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The Doctor, Fitz and Anji land in the middle of a war zone.
The chief weapon in this particular war is time itself: decelerated
time fields bring armies to a virtual standstill, while accelerated
time can age a soldier to death within seconds. In a nearby
outpost, scientists are attempting to send subjects back in
time. But two subjects bring a strange temporal infection
back with them...
As
with his previous Who book, the witty and challenging
Festival of Death, the subject of time lies at the
heart of this novel. Time is described in similar terms to
the ocean depths - when the experimental subjects go back
through time, they are sent "down" into the depths of it,
like mariners in a diving bell. Those suffering from the ill-effects
of exposure to time need to be gradually adjusted back to
their normal continuum, like deep-sea divers suffering from
the bends.
As
in Festival of Death, emphasis is placed on the futility
of trying to change your own past. A decidedly Sapphire
and Steel type adversary, a creepy race of clock-faced
time entities, takes advantage of human feelings of regret
by tempting its victims to amend past mistakes. When such
errors are undone, the victims are tricked out of their own
existence. As the Doctor points out, our mistakes, how we
deal with them and learn from them, help to shape who we are.
It is ironic that he should say this, since he effectively
erased his own past when he destroyed Gallifrey in The
Ancestor Cell (though, of course, he still cannot remember
this).
Incidentally,
the clock-faced creatures offer a tentative link to the artist's
portrait of Romana with a cracked clock face in 1979's City
of Death. Perhaps the artist was somehow influenced by
these beings as a result of that story's "cracks" in time.
The
Fourth Doctor and Romana team, who featured in Festival
of Death, would not have seemed out of place during parts
of this story, either. Despite its gloomier tone, there is
a satirical edge to this novel, in which war is motivated
by profitable enterprise. Robotic accountants, with cash-register
faces, conjure up a flavour of the Graham Williams-produced
era.
Despite
the use of time technology, the setting is decidedly low-tech,
with fixtures and fashions more suited to the 1950s and '60s,
including Bakelite surfaces and a bowler-hatted auditor. Perhaps
the author is trying to evoke the charm of Doctor Who
serials that attempted to look futuristic but were limited
by '60s, '70s or '80s technology!
Following
a gripping and intriguing opening, the middle of the book
flags badly, with a tedious over-reliance on running up and
down corridors, getting captured and escaping. However, Morris
stages a good recovery, and his dramatic conclusion had me
counting the days until April's Eighth Doctor novel, Trading
Futures.
Richard
McGinlay
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