BBC Books The Coming of the Terraphiles

Author	Michael Moorcock
ISBN	1 846 07983 2
Published	2010

Synopsis: The Doctor and Amy join the Terraphiles in order to prevent the impending collapse of the multiverse.

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 23/10/11

I didn't like it that much. I realise how momentous it is to have an author of Michael Moorcock's stature writing a Doctor Who novel, but that doesn't mean we're guaranteed to get the Best Book Ever from it.

My main problem, I think, is the tone of the P.G. Wodehouse pastiche. I think it's off. I admire how wholeheartedly he's trying to graft it on to Doctor Who, but I also think he's letting it creak under the strain. Wodehouse was in love with his characters, no matter how empty-headed or trivial, and you could feel it in his stories. Moorcock though is a bit snide. He doesn't seem to like these upper-class toffs he's created and his sideswipes at them to me often felt dismissive. "Like most tourists, Mrs Banning-Cannon loathed tourists." To me they came across as buffoons who don't matter, with pointless worldviews and very little weight as characters. Admittedly, they gain in stature as the book progresses, but they could hardly do otherwise given where they're starting from.

That's true of Wodehouse's characters too, but they're likeable, wildly entertaining and have virtues, e.g. Bertie Wooster is unshakeably loyal to his friends.

That's half of it. The other half of the equation is that Wodehouse used to build his plots to fit his characters. Moorcock's plot is about space pirates, interdimensional black holes and a threat to the entire multiverse. This works better than you'd think because the Bertie Woosters' problems are intertwined with something unimaginable, but even so there's something ill-fitting about it. That's the point. It's like Douglas Adams or Dave Stone. This actually works once it picks up, but I found the early chapters hard going with all these halfwits wittering on about nothing and yet also being rich and powerful enough to trade planets to each other on a whim.

The whole idea of the Terraphiles doesn't help here either. It's like Jac Rayner's EarthWorld or to a lesser extent The End of the World, but crossbred with Monty Python's Upper Class Twit of the Year Show. Essentially they're comedy walk-ons, but promoted to be main characters.

That's one major element in the book, but there's a lot more too. He's bringing in his other books, not all of which I recognised. I'm not that well read in Moorcock, but even I could identify Jerry Cornelius and Law and Chaos. A bit of reading suggests that the Multiverse, Miggea, O'Bean and Morphail might also be references to the Moorcock-verse, plus probably still more I've no idea about. There's a ton of wildly ambitious technobabble about the interdimensional threat that might as well have been in Serbo-Croat for all the sense it makes. There's a space pirate called Captain Cornelius, who's cool. There's fun to be had with bargain-basement space travel. There is/are villain(s) called Frank/Freddie, who appear only once, in the middle of the book. It's messy, but you can't say it's not energetic.

My favourite thing about the book, I think, is its lack of concern for the usual Doctor Who story formulae. Admittedly it would fit in quite well with Dave Stone's oeuvre, but even so this is an epic, interdimensional quest in order that Bertie Wooster's team can play cricket. (It's loopy Terraphile not-cricket from the year 51,007, but it would be an overstatement to call this even a paper-thin disguise.) The villain's involvement is almost tokenistic. The technobabble to explain it all is impenetrable. We understand that there's something important going on, but the whys and wherefores are abstract and so at the end of the day, the concrete things we have to grab on to are questions like "who stole Mrs Banning-Cannon's hat?" This is distinctive. I'm particularly impressed that Moorcock maintains his Wodehouse pastiche throughout, both in plot and character, and keeps it centre-stage despite the dizzying scope of other story elements.

You've also got to admire all those layers. We have all kinds of ingredients being thrown together in kaleidoscope fashion, up to and including the cyclical destruction of the multiverse. Moorcock's ambition is powerful and he's capable of prose unrestrained enough to live up to that.

The Doctor's a bit generic, mind you. He has his moments, but he's never noticeably Matt Smith and his companion didn't remind me much of Karen Gillan either. The line about "Amy's natural intelligence" is amusing, for instance. However, it's hard to be too critical given that this was written when we'd barely embarked upon the Moffat era and Smith hadn't had much time to settle in yet. It's the same problem Justin Richards had in The Only Good Dalek. Besides, given my opinions of Smith's acting, maybe I was lucky not to be being reminded of him.

I like the names, by the way.

It's a confusing book. Imagine Bertie Wooster and the gang at Blandings Castle in a combination of Sky Pirates!, the third Hitch-Hikers book and Steve Parkhouse's Voyager, all chasing the Key to Time. There's plenty to grab your attention. I don't think it's entirely successful in its chosen goal of bringing Wodehouse into Doctor Who, but I respect the wholeheartedness with which it goes about it. If I had to sum it up in a soundbite, I'd say I can see lots of good things here, but I don't think they come together. It's not a fully satisfying story. That's sort of deliberate, but it also means that I found it to be a patchwork of impressions and odd pieces rather than a unified experience. There are things I enjoyed and other things I appreciated in a more intellectual way. Quite a lot of them, in fact. But as a complete book, it's... odd. I'm sure it would work better for me on a reread, but on the other hand I don't see myself feeling the urge. It would probably be an interesting experience if I did, though.

Mind you, it also won't have helped that I abandoned my first attempt because I wasn't enjoying it. I then went back to it and ploughed through peacefully enough, but then put it down and didn't return to it for a week. Eventually I finished it. My feelings about it aren't that coherent, but it's an easy book to be incoherent about.

But still. Wodehouse, eh? If anyone's listening, I'd like a Doctor Who version of something like Uncle Fred Flits By. That would be great, thanks.