A novel
celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who from Barry
Letts and Terrance Dicks sounds excellent on paper. The back cover of Deadly Reunion
boasts this fact proudly, placing itself as a tribute to the early days of what
fandom at the time would have called the golden age of the show, that is the
era overseen by the pair. Terrance Dicks
also has the novelist chops to pull this off, having written dozens of novels
at this point including several for BBC Books that are praised. Barry Letts’ last prose work was The
Ghosts of N-Space for the Missing Adventures range in 1995, eight years
previous. Technically, Deadly Reunion
is his first original novel. Letts and
Dicks tackle the book by splitting it in two parts, crafting two connected
stories, presenting two novellas for the price of one. Neither story are actually worth the asking
price however as Deadly Reunion is a case of self-sabotage. The first half reveals far too much that
makes the second half become an entirely predictable plot, creating a loop of
adding extra twists and turns.
The first
half of Deadly Reunion plays out as its own little story about Alistair
Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, currently a second lieutenant stationed in Greece
during the Second World War. He is torn
by the love of his life Fiona back home and falling deeply in love with Sephie,
a woman with the image of a goddess.
That is because she is the goddess Persephone, both halves of Deadly
Reunion are Letts and Dicks retelling the myth of Hades and Persephone but
they are ancient aliens who came to Earth and were mistaken for gods. Ignoring the fact this particular science
fiction trope being incredibly problematic yet derivatives of it are a staple
for Doctor Who, there is actually an interesting idea here. The first half of the novel is directly playing
with the idea of these myths repeating themselves in the same way that history
repeats, something that is then handed off in the other part of the novel. Barry Letts is likely responsible for this
first half, on the basis that the chapters of this half do not have titles
while the second half are all titled.
Letts only used chapter titles on Doctor Who and the Daemons but
not on his two relatively recent novels and the ideas of myths replaying
themselves feels like a Barry Letts idea.
This first half not having the Doctor present does mean there can be a
focused character piece, however this does suffer from the fact that Lethbridge-Stewart’s
arc here is one that had already been done in novels like The Eye of the Giant
and The Scales of Injustice. Yes,
seeing a young version of the character serving in the army has the potential
to be interesting, but falling in love and exploring the ramifications of that
read as superfluous when it is simply putting a retelling of Hades and
Persephone with Lethbridge-Stewart on the sidelines. Were it presented as a standalone novella it
likely would work better as the two halves of Deadly Reunion are bringing
each other down in terms of quality.
The second
half of the novel is more likely the Terrance Dicks penned half of the novel
that is on the surface a continuation of the first half’s retelling of the
myth, though this time set during the Doctor’s exile on Earth. Dicks makes it a big Third Doctor
celebration, the entire UNIT family is here along with the Master as this is
set close to Terror of the Autons, but nobody is characterized quite
well. Dicks is in the mode of writing a
Target novelization here, skewing his audience quite young in terms of
prose. The god characters instead of
being shortened versions of their names as Letts did, just takes the name and
changes a letter: Demeter becomes Lady Dempster, Sephie becomes Sophie, and
Hades becomes Hadley. Dicks then plays
the reveal that this involves alien Greek gods recurring the loop of Hades and
Persephone but with the Master this time, as some massive twist, holding onto
it right until the very end. Many of the
plot points he lifts directly from The Daemons (essentially swapping Azal
for Hades), though when he is not lifting from that there is the occasional
lifting from Rags. There are points
where the characterization becomes parodic: Jo Grant is described as embodying “the
swinging seventies” and the Doctor has a jolly good time describing in graphic
detail how difficult it is executing someone by beheading. Sergeant Benton and Mike Yates are both
portrayed as a couple of lads going down to the pub for drinks and the Brigadier
is occasionally a stick in the mud. Dicks
seems to be writing out of obligation to do so, making it unsurprising that he
would only contribute one further full-length novel for BBC Books.
While
these issues are mediocre enough and the first half having potential, what does
drag Deadly Reunion down is the prose and structure of the novel. Letts and Dicks as a collaborative pair
should create ideas that flow nicely into each other, they were the production team
throughout Jon Pertwee’s tenure on Doctor Who after all, but stylistically
they are attempting to match each other and it does not mesh. The prose does match what Dicks had employed
for his novelizations, but structurally the use of chapters creates a chopped pace.
The writing feels as if each chapter had
a specific word count to reach and then the chapter must end. This mostly means Letts and Dicks are writing
so each chapter ends in a cliffhanger, but more often than not it means that
chapters will just end in the middle of a scene with very little rhyme or
reason. This is the most apparent in the
first half of the novel, making me wonder if it was Letts, who had only written
one standard length Target novelization to this point (The Paradise of Death
and The Ghosts of N-Space were expanded to the full length novels of
Virgin Publishing).
Overall, Deadly
Reunion is yet another novel that’s far too tinged by the rose colored
glasses of nostalgia, this time for the Pertwee era without taking much of its
time to explore the repeating cycle of myth and history. The characters inhabiting parodic versions of
themselves also has the potential to create a good novel, especially if the
entire novel followed the structure of an already existing story to make a statement
on nostalgia, but it is clear that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were not using
that as inspiration for this novel. The
style of prose not matching is also dragging the novel down, especially in the
stronger first half while the second half almost takes glee in being dark and condemning
aspects of the younger generations of the 1970s. 4/10.