DOCTOR
WHO
A common topic of discussion among fans at the moment is whether or not the new range of BBC novels should share continuity with Virgin's range of New and Missing Adventures. There are four factions to this debate:
 | Those who don't read either series of books and so couldn't care less (and if you're one of these, then why are you even reading this review?).
| Those who have only read the BBC novels and would prefer a complete absence of references to the Virgin novels so that they don't feel they've missed anything (and when we're talking about ninety previous novels, many of which are now out of print, who can blame them?
| Those who have read their way through both ranges and would rather the BBC novels were separate for a variety of reasons: "Virgin's range wasn't proper Who"; "...Had too much internal continuity". "...Isn't going to be available much longer, so why bother". And, best of all, "...Contradicts the telemovie", a qualification which would make the vast majority of Who "illegitimate"!
| And the fourth group, to which I belong, who feel that the effort of wading through almost a hundred novels of varying quality should be rewarded and the contributions made to the Doctor Who universe by the Virgin novels should not be entirely discarded by the new range. (There is a major article investigating those contributions that is just waiting to be written and I, for one, would be fascinated to read it.) | |
Yes, I hear you thinking, but what does a couple of hundred words of waffle about the Virgin/BBC Books continuity debate have to do with Business Unusual?
Everything.
Business Unusual is a direct sequel to Gary Russell's Virgin Missing Adventure, The Scales Of Injustice. Friends I've spoken to who hadn't read The Scales Of Injustice tell me they didn't have any trouble following Business Unusual, but they realised that it was certainly a sequel to something. They would have preferred the BBC novel to have been a bit more independent of its predecessor because they felt they were only getting half the story. Having read The Scales Of Injustice, I found Business Unusual irritating because, every now and then, throughout the novel, the narrative stops so that the author can tell you a bit about the plot of the earlier novel. Now if these sequences had been in flashback instead of being summarised as part of the characters' thought processes, these sequences would have read as though they were part of the narrative. People like myself would have appreciated the continuity instead of being distracted by it, whilst my friends might have been less aware that they were missing anything.
Thus ends the Timothy Farr lecture on how to keep three quarters of the people happy all of the time.
The first group couldn't care less (but if they're still reading this, then they're obviously lying); the second group won't know they've missed anything; for the third group, well, tough luck, you'll soon get used to it; and the rest of us will, of course, appreciate the continuity.
Wider issues in the world of Doctor Who fiction aside, Business Unusual is a novel very much in keeping with the style of the Colin Baker era.
The plot is fine but not spectacular and doesn't quite hold together, with one or two elements given more weight than they deserve, to the detriment of others, which are never satisfactorily explored.
In The Scales Of Injustice, the third Doctor, Liz Shaw and UNIT discovered someone was using C19, the government department with responsibility for UNIT UK, to acquire alien technologies and biological samples recovered from UNIT operations for use in weapons research and development. The Doctor and company put a stop to this, but the man behind it and several of his assistants were never found. Business Unusual takes up the story from there, with the sixth Doctor, Mel and the Brigadier encountering these people operating a sinister computer games manufacturing business in Brighton in 1989.
The sixth Doctor is absolutely spot on, and Business Unusual seems to come alive every time he appears. Gary says in his introduction that he wanted to write an adventure Colin Baker would have liked to have appeared in, and Gary certainly seems to have written the Doctor that Colin would like to have played. The mood swings, the obnoxiousness, the smugness, arrogance and self-importance are all still there, but instead of simply mood-swinging from one of these negative qualities to the next, this interpretation has an equal balance of positive qualities, including charm, sentiment, a positive attitude and wit. There was a tendency during the Colin Baker era to make the Doctor the butt of the guest stars' jokes (the vast majority of The Trial Of A Timelord, for starters). Here, however, every time a character attempts to make a joke at the Doctor's expense, he at least manages to reply in kind and sometimes he is able to turn the joke back on his detractor to even more devastating effect.
In the Doctor's personal timeline, Business Unusual takes place after The Trial Of A Time Lord, so he's met Mel in her future, but she hasn't met him yet. So, as he doesn't particularly like certain elements of his future, the Doctor tries to avoid ever actually meeting her in the first place and as the book went on, I began to wish he had succeeded. Almost undeniably, Bonnie Langford as Mel was highly irritating on screen, but surely that wouldn't be a problem on the printed page - and indeed it isn't. What is a problem on the printed page is the basic nature of the actual character. Earlier, I lamented the lack of positive qualities displayed by the sixth Doctor as scripted for television. Mel's problem is that she doesn't have any negative qualities and here, as on television, she is entirely lacking in depth and completely fails to come to life as a character. There's only one way I think Mel could be made to work in print without a radical change in her behaviour. That would be to use her thought processes to indicate a slight superiority complex and to suggest that she isn't, in fact, as confident as she seems - or - use her over-confidence to get her into trouble occasionally. Anything to make her more human and less, well, perfect.
As for the guest characters, the Brigadier is accurately sketched in as the retired former UNIT CO turned schoolmaster from between
Downtime and Battlefield and Mel's family are a somewhat uninteresting bunch of throwaway characters, but
Business Unusual remains worth reading for it's villains. Expressing in equal measures ruthlessness, self-doubt, a need for revenge and in one or two cases, as the book progresses, a strange sort of nobility combined with a sense of regret.
Definitely worth a look.
© Tim Farr, 2006
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