Asylum by: Peter Darvill-Evans

 

Asylum is a word with many meanings.  Perhaps most prevalent in popular culture is its description of a mental health facility, bringing up horrific stories of the past where people with mental illness.  The word itself comes from the Greek sulon, meaning right of seizure, with a prefix a, indicating lack of, literally meaning taking away the right of seizure.  This brings to mind political and religious asylum, refuge given to seekers which has evolved into the modern sense of political asylum for refugees.  Asylum is the third and final Doctor Who novel written by editor of the Virgin New Adventures, Peter Darvill-Evans, and the first to not be a Seventh Doctor novel and the first not to be a story set in the far future.  Instead, Darvill-Evans has crafted a narrative set in 13^th century Britain, where an unnamed alien race has found itself living amongst monks, possessing bodies, and causing a murder.  This sounds like it should be a great example of a novel and there should be an interesting story here, however, the book falls down on several fronts.  First it’s length, it’s actually the shortest installment of the Past Doctor Adventures, only coming to 226 pages with the rest of the book being filled out by Darvill-Evans dedicating over 30 pages to an essay on the historical context of the novel, what he changed from history for the book and this is honestly the best part of the novel.  It gives an interesting insight into the creative process and how Darvill-Evans has to alter history for a contemporary novel and made efforts to write characters in a way that sounds like they are distinctly from the past and are translated into English.

 

Asylum, the novel, isn’t a very good book.  The interesting premise doesn’t really feel like there is any time to flesh it out in any real way and all of the characters, especially the monks, are incredibly generic.  Some of them are historical figures, Robert Bacon being the most prominent, and there are some pieces of genuinely beautiful prose, but that’s about it.  This is also an odd choice of TARDIS team as it is the Fourth Doctor set immediately after The Deadly Assassin while he meets a Nyssa post-Terminus.  Neither of their characterization actually works with Nyssa coming the closest to her television characterization but this is a shame as by this point The Land of the Dead, Winter for the Adept, and The Mutant Phase were all released to the public so there really isn’t a reason that Darvill-Evans has to fall back on this naïve girl, despite the fact that she is supposed to be quite a bit older than in Terminus.  The Doctor is technically close to the Season 18 portrayal with a sense of age and wisdom and less of the wonder and quirky nature of the character.  Here he just kind of exists and sulks and that doesn’t really make for a compelling character.

 

Overall, Asylum is a book from someone who really should have just stayed as an editor, the BBC Books range certainly could have used his expertise when it came to commissions and published books.  It’s far from the worst book in the range, Rags still takes the cake, and there is a really nice 30 page essay on the historical context.  I’m not kidding.  3/10.