Verdigris by: Paul Magrs

 

When you read a Paul Magrs Doctor Who novel, you know what you’re getting going in: something high energy, farcical, and insane, while still lovingly crafted as an examination of the show and some of its more interesting decisions.  Verdigris in theory is similar to another Past Doctor Adventures novel, Last of the Gaderene: they’re both Third Doctor stories examining the era and how the exile on Earth has affected the Third Doctor, the UNIT family, and the show in general, but Last of the Gaderene is a traditional Third Doctor adventure reveling in its simplicity.  Verdigris is simple, but not traditional as anything that includes Iris Wildthyme is likely to be.  It’s a story where the Doctor and Jo intend to take a vacation and by no means are to mention the Brigadier or UNIT after The Time Monster.  Iris Wildthyme and her companion Tom, a gay man from 2000 who waltzed into her celestial omnibus one day, only come into the plot to annoy the Doctor by dropping in unannounced.  The first third of the novel or so is spent on building up the insane character dynamic between the Doctor, Iris, Jo, and Tom while keeping the actual plot simmering in the background.  Verdigris is all about this alien called Verdigris infiltrating the Galactic Federation to punish the Doctor as he stops all these alien invasions from the peaceful aliens and insisting that the Daleks, Cybermen, and Ogrons are all myths.  This insanity also involves bringing nineteenth century literary figures to life and putting the rest of the UNIT family into a brainwashed supermarket.

 

This is a book where our main characters are paralleled with one another.  Iris Wildthyme was pitched as an anti-Doctor, being a Time Lord exile that does help out in bad situations, but she smokes, drinks, and is incredibly crass.  While the Third Doctor is always the gentlemen, Iris spends most of her time in the book flirting with the Doctor and coming upon the solutions to problems in the most weird things.  Iris is a parody of the Doctor, kidnapping her companions and spending a lot of the novel through violent mood swings, starting the book angry at Tom and never actually appreciating his presence.  She has no qualms on travelling through time to help find a solution.  While she would be a character most recognized for her portrayal by Katy Manning in Big Finish Productions audio series, in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures she goes through several regenerations and lifetimes, and Verdigris is the first that feels the closest to Manning’s portrayal of the character.  This is the one where “Auntie Iris” is first used, as this is the first book where Iris has her own perspective character and the one where her own version of The Five Doctors and The Brain of Morbius are mentioned to have happened.  Magrs also clearly has a great respect for the Third Doctor who is portrayed here at the peak of his annoyance at life, as this is meant to lead in, at least partially, to The Three Doctors (there is an implication that Omega is notified of the Doctor at the end of this book) and seeing Iris as free to travel time and space while he is exiled is great.

 

Magrs also seems to be tackling the criticism of the Doctor and Jo’s relationship being adversarial, a popular interpretation which has only recently been reevaluated.  As Tom is a foil for Jo, his relationship to Iris is analogous to the Doctor and Jo’s relationship.  Iris really doesn’t care about Tom, doing little to calm him when he meets his mother as a young woman and she flirts with him, making him fear becoming his own father, or dealing with Verdigris as an antagonist.  Jo and the Doctor are the ones to actually do that, with Tom as a character not actually enjoying himself travelling.  That’s kind of the point, Tom is a gay man from a time where progress towards equality had been made and going back to the 1970s does nothing but make him nervous.  He also ends up being a damsel in distress and unable to save himself, as a way to go against the criticisms of Jo Grant not being an intelligent character.  He and Jo have an interesting relationship develop, especially as Jo’s highlight is overcoming brainwashing and a lengthy section in the middle where Magrs calls out the bad special effects of the Pertwee era as diegetic.  Jo is nearly brainwashed which is fascinating as the brainwashing doesn’t start by making her think UNIT itself is false, but all the people around her including the Doctor and everything since Terror of the Autons is.

 

Overall, Verdigris is a novel that really flies by as a tight character piece examining the Third Doctor’s era and the fan opinion of the era in the late 1990s/early 2000s.  Paul Magrs is incredibly readable as the 244 page story grabs you and doesn’t let you go, giving the Doctor, Iris, Jo, and Tom all something fun and examining the UNIT family without actually including the UNIT family as major characters.  It’s a perfect bridge between Season 9 and Season 10.  10/10.