A seditious
fusion of mood and cliché, Daniel O’Mahony’s slick and sumptuous
tale has
long since been lauded as the very pinnacle of Doctor Who
literature; literature being the operative word. This isn’t a cheap
tie-in, conceived with a view to sating the hunger of
a few easily-pleased fans. This isn’t even a progressive, avant-garde
variation on a theme. This is a text. Not something to be read once and
then discarded, but lived and breathed, cut-up and studied.
And broached on such terms, The Cabinet of Light may indeed
represent a zenith that the series’ multifarious spin-offs will never
surpass, but it is important to remember that isn’t a representative one.
If you’re looking for something close to what you’ve seen on television -
new series or old - then you’re going to be disappointed; otherwise,
you’re in for the literary treat of your life.
Of all the Doctor Who prose writers out there, if I could write
like one of them, I’d choose Daniel O’Mahony in an instant. Years ago,
when I first read his novel for Virgin, Falls the Shadow, I was
utterly enamoured by the man’s dark and detached prose. I don’t think I’ve
read anything like it or since; at least, not until now. The same,
inimitable turn of phrase that once turned a fairly run of the mill New
Adventure into a bloody good one is employed to devastating effect
here - the film noir world of post-War London Town is painted like
a
Frank Miller graphic novel; a colourless world occasionally illuminated by
a flash of colour, and, indeed, light.
O’Mahony’s plot is ostensibly straightforward, but to say that it is
thematically rich would be understating things quite considerably. In a
nutshell, The Cabinet of Light is about Honoré Lechasseur, an
expatriate American GI now living the life of a spiv cum private eye, and
the most unusual case of his life – the case of the missing Doctor...
“I like being a gangster. I like being an American in London.”
Prima
facie,
Honoré is a wonderfully engrossing
character. O’Mahony gifts the black detective
with an intriguing back story and a hard-nosed
sense of pragmatism that make his exploits
absolutely irresistible to read about. However,
what makes him an absolute revelation is his
apparent “time sensitivity” – a gift (or affliction)
that forces the reader to reassess everything
that they experience through his eyes. When
Lechasseur looks at somebody he doesn’t just
see them in the here and now, but glimpses of
their possible futures and possible pasts. And
so you can imagine the profound mystification
that ensues when he finally locates his quarry in
an old toy shop and tries to “read” him…
O’Mahony’s Doctor is a fascinating enigma.
Since 1963 the anonymity of the Doctor has
inevitably been despoiled considerably, and
though numerous attempts have been made to
re-instil that initial mystery of the years, I don’t
think that any could be considered as effective
as this one.
“More subtly, more darkly, the private-eye novel is
really more concerned with the identity of its hero…”
- Chaz Brenchley
For starters, O’Mahony doesn’t present us with a Doctor that we can easily
identify, begging the obvious question as to which incarnation it is we
are reading about. Yes, the description could well be Paul McGann (or
perhaps even Matt Smith, with hindsight), but it is every bit as likely a
future Doctor, a non-canonical Doctor, or perhaps something even more
enthralling still – the Doctor seen stretching back and forward across
time through the eyes of a unique, “time-sensitive” individual; a
distillation of everything that sits at the core of the character. It’s a
beautiful and thought-provoking portrayal; perhaps even a little
disturbing as the Doctor’s relationship to “the girl in the pink pyjamas”
is implied and his manipulation of Lechasseur becomes clear.
With two such strong characters
driving events - one at the heart
of
events and the other behind
them, largely unseen – it’s a real
testament
to the author’s skill that
the rest of his characters stand
up and stand
out. The pages of
The Cabinet of Light are carried by two
Emily Blandishes, each one as inscrutable as the other; Mestizer, an alien
femme
fatale
with her eye on the titular “cabinet”; and Walken, an unhinged magician
who seeks not only the Doctor’s cabinet, but his very identity.
Best of all though is Abraxas, a gas-mask wearing cyborg created from the
remnants of a near-dead soldier. O’Mahony’s prose conjures up nightmarish
images of a Gerald Scarfe-drawn, greasy Darth Vader; painstakingly
malevolent and sadistic in the present, but his past touched by tragedy.
It’s not very often that a prose Doctor Who villain haunts my
dreams, but this oily monstrosity has had me looking over my shoulder
every time I pay a visit in the night.
I’m not able to offer much insight into this novella’s
plot though, for one thing because this is a story that really shouldn’t
be spoiled, and for another because at this stage I still don’t quite
fathom it. The blinding conclusion is a unique feast of economy and
spectacle, but it is one that I think I’ll need to re-read a good few
times before I can fully wrap my head round it.
To sum up then, everything that they say about this one really is true. A
world apart from the preponderance of Doctor Who literature, The
Cabinet of Light is a novella that deliberately stands apart from the
rest of the canon, as bold and as subversive a take on the series as I’ve
ever come across (and as I’m ever likely to, now that the show is back on
television).
But whatever I write in this review, I couldn’t hope to compete with the
eloquence to be found in Chaz Brenchley’s tantalising foreword (which you
can read by clicking
), and so I
shall just leave you with my favourite excerpt from
it:
“Perhaps it’s
not too flippant to suggest that all Dr Who fiction
is
about what it means to be a Time Lord. With the subtext
understood that it is written by humans, and actually we haven’t
yet figured out quite what it means to be us…”
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