Self-Indulgent NAstalgia Trip: Book 4 - Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell (December 1991)
"They say that no two snowflakes are the same. But nobody ever stops to check."
And so, with fifteen little words, Doctor Who is never quite the same again.
It feels like the height of pointlessness to try to distill any of this book's sheer impact and potency down to a couple of hundred words. In a very real sense, Doctor Who is still working through the implications and imagery of Cornell's work to this very day.
From the obvious stuff like the presence of an uncanny, astronaut-suited child in The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon - and as ever, because this is the piss on the poor site, we ought to note that Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell have long been close friends - through to the reuse of the "St. Christopher's Church" name in Cornell's own Father's Day, it's trivial to point to the things that continue to reverberate throughout the series in its eventual post-revival form. Even the Chibnall Era is capable of lifting the whole "past Doctors show up in a surrealist dreamscape" thing for the purposes of a noisy mess like The Power of the Doctor, though as ever questions of intentionality are significantly complicated by the difficulty of figuring out just how much of the Wilderness Years material Chibnall has ever read (/neutral).
It's tempting to say that this is altogether too long to be mining one book. After all, it has now been longer since the publication of Timewyrm: Revelation than the twenty-eight years separating the novel from An Unearthly Child. There's undoubtedly a version of this post where we concede how monumental a work the novel was in its own time, but gesture at the possibility of finally moving beyond it.
But that's not the version of the post that I'm writing, and it's for one very simple reason: this book is still absolutely fucking electric. There's an open question to be had as to whether it's the absolute pinnacle of the Wilderness Years, and frankly it's highly debatable as to whether or not it's even the pinnacle of Paul Cornell's novels, but it's nevertheless true that all of the successes to come would have been fundamentally impossible without Revelation laying the groundwork.
At the heart of its success, underneath all the immediately apparent stuff like the sheer beauty of its language and the richness of its imagery, is the simple fact that Cornell becomes the first New Adventures author to actually substantially grapple with what it means for the series to be doing "adult books" now. Pointedly, where authors like Peel and Dicks focused mainly on the "adult" part of the equation, to varying degrees of success/embarrassment, Cornell is willing to play with the possibilities afforded by Doctor Who's new medium.
Ultimately, it would have theoretically been possible to adapt each of the first three Timewyrm novels for television, or even film, provided one had access to a substantial enough budget. There would, of course, be no chance of the BBC providing such a budget in 1991, or frankly ever, but that's where that handy dandy word "theoretically" comes into play.
Revelation, though? I mean, try translating the sequence in which Ace is assaulted by the raw, swirling language of the novel's very composition into any other medium. Go ahead, I'll wait. It's nothing short of utterly, inherently unfilmable.
And that's not actually a problem. If anything, as we've noted, Revelation's three predecessors have been far too beholden to the mindset of simply extrapolating and extending the general stylistic tendencies of the Target novelisations.
But Cornell is consciously and explicitly interested in brushing up against those tendencies and pushing through them. It's not, to be clear, that he wants to completely make a decisive break from those tendencies; this much should be clear from the diegetic quotation of Terrance Dicks' definition of the Doctor in The Making of Doctor Who.
Which inevitably brings us to one of the major critical debates over the NAs, namely to what extent they should be read as a straightforward piece of edgy, antihero-laden grimdark angst of the sort that was so popular among the genre fiction of the nineties. It's easy to see how one might conclude that that's exactly what they are, what with the prominence of images like a bedraggled, crucified Fifth Doctor buried in the darkest recesses of Seven's mind.
But equally, and with the appropriate disclaimer that I'm generally reticent to make claims as to there being a "correct" interpretation of a given work of art, it feels like something of an egregious mischaracterisation of the New Adventures, as a whole, to simply write them off as Doctor Who's answer to Mark Millar, say.
Even within Timewyrm: Revelation, it's clear that the novel does not straightforwardly embrace the epic structure in the way that its construction - and indeed that of the larger Timewyrm arc as a whole - might lead one to believe. The freeing of the Fifth Doctor, in effect, constitutes a rejection of the base premises of the epic as a narrative mode, allowing the Timewyrm to live on after a fashion.
