Camera Obscura by: Lloyd Rose

 

A camera obscura describes how light through a pinhole into a dark space will invert an image projected through the dark interior.  It’s a pinhole image and has had several uses throughout history to teach art, observe eclipses, and eventually during the development of photography and film.  Camera Obscura is Lloyd Rose’s second Doctor Who novel, once again featuring the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji and like her previous novel, The City of the Dead, it is one of the best the series has to offer.  In essence, Rose is exploring the reflection to humanity the Doctor poses, Sabbath as a reflection of the Doctor and their own identities, and in many ways the Victorian origins of the Doctor as a character.  The plot of Camera Obscura is one involving alterations to the timeline, there’s actually a time machine going awry and the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji eventually have to work with Sabbath to stop it and save the day.  Rose’s plot is simple when you actually lay it out, but she does what only can be described as obfuscating beautifully by slowly torturing the Doctor, suffering from the lack of heart and reveal in the novel that it’s in Sabbath linking them intrinsically as similar.  Rose references Victorian and Victorina inspired literature such as “A Scandal in Bohemia”, The Hound of the Baskervilles, the works of Jules Verne, Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige, Harry Houdini, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe all as essential for who the Doctor is.  He has fallen into this terrible depression, the novel putting him further through the ringer, positing that without his second heart he can be grievously injured and nearly die.

 

When a theatrical counterweight is landed on his chest, Fitz and Anji individually lose themselves to their own reflection in each other.  They’re both humans who have been put through their own hell in their own right, neither quite knowing to do without the Doctor but also knowing that the Doctor has been irrational for a while.  Rose doesn’t split the novel into subplots, so Fitz and Anji as characters are there to represent what the Doctor does to people instead of having their own arcs, which could be a problem but Rose never sacrifices what makes them work as characters.  Early in the novel is a fairly classic sequence of logically working through the con of a séance, only to reveal there is something odd actually going on, mainly that Constance Jane is actually possessed.  There is a magician called Octave doing impossible tricks with doubles of himself, a psychiatrist and his evil twin, and Sabbath has saved and hired a female serial killer to be his own assistant in another reflection of the Doctor.  Rose employs a freak show with the Doctor as his own freak, though the freak characters are the representation of normalcy in Camera Obscura.  Many characters have doubles, quite literally splinters due to breaking in the timestream, so that anything happening to one of them happens to the other.  Some are splintered within themselves, as is the case of Jane in an interesting take on dissociative identity disorder, though attributing that to the science fiction aspects of the story manifesting in different ways.

 

Lawrence Miles did a lot of work in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street to establish who Sabbath was, but it’s Lloyd Rose here who really takes the character and makes him work.  He is utterly charming, putting everyone at ease while simultaneously feeling like a predator on the prowl.  The way Rose introduces him and the Doctor both play on similar descriptions to add to the parallels, the prologue and first chapter both taking their time to establish if it’s Sabbath or the Doctor we are following.  There is a sense that you know exactly what Sabbath’s plans are and the power he has over the Doctor, having his heart means that he has claim to part of who the Doctor is.  Camera Obscura under the surface becomes an examination of one’s sense of identity.  That’s why dissociative identity disorder is used in the plot, though it is outdatedly called multiple personality disorder since this is a book from 2002.  The Doctor has to reclaim his identity by the end, he needs to pick himself up through the support of Fitz and Anji.  The implication at the end of the novel is that he is regrowing his second heart to regain his status as Time Lord, because with only one he feels too close to an odd human.  The contempt for humanity is fascinating for the Doctor, yet as Rose presents it, completely in character.  He’s barely a Time Lord and that’s been slowly killing him.

 

Overall, like The City of the Dead and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura is a high concept novel that filters its concepts through incredibly compelling character drama.  The simplicity of Lloyd Rose’s plot once again makes this one of the best novels BBC Books has to offer, and once again is a shame that Rose only wrote four Doctor Who stories.  It’s incredibly imaginative to explore ideas of identity, reflection, and just how the Doctor could never be equal to humanity (he is above us).  10/10.