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STORY PLACEMENT THIS STORY TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE NOVEL "HUNTER'S MOON" AND THE TV EPISODE "THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT."
WRITTEN BY JAMES GOSS
RECOMMENDED PURCHASE OFFICIAL BBC HARDBACK (ISBN 1-84990-238-0) RELEASED IN APRIL 2011.
BLURB In a remote clinic in 18th-century Italy, a lonely girl writes to her mother. She tells of pale English arist-ocrats and ENIGMATIC Russian nobles. She tells of intrigues and secrets, and strange faceless figures that rise from the sea. And she tells about the MYSTERIOUS Mrs Pond, her husband and her physician.
What she doesn’t tell her mother is WHAT everyone knows and no-one says – that the only people who come here do so to die.
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APRIL 2011
James Goss, better known for his Torchwood novels, in Dead of Winter prov-ides the eleventh Doctor with one of his strongest novels to date. Goss takes an atypical approach, constructing his adventure as an epistolary novel, told in letters, diary extracts, memories and asides. This allows him freedom to play around with the form, with different portions of the story coloured by the perceptions of different characters, and he gets away with some clever tricks. In particular is a twist that comes around a third of the way into the book; anyone over the age of eight should really see it coming, as it’s well-signposted, but nonetheless he pulls it off with flair.
It’s a powerfully atmospheric novel, admirably unafraid to be grim and occasionally horrific. Set in the winter of 1783, it sees the TARDIS crew wash up on a beach at the door of a remote and suspiciously sophisticated clinic. The pioneering Dr Bloom runs St Christophe, treating patients of consumption - a disease that would be untreatable for over a hundred years beyond this time. The Doctor has to deal not only with the moral quandary of a terrible disease being cured ahead of schedule, and the threat to history that it poses, but also with amnesia, as he, Rory and Amy all lose parts of their recall and even identity. What’s more, there’s an unearthly presence in the sea itself, something which, in the wrong hands, has power beyond imagining.
The strength of the novel lies not only in its spooky atmosphere, in a hospital filled with patients perpetually stuck near-death, but also in the effectiveness of its characters. Much of the story is related by Maria, a young French girl who relates her adventures in letters back to her mother. She’s an inquisitive child, and provides the perfect foil to all three regulars in turn. Dr Bloom is himself a very sympathetic character, motivated by only the best of intentions. Then there are the two Elquitine, one plump and lively, the other thin and possessed of a unique mathematical brain; Henry Nevil, a spiteful, bilious Englishman with no time for any opinion but his own; and in the most readable sections, Prince Boris, a Russian nobleman and charming bastard. By providing such strong characterisation and shifting viewpoints, we’re never quite sure who to trust, and although the novel takes some time setting up the setting and building the atmosphere, we’re treated to some tense thrills once the plot moves into a higher gear.
All three regulars are well served here; Rory, as always, becomes the voice of reason, but also of sympathy, as we get to see how much he puts up with as he wants to keep Amy, while Mrs Pond herself provides a contrast to the period setting by throwing in modern pop-references (even Jedward get a mention). The Doctor, in spite of never telling the story himself, is explored most interestingly; we get to see the sadness, hopefulness and perv-ading intelligence that he must live with. Amy theorises that the Doctor’s brain must be like “a large hadron collider in a candyfloss factory,” while the Doctor sums up his approach to life beautifully: “I just get as close as I can to a happy ending, then I shut the door behind me and move on.”
If there’s one weakness here, it’s in the familiarity of some of the material. Perhaps BBC Books should have scheduled this for release at another time. Not only does the amnesia plot recollect a similar device in sister novel The Way Through the Woods (although here it is done with much greater finesse), but the latest episodes are also evoked. There’s a plot involving alien duplicates which clashes with the similar storyline of The Rebel Flesh, broadcast only a month after the publication of this book, while there’s a further twist late in the tale that has similarities to an earlier episode. Publishing Dead of Winter in another batch may have alleviated some of this sense of repetition.
None of this really detracts from this novel being a triumph. It’s beautifully told, and, although there are plenty of silly moments guaranteed to make the reader smile, it is, overall, a truly sad book. As the Doctor himself says at the end, “Try and think of it not so much as a happy ending as a less sad one.”
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Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2011
Daniel Tessier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. |
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This novel's blurb offers no guidance to assist in placement. However, as Rory is now a time-travelling newly wed, we have placed this adventure between the television episodes Time and The Impossible Astronaut, the broadcast of which it was released it between.
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