Tuesday, September 6, 2016

The Man in the Velvet Mask by: Daniel O'Mahony: I Am Not A Number!

WARNING: This review of The Man in the Velvet Mask will contain discussion on the more adult themes present in the novel.  If this sort of discussion will make you uncomfortable please stop reading this review or just continue, I don’t really care.

 

Does Daniel O’Mahony have some sort of obsession with French literature?  I mean his second Doctor Who novel features heavily themes and influences from the likes of Victor Hugo and Gaston Leroux.  His portrayal of Dodo is essentially Fantine from Les Miserables mixed with Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the story is set in an alternate universe where the French Revolution never ended and so many of the chapters are titled in reference to the literature of the French Revolution and direct translations of the titles, Les Miserables and Le Fantome de L’Opera.  There is references to several French works and O’Mahony uses a lot of French tropes in the way of his storytelling with a heavy handed message about revolutionary spirit and your standard troupe of actors.  Oh and randomly throw in quite a few references to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  There’s also this really weird send up to The Prisoner with the titular “man in the velvet mask” being Monsieur le 6.  He is not a number, he is a man.  This is basically a weird mix of stylings which really makes the story have a tone which is very mixed as it doesn’t know where to take the story.  The novel outside of the elephant in the room which I will get to later, is much lighter in tone than Falls the Shadow.  This is a really good thing as I don’t think it would really fit the era of the show where it was in 1966.  He does get the actual tone of the show down pretty well for a lot of its flaws.

 

The portrayal of the First Doctor is a very real portrayal of the dying man near the end of his life.  The events of The Daleks’ Master Plan, The Celestial Toymaker and The Savages are taking their toll on his body.  He can feel his first regeneration coming up and while ready to embrace it, is very scared as he doesn’t know what it is going to be like.  O’Mahony also does really well at making Hartnell have that air around him of not really taking a lot of things seriously and still enjoying himself as he meddles in history.  The titular man in the velvet mask is also a really fun character as he is an allegory for quite a lot of the characters in the story who also wear different types of masks to hide their true identities.  The theme of masks is a very strong one throughout the story from the start where O’Mahony introduces us to the Marquis de Sade who is a red herring as to who the villain is and the twists.  De Sade is not a good character, but he is really the man trying to keep himself alive while the Revolution is burning all around him.  He is a survivor who is wearing a mask to keep himself safe which is great.  The rest of the characters are all pretty one note as they consist of guards, who are obviously boring, and the theater troupe Dodo hooks up with.  The theater troupe as featured are at least a little bit interesting as they are all wearing masks as a way to survive which is great.  There is a standout with the character based off the Phantom of the Opera which is a really interesting angle for a beauty underneath story.  The other character who really stands out is Dalville, which means we have to get to that elephant in the room.

 

Now remember the warning I put at the beginning of the review, yeah this is your final chance to look away as we are going to get into the nitty gritty of the story.  Dodo and Dalville develop a relationship and in the end of the story they have sex.  Now I don’t have a problem with Doctor Who including sex in its plots and I especially approve of what O’Mahony is trying to do with the sex.  He’s trying to show Dodo having a sacrifice, which is contracting alien syphilis because the villain Minski has a virus which resembles syphilis.  The problem is that this is Dodo who we are talking about who just doesn’t understand and is trying to act out.  This becomes a downfall after of course O’Mahony does so well at getting Dodo a good character for this novel.  It really isn’t something that is easy considering Dodo was a Susan clone.  It is also exceedingly cruel to Dodo who while not a character I like, does not deserve this.

 

To summarize, The Man in the Velvet Mask is an incredibly easy read to get through with a really good tone with some pretty odd plotting.  The biggest flaw is the implications it has for Dodo and the characters really being stock archetypes which really doesn’t work very well and almost has a tone that does not have a lot of stability.  50/100

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