The Great Virgin New Adventures Review: Parasite & Warlock

We’re reaching the end of Ace’s time with the Seventh Doctor in these two books and there is a sense that she won’t be around much more throughout both with her spending large chunks of time away from the Doctor, proving that she can survive on her own. But you also couldn’t two books further away from each other in strange ideas than Parasite, which is utter chaos from the get-go and Warlock, a gritty psychedelic novel which looks at drugs and animal testing in a weird mash-up.

Parasite

Written By: Jim Mortimore

I was really looking forward to reading Parasite. Despite an uninspiring cover, I’ve really enjoyed Mortimore’s previous entries into the range with Lucifer Rising and Blood Heat. And while both those books were a great read that I’d recommend to anyone, Parasite felt like it was missing that same gumption those other books had.

It’s a shame because it starts off pretty good. When the  Doctor, Ace and Bernice arrive and find themselves in the mysterious Artifact, they find an ecosystem that seems to do whatever it wants, gravity is virtually non-existent and the walls are an ocean. It becomes pretty clear fairly early on that everything from the flora and continents, to animals and fauna, are all connected and all of it is very deadly. It’s a fun landscape to find our characters in and Mortimore has lots of fun in describing what they are seeing and interacting with, as well as setting up the story’s location well.

It would be a hard world to recreate on screen and as a result, it is a strikingly imaginative place, confined to this book and this book only, never to be recreated elsewhere. As things begin to happen and a space shuttle is ruined, killing almost everyone on board, there is a real sense of dread that Mortimore injects into the story.

Parasite does however stumble out of the gate mainly because there is little to no plot. An interesting world isn’t all a book or a Doctor Who story should be. There is some attempt to put a plot into the story, with a nearby world travelling to the Artifact because of religious purposes and when one of the ships is virtually destroyed when the world shifts, a few survivors find the Doctor and his companions and they try to get them back to their home world.

But then the environment shifts and characters are moved around, a silly amount of monkeys are involved, which I’m still not sure I understand, characters get possessed by strange entities and the flora begins to infect people and there are some bizarrely massive time jumps.

It’s a very mind-numbing read towards the end, but I couldn’t help but feel if Mortimore expected us to be mind readers as well, as only he seems to understand what is going on. And in the end, it’s Ace who explains what has been explaining what is going on, not the Doctor, but the plotting is so confused it just adds to the mess.

What doesn’t help is that the Doctor isn’t really involved in a large portion of the book. Mortimore does have a good handle on Ace and Bernice, though Ace does return to that nasty version of the character we had to endure at the beginning of this range. Bernice is much more likeable in this novel, though she doesn’t really get much to do except keep on nearly dying and getting ill. It’s hard to not feel sorry for her, these books keep putting her in some serious danger and it’s hard to understand why she doesn’t just leave. If I was travelling with the Doctor and had an “adventure” like this, I’d be off at the next stop.

We also never actually get told why the Doctor isn’t in the story all that much, but when he does appear towards the end, he has a seemingly mortal wound, which he later just shrugs off. I know Virgin Publishing was planning on making the Doctor regenerate into a new body at some point, though that never really came to anything, it’s only the final book in their range that featured a new incarnation. But it doesn’t really excuse what is happening here, lucky then that Ace and Bernice have enough character to shoulder much of this book.

I think if I’d only read half of the book before reviewing it, I’d have probably looked a little more favourably at it. It’s just a shame that after all the wonderful world-building and character creation, the plotting leaves so much to be desired that it quickly becomes a chore to read.

While I’ll commend Mortimore for his ambitiousness at creating a completely alien world and environment, the plot – what exists of it – takes too much of a backseat and really doesn’t interest anyone when he brings it to the fore. This is quite possibly the strangest of these books I’ve read and while some people might like it, I suspect it does have its fans, it does all fall down to what you like in a book. And unfortunately, there was very little I liked here.

