Wolfsbane by: Jacqueline Rayner

 

The BBC Books line of Doctor Who novels have this tendency to create multi-Doctor stories where the pair of Doctors do not interact.  The Colony of Lies was the oddest of these in terms of structure, the Seventh Doctor was almost exclusively in the prologue and epilogue while the rest of the novel was a standard Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe story.  Heart of TARDIS was Dave Stone’s attempt at a Fourth and Second Doctor novel where the TARDIS teams got close to meeting while Interference: Book Two is its own beast.  Jacqueline Rayner’s Wolfsbane is the most interesting example of this trend.  It is a multi-Doctor story that separates the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane from Harry Sullivan by a couple of years due to a TARDIS malfunction.  Harry finds himself with a different Doctor, one that he has to be convinced is the Doctor while his Doctor and Sarah find his grave.  Now it is important to put this into the context of the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this point: the multiverse is collapsing and it’s clear that the previous Doctors’ timelines are being altered, often with the deaths of companions.  The Doctor Harry meets and spends the novel with is the Eighth Doctor, set during his exile on Earth after the events of The Ancestor Cell, meaning that he is suffering from amnesia at this point.  Rayner plays with exactly what the Eighth Doctor knows, his segments are entirely from Harry’s perspective and he isn’t sure if this mysterious Doctor is at all related to his Doctor.

 

As the premise dictates, Harry is doomed to die in Wolfsbane.  Rayner uses this to play with expectations, while the Doctor and Sarah Jane find his grave his actual death only comes at the very end of the novel.  Wolfsbane examines what role Harry Sullivan actually plays as a character.  His function on television was made redundant by the casting of Tom Baker as the Doctor, being initially envisioned as filling any required action with the potential casting of an older Doctor.  In developing the character, however, something interesting happened with Harry, he became the more old-fashioned character.  Rayner in Wolfsbane, by putting him into the 1930s setting, is putting him into essentially the older time that he should fit within.  He was written to make several chauvinist remarks towards Sarah Jane especially and Rayner does not diminish that attitude, but there is also the sense that he is pushing forward into the “modern” times of the 1970s at which Season 12 was produced.  Outside of Harry’s death, Wolfsbane is on one hand a story about a werewolf terrorizing an English village and on the other hand an examination of British myths.  There is a man convinced he is the son of Mordred, intending on taking the throne if/when Edward VIII abdicates, and the search for the Holy Grail.  To add to Harry’s chauvinism is a dryad, portrayed by Rayner as ethereal and as fickle as you would expect from the fair folk.  The choice of entrapment of Harry with a dryad is a deliberate choice made from love, despite separating the TARDIS teams Rayner clearly loves them.

 

Emmeline Neuberger is the novel’s werewolf, Rayner laying out these werewolves as unable to control themselves on the full moon although they can force the shift.  There are connections made between the moon and silver that create the weakness of it, specifically discussing the connection of colors.  Making the werewolf female creates a subtext of the werewolf as a further metaphor for femininity.  This is in addition to being in the explicitly patriarchal society of the 1930s, Emmeline being initially presented as a victim before becoming closer to a full person through the course of the novel due to her interactions with both Doctors, Harry, and Sarah.  The mythic history of Britain is framed by Rayner as masculine and specifically aristocratic.  It is power as subjugation, the villain isn’t actually Mordred even if the magic and supernatural elements of Wolfsbane are explicitly real.  There is the thematic element of a mother scheming to usurp the power as a parallel of Arthurian legend, but Harry Sullivan is not a knight destined to find the Grail, Sarah Jane is not Guinevere, and the Doctor is not Arthur.  That particular parallel does weaken ever so slightly the commentary on gender in Wolfsbane.  Rayner’s plotting is meticulous in how it actually ends with the possibility that this story does not actually happen at all, or happened in a different way, but again that is partially the nature of myths.  There could be a mote of truth, and on some level the reader knows that Terror of the Zygons is going to happen eventually, but for where it stands it is a myth.

 

Overall, Wolfsbane is a novel that works because it’s examining both an aspect of Doctor Who, in this case a companion, and putting them in the context of their archetype and a larger look at British myths and legends.  It plays the supernatural incredibly straight and finds a way to write the story where it feels right that the two Doctors don’t meet in the end.  There’s a lot of this novel about the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry as a team and how they fit while also tackling a larger societal underpinning.  In terms of Rayner’s novel work it’s the strongest novel she’s written.  9/10.