Hope by: Mark Clapham

 

The Eighth Doctor Adventures have generally struggled when it comes to characterizing its female companions.  Sam Jones as initial companion was by far the weakest of the bunch, largely having her characterization be shallowly defined as activist and sassy as her character traits in an attempt to replicate the success of Bernice Summerfield.  Her immediate successor Compassion fared better by at least having a defined character and interesting concept for a companion, a woman from the future becoming a sentient TARDIS, but again there was inconsistencies in characterization and underutilization until her last run of appearances.  The current female companion, Anji Kapoor, by comparison is a back to basics model of companion who doesn’t really want to travel with the Doctor.  Her introduction, Escape Velocity, was something of a mission statement for the character was that her boyfriend Dave was the one who was really companion material, but he was murdered so Anji took his place.  Now here I am several books later and a year since I last read a Doctor Who book with the enigma that is Mark Clapham’s Hope, the book that feels like it’s meant to be Anji’s book.  As a character she has been served well in previous books but with installments in the lead-up to this like The Adventuress of Henrietta Street being very much the Doctor’s book and even further back Revolution Man being largely Fitz’s book, Anji needs one that essentially defines who the character will be and what she needs to go on.  It becomes especially interesting because that’s not how the book actually begins.

 

Hope begins with Mark Clapham deciding to push the Doctor and company to the end of the universe in a setup that Russell T. Davies would draw on for “Utopia”.  The setting is literally called Hope and it is clear from the off that the hope is false.  There is an organized militia in the city of Hope, the leader of the city is Silver another time traveler of a sort with a mechanical exoskeleton and electronic memory, and the TARDIS falls into the sea.  Much of Hope owes itself to film noir as it does cyberpunk, blending the two genres wonderfully with the Doctor being put in his own desperate situation.  This is one of those points where the Doctor’s own need for control becomes a problem for himself, agreeing to help Silver in exchange for retrieval of the TARDIS.  While not made explicit in the text, Silver is a Cyberman, converted at some point in Earth’s future while retaining aspects of his humanity.  At this point in the future, humanity has already evolved so seeing three figures that look all too human, and for one of them have found themselves closer to humanity then ever before, they are the outsiders.  Silver as a character also fits largely into the mythic trickster category of fiction: offering people exchanges for what they think they want, always with a price and twist on the original deal, and this is the man the Doctor must make a deal with to see himself, Fitz, and Anji survive.  The Doctor and Fitz’s plot to hunt a killer is one of those perfectly good plots, Clapham’s prose is quite compelling and it allows a lot of worldbuilding of the setting.  If it were just this plot, you’d have a fairly solid Doctor Who novel, but Anji is what elevates it above into something at the very least more interesting.

 

Anji Kapoor didn’t really want to travel the universe, that was Dave’s wish.  Like happens with many of the Doctor’s companions along with the wonder of the universe there are also the dangers and trauma, especially present around this period of the Doctor’s life.  Mad Dogs and Englishmen may have proven a respite, but Hope sees Anji’s mind preoccupied with thoughts of Dave from the first page.  This is a story where there honestly isn’t much for the Doctor’s companions to do, so Anji has plenty of time to herself and time to speak with Silver.  Clapham sets up this interplay of predation between the two.  Silver is far too charming and has far too many resources at his disposal, and Anji has been thinking about Dave.  Silver wants an escape, not a way to steal the TARDIS, but a way for Anji to give him the knowledge to build one of his own. Silver’s backstory is framed as a pulp adventure hero’s backstory and that pulpy charm allows him the perfect route under Anji’s skin.  Despite in her heart knowing that Dave is gone and never coming back, time travel does not allow for resurrection at least in the usual framework of Doctor Who, Anji’s temptation to have a Dave II cloned and brought into existence is the unsettling aspect of Hope.  It’s the hope that gets the woman through, and is something that has already shattered when the idea first arises, elevating Clapham’s novel.

 

Overall, Hope is a great novel to come back to the Eighth Doctor, Fitz, and Anji after my stint away.  While not particularly strong in certain areas, the Doctor’s plot is actually quite weak in places and a bit too standard, it philosophically embodies a lot of what the Eighth Doctor Adventures are going for.  It also gets to the roots of what the Cybermen and their relationship to humanity actually is without using the word Cyberman anywhere in the prose, but best of all, it’s the showcase for Anji Kapoor that she perhaps needed to lay her baggage behind her.  8/10.