#19
The Man In The Velvet Mask
By Daniel O’Mahony
Aw. This one made me all nostalgic.
Not for the Hartnell era,
obviously, which the author seems technically aware of but has no real interest
in evoking. Or for my childhood when I
first got this book, since I didn’t read it until now. The
Man In The Velvet Mask brought back more recent memories of Virgin books –
specifically the ones I had to all but prise my eyelids open to finish. It’s been a while since I had an honest to
goodness ordeal in book-land, where just getting to the end feels like an
achievement akin to slaying a Kaiju.
Still, I did it! The city is safe
again... for now.
I know it has its fans, but
they’re the first to admit it’s a marmite book.
And it ain’t the author’s first.
Falls The Shadow, matter-of-factly referred to in the blurb as
“mould-breaking” (O RLY?), also played fast and loose with things like plot,
character and good taste. It was a book
uncomfortably keen on sadism, which makes it hilariously unsurprising that The Man In The Velvet Mask goes the
whole hog and features the man for whom sadism is named. I mean god forbid we psychoanalyse an author,
but at this point I wouldn’t leave him alone with any small animals.
The villains of Falls The Shadow
had some interesting aspects, their existence being a knock-on effect of the
Doctor simply arriving in times and places, erasing what might have been. But as characters they didn’t have a
dimension between them. They were
sadists for a laugh – because well, sadism innit? – and that pervading sense of
self-serving meanness hangs over The Man
In The Velvet Mask. It’s a visceral
and ugly book, dwelling on typically icky (and narratively absent) dream
sequences and delighting in Giger-esque settings, all of which is its own
reward. Once again, Daniel O’Mahony
gives the impression that great care has gone into the prose, and any strikes
with a red pen would be met with a snort of derision: “You just don’t get it,
maaan!” It’s just as fond of random
violence as the abominable Strange England, but this author at least seems to
perceive a pattern. Lucky him. All the deliberation and care in the world
can’t animate an AWOL story.
Again with trying not to second
guess the author; I don’t know how meticulously the plot was laid out before he
wrote the book. Shall we assume,
very? If so, it doesn’t come across that
way. Upon arriving in an obviously
changed France of 1804 – the Doctor deduces this by stepping out of the TARDIS
and reading a poster, how thrilling – the Doctor and Dodo go their separate
ways and become embroiled in... the fact that it’s different, I guess, with a
vague view to fixing it. There’s no plan
to speak of for almost the entire book, since there’s correspondingly little
clarification on what has changed and what, besides the presumable need to make
it all nice again, is at stake. (When we
finally do get the villain’s evil plan you can barely hear it over the bellow
of Oh Well None Of This Will Have Happened Anyway. Ditto the threat of a French/British
conflict. Who ruddy cares?) Sheer bad luck places this book quite soon
after Just War, which handled its own alternate history with wit, gravity and originality. D’oh.
Lance Parkin was just all round
better at this, jumping off from an easily recognisable historical fork in the
road and grounding it with the experience of the regulars. O’Mahony has the Doctor vaguely potter around
the villain’s Bastille, wrestling with his own mortality which doesn’t exactly
relate to the present crisis; meanwhile Dodo falls in with some (obviously
weird and metaphysical) actors, and starts a relationship with one of them,
occasionally getting so involved in the Marquis de Sade play they’re performing
that she uses another name. (Some of
this echoes Managra, another book with a doolally view of history and an author
eerily certain of his business. Except
Managra was fun to read.) This is
infamously the book where Dodo gets an STD, and it’s difficult to follow that
with any meaningful analysis. Yep, that
happens. What the freaking hell, dude.
The relationship behind said
probably-meant-to-be-poignant sex keepsake isn’t strong enough to warrant such
an odd water cooler moment. (What the
hell would be? But even so.) Dalville likes Dodo immediately and makes it
clear he wants to corrupt her. She is...
fine with this? And after losing her
virginity (I got too much detail so here you go as well) she continues to buzz
around him. Problem: Dalville isn’t an
interesting character. None of the
actors are, some of whom are aliens, or in a supernatural disguise, which only
adds to the anonymous blah of the lot
of them. (The text describes them as “a parade of faces and false names” which
gives the unnerving impression that they are meant to be a weird, colourless bunch of blah.) Nor are the two or three murderous characters
who flit through the story and kill the girl Dodo replaces in the acting
company. The Doctor fails to save her
and then lies about it to Dalville; that either didn’t come up again or else I
missed it.
