Wonderland
APRIL 2003
The seventh of the Telos novellas,
Mark Chadbourn’s Wonderland, isn’t what I’d expected it to be. The
prospect of a second Doctor adventure set during the swinging 60s
suggested a bright maelstrom of colour and sound, but what Wonderland
actually delivers is something much more hard-headed and
thought-provoking.
“There was this other box of inner space, larger on the inside than it
seemed on the outside, and the door to this alternative TARDIS was opened
by a chemical key…”
- Graham Joyce
Narrated many years after the event by Summer, a hippie crushed not only
by the inevitable rise of “fascist pigs and bread-heads” but also by her
own much more personal misfortune, Chadbourn’s tale skilfully conveys both
sides of 60s’ counter-culture. Groups of stoned people dance naked under
the stars in a veritable hippie’s paradise, whilst at the same time
long-term users and pushers leach off the movement for their own
reprehensible ends. Indeed, Haight-Ashbury of 1967 is horrifyingly real.
At its best, Wonderland put me in mind of Andrew Cartmel’s three
War novels for the Virgin range. Certain scenes are almost
impenetrably bleak, and even when Chadbourn is looking to convey something
positive, he does so very matter-of-factly, ensuring that the novella
never loses its gritty edge.
Regrettably
though, Chadbourn’s handling of the regulars is poor – it’s almost as if
they’re an afterthought, bludgeoned in rather than fashioned around. Ben
and Polly acquit themselves reasonably well when they feature, but they
feature very little, and the Doctor’s appearances are even sparser still.
Now I can see what the author was trying to do here - looking to pull upon
the dark thread that we occasionally glimpsed running through Patrick
Troughton’s Doctor by casting him in a remote, seventh Doctor-type role –
but it just doesn’t work on the page, particularly when followed by a
peculiar meta-fictional coda starring a badly-drawn fourth Doctor.
And so whilst Wonderland is without question an intriguing and
insightful story, it is most probably a step too far outside the box for
most fans’ tastes. Had Chadbourn been better able to integrate the
regulars into his vividly-realised world, then Wonderland would
have been a really good little Doctor Who novella. As it is, it’s
just a really good little novella.
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