In Act 2
of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, as the narrator
is discussing the problem of the giant, the fairy tale characters break out of
the story, drag the narrator in, and sacrifice him to the giant. This breaks the narrative and means the
characters must now actually choose what actions to take without the guiding
hand of the author, they are now in control of the narrative and that leads to more
death and tragedy before eventually resolving in a hopeful enough ending,
though always changing and trying to be better.
It is an essential piece of metatext that is both accessible and easy to
understand. It is important to bring this
up because Doctor Who novelist Steve Lyons owns quite a lot to Into
the Woods for his trilogy of metafictional novels Conundrum, Head
Games, and The Crooked World, the latter being the most explicitly metatextual
on speculative fiction in general and the very nature of Doctor Who as
an idea. Conundrum and Head
Games are a pair of directly linked New Adventures set in the Land of
Fiction, while The Crooked World is a spiritual successor to the other two
in a similarly fictionally linked setting though one revealed to be a physical
place and single planet. The idea behind
The Crooked World is that the Doctor is a force of nature responsible
for changing the narrative flow of stories.
He comes in and fundamentally changes the rules of the universe every time
he leaves the TARDIS.
The Crooked World uses this through the lens of cartoons, specifically cartoons
pre-1970 including expies of the characters of Looney Tunes, Tom and
Jerry, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, deconstructing in the first
100 pages or so what makes each of these cartoons work and the formula they
have to follow before ripping it to shreds.
The inciting incident is our Elmer Fudd/Porky Pig/Wile E. Coyote expy,
Streaky Bacon shooting the Doctor with his blunderbuss which nearly kills
him. The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji do not
work by cartoon logic, while the rest of the world does. Lyons specifically draws on Robert Zemeckis’ Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?, though not visually as this is a novel and there is
no way to translate that technical wonder that film is, but the ideas are there. The Crooked World as a planet is bound by cartoon
morality: those shot will have an overreaction, fall over, maybe be carted off
in an ambulance, but be back to normal almost immediately. The Doctor brings injury, pain, and death in
his wake to Looney Toons characters, Fitz brings meaningful
relationships (through ironically the introduction of sex) to serial parodies,
and Anji brings a sense of cold hard logic to the Scooby-Doo gang. The world begins to almost immediately unravel
and descend to chaos, every action the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji take ends up
changing the world intrinsically and makes things worse. Every thought they have ends up bringing the
notions of war, corruption, capitalism, and death in their wake.
The novel
eventually becomes a meditation on bringing the central idea of adult, fully
formed morality, onto these cartoon characters.
What exactly are their purposes when there are consequences to their
actions and the universe doesn’t essentially reset at the end of an
episode? Our Tom the Cat expy is put on
trial at one point because he has genuinely attempted to kill the expy of Jerry
the Mouse, and there is even at least some attempt to at least acknowledge much
of the racial stereotyping of certain old cartoons. Now this is where Lyons perhaps cannot go as far
as he wishes to, the BBC was never going to get the rights to use any of the
established characters, but it is clear exactly who they are so the commentary
still works and is added to with the idea that these cartoon characters are
already corruptions in who they are. The
big twist of the novel is that the Crooked World being this cartoon logic laden
place is because of the mind of a dead child, taken and insulated at the center
of the world who’s escape pod dying. The
Crooked World actually goes as far as it can go in making it explicit that changing
the narrative as the Doctor and company are the ones to do is not an inherently
good thing to happen. The situation only
gets worse and the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji do their best, but there’s a moment
where they accidentally create an atomic bomb because they are thinking about
it. Lyons keeps reality pliable and even
when the main trio try to make the world bend to their advantage, the influence
of their morality eventually gives the inhabitants their own free will to
override things. It means that The
Crooked World ends as a tragedy; like Into the Woods the Doctor, Fitz,
and Anji are the ones to leave and the world just has to get on and make its
own decisions.
Overall, The
Crooked World is Steve Lyons’ masterpiece, it’s the crowning achievement of
metatext, knowing exactly what cues to take. One minute it has you laughing at the cartoon
antics, and how weird things are going, the next it has you questioning exactly
how long it will take for the idea to get old, and then finally it begins to
have the shift of redirecting, and eventually losing the narrative. 10/10.
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