The Year of Intelligent Tigers by: Kate Orman

 

Sometimes you want to see a character get very angry.  Anger in a protagonist is something often either muted or exaggerated for the purposes of angst, but The Year of Intelligent Tigers is a book that slowly builds up the anger of the main character while all his friends slowly betray him, and two societies cast him off.  This is Kate Orman’s final contribution to the Eighth Doctor Adventures and penultimate Doctor Who novel as it is, though she would contribute some short stories to Big Finish and was recently announced to be writing the fourth in their series of Audio Novels, and like all of Orman’s work at its core there is a deconstruction.  This deconstruction is of who the Eighth Doctor is as a character, what his goals are, and what the effect of the near constant amnesia has had on him.  Orman writes the Eighth Doctor with a real sense that he doesn’t quite know or understand who his friends are.  He is travelling with Fitz, but does he really know this version of Fitz?  Anji is also a relative newcomer, and their previous adventures have been so full of death and destruction that the anger is already there.  The TARDIS team’s arrival on Hitchemus has served as a vacation, the first fifty pages or so are written in such a lyrical style of the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji having their first real chance of character growth and development.  This is the first time that it seems they are actual friends and travelling companions without the added angst of Anji grieving or Fitz being afraid of not being the real Fitz.  This makes a nice change and the human colony on Hitchemus, one of artists and musicians with some scientists but mostly those set apart from traditional capitalistic human society.  The only form of life on Hitchemus is a species of tigers who have been lazing around and whom one scientist is convinced are more intelligent than they are letting on.

 

The Doctor is playing first violin in a concerto and the novel itself is structured like a symphonic composition.  The music subplot is something that permeates the novel which is integral to how the Doctor is portrayed, every time he attempts to play his solo in the concerto it only grows and grows, becoming more and more unruly and impossible to contain, reflecting the nature of the Doctor himself.  The conductor and composer, Karl, still wants to keep the Doctor in the part but he becomes more and more unmanageable.  It is at this point when the tigers reveal their intelligence and take over the city, keeping anyone not a musician or music instructor trapped in their home, literal and figurative storms are brewing and the Doctor is cast out from the rest of the humans.  The bulk of the novel deals with the descent of the humans against the Doctor’s endless and romantic optimism that the humans and tigers could possibly live together.

 

Fitz takes a background role, having traveled with the Doctor for so long he understands that the Doctor wants to save everybody, wants to see the humans and the tigers living together even when both humans and tigers are at each other’s throats.  Even the tigers, who have cyclical evolutionary development of intelligence to stupidity back to intelligence, eventually want to see the Doctor dead because he wants everyone to live.  Anji, being still the newcomer to the TARDIS only having three proper adventures under her belt, becomes a leader in the anti-tiger resistance, something she takes up because she is scared.  Orman is brilliant in foreshadowing this early on with Anji being the most distrustful of the tigers even before they show their intelligence, worried about people letting them into their homes and places of business to do whatever they please.  And then once everything comes to a head we get to the ending where Kate Orman ties everything together.  The Doctor fails.  He intentionally leaves the situation with only a few short years for the humans and the tigers to learn how to work together or their small little island will end.

 

The Year of Intelligent Tigers is not just a book about tigers, it’s a book about music, losing one’s faith, gaining confidence for a cause, and most importantly about humanity.  Nobody in it is wholly good, or wholly bad, they are just people trying to live their lives and survive, that survival instinct leading to the fear that brings people down.  Even after ten previous novels Kate Orman still finds ways to surprise you and keep you wholly engaged with lyricism and beauty on every page.  10/10.