Doctor Who: Matrix [Paperback]

Hunted by an unseen foe, the Seventh Doctor decides to leave Ace in the safe hands of his first incarnation. But London 1963 is not the London he remembers: it is a beleaguered police state under siege from an arcane vampiric force. The infamous Whitechapel murders have sent twentieth century Earth down a parallel timeline, leaving the Doctor and Ace no choice but to travel to the East End, circa 1888, to catch the Ripper . . .

Like The Bodysnatchers, Matrix is full of gaslight and gore inspired, no doubt, by repeat viewings of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. But where Morris took the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes approach to the series - exploitative B-movie-derived plots elevated by wit and good characterisation - Perry and Tucker are far more enamoured of the John Nathan-Turner/Eric Saward aesthetic, with storylines contrived to support clever-clever scientific ideas and tie-up with the show's rich and convoluted history. Matrix is no light read; it demands an in-depth knowledge of Who-lore and repays the reader with revelations about the Doctor, Ace and Gallifrey that he or she may not wish to know. You have been warned.

On the plus side, the narrative is strong and atmospheric, if unconventional, and the period detail of an unusually high standard. Perry and Tucker have drawn on a number of sources, including, it seems, Orwell, Borges and the 1930's horror classic Freaks, though their main inspiration is the novels of Peter Ackroyd: the East End setting, Ripper connection and Quabalistic overtones recall Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, while the use of London churches, black magic, possession and parallel time streams has its precedent in Hawksmoor. Fans of Ackroyd will spot the connection early on and, if they don't, Perry and Tucker actually name a character after him to hammer it home.

Ackroyd's obsession with secret histories, ghosts and metempsychosis, and the theory that different time periods run concurrently rather than consecutively, lends itself well to Doctor Who. Unfortunately, Perry and Tucker take this too far. Touches like the re-writing of the Kennedy Assasination, the flash-forwards to the TV movie, and the presence of Ian, Barbara and the Wandering Jew (yes, the Wandering Jew who mocked Christ as he bore the cross to Calvary) as supporting characters, are both ingenious and pointless (the latter appears to be a stranded Time Lord who will reappear in a future Eighth Doctor story). The novel also throws in some of truly disturbing imagery - this is not a book for children - and raises some uncomfortable questions about the nature of evil (is evil excusable if it is in one's nature? can the most horrific of crimes can be excused if one acts under duress?) which, while they might have worked in a first Doctor story like The Aztecs or The Massacre, are rendered facile by the character limitations of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, and the unmasking of the novel's mystery villain.

This is a novel about confronting the nature of the beast - advice Perry and Tucker should have taken on board as they wrote it. That's not to say that Matrix isn't a cracking read - and its ambition is admirable -, but it is one that arguably pushes the envelope of what is essentially a tea-time adventure show for children a little too far.