Doctor Who: Rip Tide (Doctor Who Novellas) [Hardcover]

I'd never heard of Louise Cooper before, but according to Stephen Gallagher's introduction, she's a writer of Young Adult stories. And indeed RIP TIDE feels very much like something aimed at that market. The main character is a good-hearted teenage girl, Nina. She has problems relating to her family. Most of the scenes are not told from any one character's point of view. Jokes are explained to the reader. An omnipotent third person narrator tells us when people are lying. Characters are described using a small, static set of words (before the Doctor is explicated named, he is almost always revealed by the author's reuse of the same words and phrases).

These are not criticisms. I thoroughly enjoyed the style. In fact, it kept the pace of the book moving very quickly. I can easily imagine this book written in a more adult, more subversive and less obvious manner, and that version would easily be twice as long. There isn't all that much plot to the story -- just about enough for a book this length. So the style in which it is told is very important to the overall effect.

One of the more unusual aspects of this story was how much real time it takes up. Days and weeks pass between scenes. The pace is very slow and deliberate. This is certainly a huge difference from many other Doctor Who stories, where the Doctor and his companions arrive during daylight hours, get involved in a massive, universe-changing adventure, and leave before sunset on the same day.

In addition to the leisurely pace and the small scale of the adventure, one realizes that there really isn't much plot in this. It's very much a find-the-problem-and-fix-it story with only a handful of obstacles put in the way of the protagonists. But it's the way that everything unfolds that appealed to me. There aren't very many big surprises, yet it's still very absorbing. I can only echo Stephen Gallagher's introduction and state that the "what-happens-next sense of story" works very well.

I had two songs stuck in my head while reading -- The Velvet Underground's "The Ocean" and Bruce Lash's "High Water". This wasn't a coincidence. This is a story set in an English village by the sea, and the ocean plays a big part. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's almost a secondary character in its own right, but it certain adds heavily to the book's atmosphere. The village and its inhabitants are also fleshed out extremely well. I don't know if they were based on reality at all, but they certainly felt like real people. There were loads of little details that went a long way towards painting a satisfying picture.

I also enjoyed seeing Cooper's take on the Eighth Doctor, the text of the story never unambiguously names him, but the characterization and the publicity material can't lie. He definitely possesses the more fluffy aspects of his personality as seen in the TV movie, but there's a sterner core, a heart of stone at the center of his absent-minded professor persona. It's a great balance, and one not always seen in the print adventures of the Eighth Doctor.

RIP TIDE is, as I said before, very much in the Young Adult style. There is a clear moral at the end. There is a definite and obvious connection between the life of Nina, and the lives of the book's central aliens. Doctor Who, of course, began as a family show and so, even after all the changes the series has gone through since, this style still suits it. And it's not written in a way that annoyed this adult, so I can certainly report that I enjoyed it.

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