Bunker Soldiers by: Martin Day

 

Bunker Soldiers is an interesting novel.  It’s one of the few books to use the team of the First Doctor, Steven, and Dodo, with only Steve Lyons’ Salvation doing so and Dodo only appearing in two additional novels, The Man in the Velvet Mask and Who Killed Kennedy?.  It is also a novel that straddles two ‘eras’ of the show, mainly the two subsections of the Hartnell era, reflecting much of the tone of the first two seasons under producer Verity Lambert while also reveling in a plot that fits in with the third season of transition away from history towards more alien stories.  This book is essentially a base under siege, but the base is the city of Kyiv on the verge of the Mongol Siege of Kyiv in 1240.  The siege lasted a week and ended with the people of Kyiv dead, with an estimated 2,000 survivors of the estimated 50,000 inhabitants meaning that the tone of Bunker Soldiers is appropriately dark.  Martin Day has learned since his last solo novel, The Menagerie, and grown as a writer to steep the novel in this atmosphere of doom a la The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve with some of the humor of The Myth Makers there just to make it not be a complete dirge.  The book also is steeping itself in the history, the Doctor at the very beginning of the novel establishes the idea that the city will be sieged and there is nothing he, Steven, and Dodo can do about it.  They just have to get away, which is difficult when the TARDIS is captured following the outline of earlier historicals like Marco Polo and The Aztecs.

 

Indeed, this is much of the first third of the novel following the historical ‘let’s get back to the TARDIS narrative’ leading to a point where the Doctor exits for a while as if Hartnell had a vacation.  Now this is not a pure historical story.  There is an alien killer stalking the streets of Kyiv, several chapters from the point of view of this thing, killing in odd patterns, letting some go for mysterious reasons.  It’s how the genuinely evocative cover of this book comes to be but a lot of it is a background threat as Day focuses on the character drama of Steven and Dodo attempting to stay alive while suspicion lays on them.  They arrive via the TARDIS arriving in a home while a family is eating dinner.  Dodo has the focus of making a friend and discussing young love adding some humanity to the proceedings while Steven is eventually thrown into a prison cell for the murders.  Although he is exonerated for the crime, the time from his perspective (and much of the novel is in the first person from Steven’s perspective) creates this intimate feeling to the novel almost like a Companion Chronicle, to which Day would contribute two installments at the time of writing this review.  There is a genuine fear that they will not be able to get away once the siege begins nor able to actually help anyone survive the siege.  Interestingly, they almost are able to in the end of the novel when the alien’s history is revealed and what exactly it’s doing in this time period.  The interference from Steven and Dodo really only ensure that history stays on the right track.  Day draws on historical records, with some license as you would expect from Doctor Who, to make Bunker Soldiers work as a novel.  The historical figures are close to what you would expect, with the interesting amoral perspective taken from the Doctor without shying away from the horrors of a city under siege and the destruction that was to follow.

 

Overall, Bunker Soldiers is a really nice little piece of Hartnell style Doctor Who, although this is a novel that suffers from some pacing problems and some of the flaws of certain Hartnell serials, especially those near the end of his run.  While Dodo is nicely characterized, she isn’t actually unique in her characterization and could be switched with Vicki quite easily, although Steven is clearly Steven Taylor and the Doctor is clearly the Doctor.  It’s an enjoyable ride of a novel, but does have some heavy problems.  7/10.