Neither the Doctor nor Dodo is
fully aware of what the other is up to, and both seem to osmose through the
story in a sort of fugue state. (Rather
like the one I was in.) You might at
least find O’Mahony’s choice of characters interesting. Nobody writes about Dodo, a companion who
didn’t quite find an audience and was so far from beloved that she left the
show off-screen, mid-adventure, and Jackie Lane has had seemingly no interest
in touching the character with a barge pole since. This book doesn’t especially like her either,
highlighting her unspectacular looks (including, at one point, her flat chest,
because this book is charming), and her need for attention so craven that she
used to fake itching fits to get a few stares at her own birthday party. Yeah, so glad she got a book to herself and
Leela didn’t.
By separating her from the Doctor
the lingering (and you would think, pressing) question of “Does he actually
like this random person who once barged into the TARDIS” doesn’t come up much,
although he does aptly observe that she is effectively Susan’s reflection “distorted in a rough mirror.” Sure enough, the experience serves to
highlight the fact that she will be leaving soon, not that she goes willingly
so that’s all rather pointless, isn’t it?
Perhaps the cover artist should have given her a T-shirt: “I Starred In
A Book And All I Got Was This Lousy Venereal Disease.”
The Doctor is somewhat more
recognisable, although his hurtling towards his own regeneration, which is a
little while off actually, is a bit too try-hard in terms of interesting
characterisation. Why is he so weak and
feeble now, when the Doctor we see in
the next TV story is if anything revitalised?
(I think O’Mahony missed a trick setting this after The Savages, in
which some of the Doctor’s life force is stolen. On my telly watch-through of the Hartnell
era, including missing episodes, I thought this led serendipitously
into his regeneration. But it isn’t spelled
out here. Oh well.) Interesting side-notes include a reference to
the Doctor having one heart in his first incarnation, which probably explains
an inconsistency somewhere; the second heart came with the regeneration,
apparently! Despite it all, O’Mahony’s
Hartnell has the right measure of crotchety bluster and warmth, even when
talking to a severed head on a spike or the Marquis de Sade. But it’s a very small plus in context.
In amongst this vague dawdle
through a generally unpleasant Paris, not punctuated with enough relatable
characters for the incongruity of it all to matter a damn, is de Sade, a
slithery relation of his called Minski and the titular man in a velvet
mask. I learned very little about de
Sade here, but the trajectory of his story, and the identity of the masked man
is all pretty obvious. (Praise be that
something here is.) O’Mahony, as I’ve mentioned, tends to divert
all power to the prose machine, so you’ve got tenses swapping (to denote being
outside of regular time, which is at least explicable), bits in italics or
brackets, gothic dream sequences and – need you ask! – a thoroughly weird
prologue that combines much of the above.
There is a general self-consciousness about how weird it all is, which
for me is just pointing at the window dressing.
I am here for story and meaningful character development. At points my eyes rolled over the words as
pleasurably as if they were laying tarmac, and more than once my brain revolted
and I nodded off. Like this review, it
just goes on and on, (self?) flagellating.
There are moments where it
attempts to lighten up. The chapter
headings are in an oddly chirpy mood throughout (see “Carry On Chopping”); it
has some literary allusions, generally Shakespeare, which mostly reminded me of
books I liked more that did that; and characters occasionally use jolly
colloquialisms. After all, you might
argue, Donald Cotton wrote conspicuously dry dialogue (for the setting) in The
Myth Makers. Yeah, but that worked in
context. Lightness doesn’t suit The Man In The Velvet Mask at all.
I think it comes down to how you
felt about Falls The Shadow. If you
couldn’t get enough of its changing imagery and peculiar horrors, you’re in
luck. Whereas if you struggled through
its mostly incidental story and random violence, reading The Man In The Velvet Mask may be an exercise in punishment of
which the Marquis de Sade would approve.
3/10
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