Stephen Cole: Doctor Who - Vanishing Point

When I first began this little project of mine, I decided early on that I wanted to review everything I read, without discriminating between genre, stature or otherwise. The fact that I chose to follow one of Patrick O’Brian’s thoroughly enjoyable novels of naval life in the Napoleonic Wars with this little adventure indicates nothing more than the fact that on Wednesday morning when I left for work, I had had about five and a half hours’ sleep and didn’t feel up to anything more ambitious.

It can be interesting to evaluate your response to a novel by your emotional reactions to it at various stages. Vanishing Point begins promisingly enough, before appearing to stumble slightly, then regaining its balance and finishing reasonably well. In fact, the early chapters were totally involving as the basic characters and situation were set up- on an unnamed world at an unspecified point in time, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji find themselves in an isolated coastal location where Fitz manages to slip and injure himself. Seeking help, the Doctor and Anji encounter Etty, a middle-aged woman keeping a secret on which the rest of the novel hinges. Etty has also attracted the attention of a group of men who attempt to abduct her, for reasons which become apparent during the course of the novel.

The chapters immediately following the scene-setting are, however, the least promising, as Cole gives the impression that he is writing a simplistic novel where religious faith is used to justify control of the population and physical conformity. At one stage, I feared that he was about to retread sections of his earlier collaboration Parallel 59, with Fitz apparently brainwashed and a doomed romance in the offing. The villain of the piece is not particularly well-defined until the late stages of the story, and many of the minor characters are similarly unremarkable. However, and to my not unconsiderable relief, the novel does pick up dramatically towards the halfway point as we learn more about the villain and his plans- in a way which is more than reminiscent of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Cole’s themes are also more apparent in the later stages of the novel, in particular the way in which a society treats individuals who are physically different from the majority, particularly when society considers the physical deformity to have a bearing on the individual’s spirituality and potential for salvation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Fitz’s romance with the naive but courageous Vettul- a romance which appears to promise rather more permanent consequences than most of his previous dalliances.

The most effectively-drawn characters are the fiercely protective Etty, whose family history underpins the backstory of the novel, Vettul, whose romance with Fitz is genuinely touching, and the villain of the piece, whose modus operandi is pure Magnus Greel, but whose motivation is quite different. Otherwise, the physically deformed characters, or mooncalves, are distinguished as much by their deformities as their personalities. Mention should also be made of the cleric Nathaniel Dark, whose journey from an artificial faith to a real one provides one of the strands of the novel, and his romance with tart-with-a-heart Lanna.

Cole reserves his themes and concepts for the second half of the novel; ultimately this is a tale of a society outgrowing the purpose for which it was constructed and embracing its own destiny- but told through the experience of an extended family rather than great events in high places. One of its strengths is that it shows the Doctor achieving change by working on an individual level, beginning by helping Etty with her quest for answers and ending with this particular society exceeding the limitations set by its creators and deriving a sense of meaning in its own right. Although somewhat variable in quality over its length, it does reward the reader’s persistence, with a suitably complex premise finally revealed- as an attempt at writing truly novelistic Doctor Who, it is largely successful and a generally enjoyable instalment in the series.

12th January 2004