Warlock

Written By: Andrew Cartmel

Warlock is one of those Doctor Who stories that you’ll either love or hate. Luckily, it didn’t bore me as much as Parasite did and I think I enjoyed it for the most part. But it became clear pretty early on that Andrew Cartmel likes to make his Who quite unpleasant, perhaps aiming them at those young adults that he was trying to aim the television series towards before it was cancelled.

Much of his work seems to have a message. Whether it’s trying to bring the government down with The Happiness Patrol and environmental issues with Warhead, his previous novel, Warlock tackles two issues, drugs and pharmaceutical trials on animals.  Both are still incredibly important issues that still need to be dealt with today and while they aren’t necessarily separate issues as one does lead into another, I’m not sure Warlock was the right Doctor Who story to look at these topics and as this book proves, maybe these issues are just too dark for Who to handle properly.

There is a new drug hitting the streets, called Warlock, it seems to have supernatural powers, giving people the ability to forget others and kill them but asking the question do we stop existing if people stop thinking about us. It’s very existential and yet another plot point that doesn’t really mix with Cartmel’s message. With Bernice despatched to IDEA, an American anti-drugs organisation, Ace joins up with a couple called Jack and Shell who both use Warlock but are heavily involved in stopping harm coming to animals in trials.

Cartmel quickly hops between the two stories keeping them seemingly separate for a short space of time, with Benny witnessing a drug bust and then quickly finding herself back in the UK and teaming up with the Doctor in his house on Allen Road. But her escape from IDEA happens without incident between chapters and it feels like Cartmel forget to write that portion of the story.

My biggest issue with this book is that it goes on for quite a while. One of the bigger novels in the range, it doesn’t bore you as much as something like Falls the Shadow does, but there are large parts of the book that don’t add anything to the wider story that could have been cut, especially toward the end and the really shocking treatment of one of the characters. But the treatment of the animals in this book is even more uncomfortable to read.

I know that this book has a political message, and as I said above, it’s still a very important topic that we are trying to deal with nowadays, but I don’t need to read pages and pages of a Doctor Who story to have it spelt out to me. I know that all that makes me sound like I am against the message the book is trying to get out. Animal cruelty has no place in society and I am totally against it. But I don’t need to read pages and pages of the Doctor’s cat, Chick, getting harmed and killed to hammer home the point.

It’s odd then that Cartmel wants us to wallow in this misery that drowns out the narrative and not enjoys the baddies getting their comeuppance. Any time a character gets what they deserve it seems to happen off-page or in-between chapters. Cartmel does do a good job at giving us passages of the book from the animal’s perspectives but this serves for another reason as Warlock allows the characters to transfer their minds into animals. And that would have been fine if the animals could have escaped while Ace, Jack and Shell are forcibly put under the drug’s influence. But escaping into the mind of animals is no help at all and it seems to make the torture of these characters even worse.

There is just a sense of complete hopelessness that surrounds the book. Bernice joins IDEA knowing that they will suss her out and Ace joins up with Jack and Shell knowing they will be captured. If they know this then why are they doing it, I know they are companions trying to do everything they can to save the day, but here they are just putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of it, to help Cartmel make things as depressing as he can.

While Cartmel’s well-done prose, though it did waffle on a bit, made it a book you can read pretty quickly despite being one of the biggest books in the range, there were times when I wondered if was a little too detached from Doctor Who. Maybe if it had been a different book, not related to Doctor Who at all, it might have set out to do what it wanted with its messages a lot better than is achieved here.

Overall it’s a book that I’m torn over. I certainly enjoyed reading it, but maybe that was because it was superior to Parasite. And there isn’t an issue with creating a story with powerful messages. But there is a sense of really trying to rub the reader’s face in it. Having things look bleak in a story isn’t a bad thing, it can add some pathos and make the finale feel all the more earned with the Doctor and Co saving the day.

But that earned finale doesn’t ever really happen and after investing some effort into this story, the reader shouldn’t be made to feel bad when it’s all done.