Damaged Goods by: Russell T. Davies: Death in a Remarkably Violent and Inelegant Form

Damaged Goods is a dark novel.  There’s no denying that the tale about drug trafficking in 1987 Thatcher controlled England wasn’t going to be dark, but damn if it isn’t darker than anyone could have really expected.  The novel was written by Russell T. Davies who would eventually become showrunner for the revived show in 2005, but here he’s giving us his first impressions.  Why couldn’t his era be as dark as this?  This tone is really enough to make anyone enraptured with the novel, even if it goes a bit too dark in places.

 

After the dull The Death of Art, Damaged Goods focuses on an action packed plot which is a nice blend of traditional Doctor Who plotting and the Virgin New Adventures style of storytelling.  The change in style is refreshing and it really lends to the Earth like feel of the novel.  The drama comes from the characters and the fear comes from the invasion of an entity.  The plot is as complex as The Death of Art, but complexity is required with this story.  As this is the case this review will contain more spoilers than my reviews normally do, so you have been warned.  We open on Christmas Eve, 1977 where Bev Tyler sees her mother Winnie make some sort of a deal with a mysterious Tall Man.  She follows her mother outside where she sees the Doctor.  The way Davies describes the scene sets the tone for the rest of the novel and sets up our main human characters.  The tone is bleak and sad and is best exemplified in the way Davies describes the Doctor:

He must have edged forward a fraction, ambient light revealing a smudged impression of his clothing: a cream jacket, splattered with mud, and a battered white hat…despite the dark and the distance, Bev could see his eyes. They were looking at her…She thought he smiled at her, just a small smile, but one which gave no comfort…Bev always imagined that these old, wise, terrible men must have long white beards and flowing robes, but now she realized that they looked like this: small and crumpled and so very, very sad.

The novel then cuts to introduce us to our villain, Simon Jenkins aka the Capper.  Jenkins is a drug dealer and notorious around the Quadrant, the housing complex the novel is set at.  We are introduced to him with flowing prose about who he is and why he’s feared.  Davies then gives us a shock with the villain of the story committing suicide.  He douses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire.

 

The sense of foreboding present in these early scenes doesn’t let up as we cut to ten years later where Harry Harvey, a man struggling with his own sexuality, is mugged in a graveyard, but is saved by the dead Capper who rises from a grave in this terrifying scene depicted on the front cover of the novel.  This first chapter is the only real exposition we get for the novel as we learn most of our principle characters and things are set in motion.  A small mistake Davies makes is that he tries to lighten the mood by cutting to New York and introducing a waitress to get the Doctor into the plot.  This waitress is set up as if she will be important to the plot later on, but she doesn’t appear outside of this chapter.

 

The story is now set up and we can get on into the real meat of the story.  The Doctor, Chris, and Roz move into the Quadrant due to a trail of grisly deaths from the cocaine outbreak in the 1980s.  The novel consists of two plots, first is the tracking down of the cocaine and the second is dealing with the psychic powers of Gabriel Tyler, Bev Tyler’s younger brother, who seems to be a source of relief to the people of the Quadrant.  They intertwine as the twist of the novel is that Gabriel Tyler is actually a twin to Steven Jericho who is slowly dying in a hospital bed.  That Christmas Eve, Winnie Tyler gave away one of her children for 30,000 pounds payment in an act of desperation and ever since Gabriel has been like a vampire to Steven.  The psychic powers of Gabriel have attracted an N-form to the Quadrant.  An N-form is a Gallifreyean weapon created to fight in the war against the Vampires and Davies would use them as soldiers in the Time War of the new series.  The N-Form wishes to bring others into the world through the infected cocaine and take back Gallifrey.  It has overtaken the Capper’s body and is now distributing the drug amongst the world.   The climax is a bloody battle where the Doctor has to take cocaine to defeat the N-Form leading to the deaths of everyone in the novel except for Gabriel who is put into a coma.

 

The cocaine plot is pontificated with a large cast of varying characters including the main cast.  Roz does her usual job of being the standard companion to the Doctor as she is always by his side, but she gets to have her motherly side shine through as she does care for the Tyler children.  She doesn’t believe in coincidence, not since she stepped foot into the TARDIS and she knows exactly what’s at stake if the Doctor has been meddling again.  Her portions of the plot are really the least interesting in the novel as Chris gets a much longer time in the spotlight.  Chris is the one searching for the cocaine, so the Doctor can hopefully destroy it.  He does this with his new lover, David Daniels.  Chris and David hook up in this novel.  Chris is there to give David comfort that his lifestyle will not always be discriminated against as well as to be the butt of several jokes.  Chris is the comic relief, or at least the closest equivalent of comic relief in this dark novel.  David and Harry also have an interesting relationship as David only lives with Harry because Harry’s late life let him move in to their front room.  Harry of course is questioning his own sexuality which in and of itself is an interesting plot to delve into.  Gabriel Tyler is also an interesting character as he is almost omnipotent yet comes across as a normal child which is something that really works in the novel.  The other character of note is Eva Jericho who is the madwoman who takes over as villain and wishes to take Gabriel in exchange for her own son, the damaged goods of the title.  She’s a completely sadistic woman and you really don’t know if you’re going to survive if you met her in the street.  The ending is extremely bleak as nobody survives which is really hard to finish a book with.

 

To summarize, Damaged Goods is a novel that shows an interesting glimpse of what could have been when Russell T. Davies was in charge of Doctor Who.  Dark and captivating the novel does not disappoint with twists and turns that keep you guessing as to how this is going to end at every moment.  95/100