WRITTEN
BY
DANIEL O'MAHONY
RECOMMENDED
PURCHASE
OFFICIAL
VIRGIN
PAPERBACK (ISBN
0-426-20461-1) RELEASED IN FEBRUARY
1996.
BLURB
24 Messidor, XXII: the TARDIS
has landed in post-revolutionary France, or so it appears. But the
futuristic structure of the New Bastille towers over a twisted version of
Paris. And First Deputy Minski, adopted son of the infamous Marquis de
Sade, presides over a reign of terror that has yet to end.
Revolutionary soldiers arrest
an ailing Doctor as a curfew breaker. Dodo is recruited by a band of
wandering players whose intentions are less than pure. Deep in the
dungeons of the Bastille, Prisoner 6 tries desperately to remember who he
is. And outside time and space, a gathering of aliens watch in horror as
their greatest experiment goes catastrophically wrong. |
The Man
in the
Velvet
Mask
FEBRUARY 1996
Well this is a
strange one. A strange one that, I have to say, I enjoyed much more
than I expected to. I’m more liable to throw a dart at any book bearing
Dodo’s image on its cover than I am to read it, yet here, against all
known laws of the universe, Daniel O’Mahony has actually managed to make
one of the most unspeakably dreadful companions of all time appealing.
Initially winning me over with his cruel descriptions of her physical
attributes (were actress Jackie Lane ever to read about “dumpy Dodo” and
her “crooked smile” she would almost certainly weep), O’Mahony went on to
take Dodo’s asinine, exasperating (I could go on…) character and
push it in a whole new direction. Innocence lost. Senseless shagging.
Doctor Who purists would probably sob even more feverishly than Lane
were they to tackle this text, but for me, reading The Man in the
Velvet Mask was illicit fan service of the most compelling kind.
The debauchery does not stop with Dodo, either. The plot revolves around
the Marquis de Sade – the original sadist. And he is perverted. One
scene early on, which sees a terrified young blonde sent to Sade’s
bedchamber, encapsulates the tone of this novel quite deftly. The poor
girl knows that she’s going to be raped, tortured and mutilated, and it’s
this knowledge that makes it so much more chilling than any spontaneous
suffering. Heavy stuff, it has to be said.
With this novel O’Mahony once again creates the same sort of
claustrophobia that he did in Falls the Shadow; his dark, vicious
prose lends itself brilliantly to the savage barbarity of
post-revolutionary France. Although it isn’t post-revolutionary France,
actually, and this is where it all started to go a bit off beam in my
view. The events of this story are set within a sort of virtual reality,
which effectively debases most of its torments. The Man in the Velvet
Mask should have been a straightforward historical story, free from
the science fiction trappings that threaten to undermine its horror.
On a final note, it’s worth mentioning that
this novel portrays William Hartnell’s Doctor uniquely. Besides
controversially positing that originally the Doctor had just one heart,
and that his second was grown during his first regeneration, O’Mahony uses
the magic of the written word to show us a side of the original Doctor
that we never got see on television. He’s dying and he knows it. We get a
fleeting glimpse of his portentous thoughts, his mindset, his fear of his
impending renewal. I find myself reaching for that word again –
illicit.
An absorbing, macabre torture chamber of a novel, The Man in the Velvet
Mask pushes the envelope about as far as is practicable within the
format of Doctor Who. It’s certainly not for the faint-hearted, and
definitely not for those who have a very clear-cut idea about what should
and what should not go on in the series. Those who enjoyed Falls the
Shadow though, not to mention the more adult of the Virgin novels out
there, just might love this. It’s well worth a look if you’re feeling
brave.
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