.
All of that must have come as a horrendous shock to Gareth Roberts; if there was ever a novelist who more clearly wanted to do light, fluffy, humorous books, I'd be hard-pressed to think of him. His seven novels of the Virgin era (The Highest Science, Tragedy Day, The Romance of Crime, Zamper, The English Way of Death, The Plotters, The Well-Mannered War) all struggled to harmonize his own personal style with the mandates of the line he was working in, and only once, I think, did he truly succeed.
Initially, the New Adventures were the only game in town, and his first two novels (and his fourth, Zamper) were written for that line. Again, it's very clear that he wants to write something humorous and light, out of the Douglas Adams school of Doctor Who, but that he's also trying to write one of the darker, more serious novels that fit in with the house style of the NAs. The results turn out like lurching, lumbering Frankenstein monsters with the stitches clearly showing from his impromptu surgery. The Highest Science features many comedy sequences that entertain quite well, for example, but ends with the Doctor having failed and doomed some thirty people to near-certain death because he arrogantly assumes that a non-violent approach will work just fine in the face of a marauding, vicious reptilian species that hate all mammalian life. (Thankfully, Romana and Paul Cornell save him from the results of his own hubris some books down the line.)
Tragedy Day is the clearest example of why this approach didn't work. On the one hand, Olleril is meant to be a cute and enjoyable satire of 20th century Earth, with everyone obsessed with the android celebrities and a secret empire run by a twelve year old working behind the scenes. It's all supposed to be funny, and we're supposed to have a good laugh... but in that case, why put in the scenes of the innkeeper who befriended the Doctor being burned alive in his own tavern, or having the twelve year old boy crushed to death at the end? A spot of child murder is never "witty", or "cute", but Roberts must have felt it necessary given the mandates of Doctor Who.
Zamper takes this even further; by the end of the novel, every single character we see, every single character involved, every single character even peripherally relevant to the plot apart from the Doctor and his companions dies. The Doctor convinces the Chelonian fleet to self-destruct, then nips out without trying to arrange any kind of escape pods or evacuation of the doomed ship, because "he's more important to the universe". It's as though Roberts was so busy trying to be all "mature" that he neglected some of the basic elements of the Doctor's character.
Fortunately for him and for us all, the Missing Adventures came along, and Roberts was free to write stories in a line whose mandate wasn't "too broad and too deep", but "exactly like" the small screen. Here, he produced the trilogy of Fourth Doctor books for which he is best remembered, as well as The Plotters, which somehow always winds up being forgotten (perhaps because it's quite forgettable; it evokes the Hartnell era perfectly, mostly by being padded, dull, and filled with hammy, unnecessary faux-"comic" characters.)
With these books, Roberts tries to evoke the atmosphere of the TV series, with great success. In fact, in his first effort, The Romance of Crime, he succeeds a little too well -- the mind's eye pictures the wobbly sets, the bad special effects, the hammy acting...thankfully, he upped his mental budget for The English Way of Death, a Wodehouse pastiche that is arguably his magnum opus. In it, the elements that lurched and stumbled in his New Adventures all finally pull together -- the villain is threatening enough to be credible without being so deadly as to strip away the lighter elements of the work, and the deaths, while shocking, don't create the same bittersweet aura that taints the jokes of his other novels. It's a work in which the celebration at the end feels justified; the villain has been defeated, the lovers united, and the world saved.
And then there was The Well-Mannered War.
It's a "stunt" novel, in this case a "final" Doctor Who novel in which we finally see the end for our hero, sacrificing himself and his TARDIS to thwart the goals of the Black Guardian by hurling himself outside the very universe. As such, it has a bleak, funereal atmosphere, and also as such, I cannot think of a worse person than Gareth Roberts to write it. The whole thing is not his forte, and the "stitched-on" sense one got when reading his New Adventures returns in spades at the end. Suddenly, like switching into reverse on the highway, we go from the Doctor's triumph to his pathos-filled departure to the Land of Fiction, and the ending to a book has never felt more wrong. It kills the enjoyment of the novel, and for me at least, left a bad taste in the mouth regarding the end of the Virgin line.
It does, however, tie up a loose end from his first book that even Paul Cornell didn't; notably, it resolves the fate of the Chelonians left stranded at the end of that book. The Chelonians remain Roberts' lasting contribution to the Doctor Who mythos, if only because they were one of the few monsters in Doctor Who that was never drawn right on the cover. (All the covers showed Chelonians as bipeds with shells on their backs, whereas the descriptions clearly showed Chelonians as quadropeds who occasionally reared up when both hands were needed. They looked like big turtles -- how hard was that to get right?) In any event, the Chelonians, giant hermaphroditic space turtles with a taste for flowers and a hatred for mammalian life, will probably remain indeliably fixed in the minds of readers with not only Gareth Roberts, but with the New Adventures as a whole.
As with many of the early writers, Roberts has moved on to other fields of writing, and a return to Doctor Who seems phenomenally unlikely. I can't say this really bothers me; he never really seemed suited to the sort of writing called for by the books, and has probably already produced his one great work. It might be nice to see another Fourth Doctor novel out of him (preferably one where he gets the Doctor out of the cliffhanger at the end of The Well-Mannered War), but I really can't say I miss him all that much.