This would be shrewd enough, but Cornell, not to be outdone, adds a further layer to the dizzying fractal dance of the book in his soon-to-be-a-staple handling of rural England, with Davison (not unreasonably) being tied to a sort of pastoral, cricket-playing idyll of a life. The kind of life, in other words, that Cheldon Bonniface directly represents (and it's also perhaps telling that the account of the village's destruction directly invokes Stockbridge, which, although technically first appearing in the Tom Baker strip The Iron Legion, only gained its name during Davison's tenure at DWM), and that Cornell clearly has a great deal of nostalgic affection for even as he isn't afraid to acknowledge the political and ethical failings that often accompany such spaces.
More to the point, though, this pastoral imaginary England is positioned as an indirect mirror of a simpler, more innocent age of Doctor Who fiction, with Davison and Dicks as their respective sigils. This is what lies at the heart of one of the underdiscussed highlights of the book, that being the sequence in which Ace, having lost vast chunks of her past to the influence of the Timewyrm, effectively finds herself the protagonist in a standard-issue children's story of life in the city, all her incendiary, anarchic potential having been sanitised into a sort of bland two-dimensional regressiveness.
It's a sequence which is positively caustic in its bite, even if it's far from being especially subtle, presenting a version of Ace who has found acceptance among her peers, but at the cost of having to hang out with girls who belittle the mere concept of feminism and view Margaret Thatcher as the pinnacle of moral rectitude. But the unsubtlety of it all is very much a virtue here, speaking to a younger, angrier Paul Cornell of the kind that it's hard not to be enraptured by.
In this regard, it's instructive to turn to his preemptive grinding of the axe against Pertwee, which actually manages to be even more provocative than the infamous "They exiled the Doctor to Earth and made him a Tory" logline from his Terror of the Autons review in DWB. Revelation simply goes for the jugular and says the Third Doctor is "vaguely akin to the Nazi."
This is very much the central tension of Revelation, in a nutshell: on the one hand, the epic, represented both by the childish, bullying cruelty of Chad Boyle and the crazed, destiny-obsessed fascism of Hemmings. On the other hand, represented by Ace (and note that her child self is pointedly clad in a pink anorak, allying her not just to fandom but a specifically feminine mode of fandom) a smaller-scale mode of storytelling, of the sort that generally denotes at least a nominal commitment to concepts like social realism and other more worldly concerns.
And it's crucial that the latter is explicitly positioned as something that extends naturally out of the former, albeit not in the sense of the epic, or the more simplistic prose of the early Target novelisations, being a prerequisite for more grounded stories. On the contrary, the Timewyrm is shrewdly said to have been allowed access to the Doctor's mind by his decision to call up the Third Doctor at the climax of Genesys. The fealty to the past and the mythic weight of "the lore" that the epic implies, in other words, cuts directly against the smooth functioning of Doctor Who as an unfolding text. To echo Cornell's chosen epigraph for the epilogue, it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
But of course, as the saying also goes, you can't get to where you're going without knowing where you've been, and it's only with the benefit of added experience that one is able to truly interact with and comprehend the events of one's past. This holds true both for learning the ultimate fate of your playground bully, and for figuring out how to make properly mature Doctor Who novels.
And so the true nature of the Timewyrm tetralogy stands revealed, as does the reasoning for why the novels had to begin in such an overly cautious and stylistically conservative fashion. Ultimately, this has been a tale of existential self-definition in just as fundamental a sense for the New Adventures themselves as it has been for their lead characters. If, at the end of 1991, the future was still not visible with perfect, crystalline clarity, well, that's no big issue.
The Doctor and Ace have gone beyond the realms of mere television characters now, and attained that fate that awaits us all, in the end: they've become a story, in the purest, most literary sense of the word. Now all that's left is to make it a good one.
And from where I'm standing, they've got one hell of a headstart.
