The Dying Days by: Lance Parkin - A Re-Review

The Doctor Who fandom doesn’t really appreciate how good the Virgin New Adventures run was.  Running from June 1991 to April 1997, this series of 61 novels were the primary source of new Doctor Who stories once the show was taken off-air in 1989.  Sure, there was a rough start but by the final novel’s release date in April 1997, the novel line had a system and was ready to go out with a bang.  The previous novel finished the Seventh Doctor’s adventures with Lungbarrow completed the Cartmel Master Plan and wrapped many of his threads up, and the final book works to set up the continuation separate from Doctor Who.  The Dying Days is the first original novel to feature the Eighth Doctor, Bernice Summerfield, Ice Warriors invading England, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Brigadier Bambera.  Lance Parkin writes a novel that demonstrates how even with a story that could easily be on television in the era.  There are only ever three Ice Warriors in a room at one point, much of the special effects could easily be done with models and minimal CGI, and there are plenty of action sequences and chases to keep things going.

 

The structure is also an obvious send-up to the Pertwee era with UNIT as a driving force of combating the invasion.  The Brigadier is called out of retirement and Brigadier Bambera is there for support.  If there was one complaint it’s that while Bambera is used well, she is still relegated to a supporting character for the novel.  There’s some great stuff early on with Bambera: catching up with her relationship with Ancelyn, and attempting to get to the bottom of the conspiracy with the Ice Warriors.  Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, on the other hand, gets to have one final spotlight as UNIT is brought to 1997, after Battlefield, and with a compromise in the team.  The Brigadier has to help Alexander Christian, an astronaut who worked with UNIT, apparently responsible for murdering his crew on a mission to Mars.  There is a real connection between the two men: both have seen real horror in their time, and that horror is almost coming back to haunt them.  There is also something amazing about the Eighth Doctor meeting the Brigadier: they immediately create a rapport between each other, helped by an unseen adventure which is in the Doctor’s future, and there really is a sense that the Brigadier would do anything for the Doctor.

 

Bernice Summerfield, however, really is the start of the show.  Since Happy Endings, the Virgin New Adventures has been wrapping up her character.  She found her father in Return of the Living Dad, said goodbye to Roz in So Vile a Sin, and prepared for her own series of adventures in Eternity Weeps, but The Dying Days is where those adventures start.  Several sections of the book are told from her perspective which makes her really see what she can do as a professor on Dellah, the beginning of her own series after this novel.  Her relationship with the Eighth Doctor also allows Lance Parkin to really create a dissociation with the characters.  The Eighth Doctor is not the Seventh Doctor: there isn’t a master manipulation and he’s really just making things up as he goes along.  Parkin does an admirable job of characterizing the character from only having the TV Movie to work off.  There is no doubt that Paul McGann is the Doctor from this book, and while the BBC Books would go in a very different direction, this allows a glimpse into an Eighth Doctor era that never was.

 

Lance Parkin is also incredible at writing a book from an alien perspective.  The Ice Warriors in the novel get their own points of view throughout the novel and these sections are written as if they are by an alien and translated into English.  The spelling of the sections, especially in referring to the human characters, are done using English translations of Martian, often replacing ‘s’ with ‘x’, and ‘ai’ with ‘y.’ It’s a small detail in the prose, but its inclusion makes the experience of reading it much more immersive.  The Ice Warriors are also characterized incredibly well: warlike, yet honorable to a fault.  They don’t necessarily understand humanity, and are only invading because of humanity’s own disruption of Mars.  Parkin also includes a human villain in Lord Greyhaven, a power-hungry man working to become Prime Minister by getting the Ice Warrior Xznaal crowned the king of England.  He has been playing the long game which makes him a perfect match for the Seventh Doctor, and an even better foil for a novel that doesn’t include the Seventh Doctor.  It never becomes parody of the Seventh Doctor, but it is enough to make it interesting.  Overall, The Dying Days is a brilliant end where Lance Parkin is allowed to give the range an ending with a bang and get back at comments made by Philip Segal about how you can’t do an invasion on a BBC budget.  9/10.