St. Anthony's Fire (New Doctor Who Adventures) [Paperback]

The book does begin relatively strong. There's a war-torn planet in a distant star-system engaged in a genocidal war to the death between two sets of virtually identical aliens. So far, so good -- not exactly groundbreaking stuff here, but it's told enthusiastically enough to bring my interest along for the ride. The battle sequences are told with a good bit of flair and revolve around giant reptiles reenacting the trench scenes from PATHS OF GLORY. But this does bring us to the first place where the book starts to fall apart. Gatiss goes to a lot of trouble to describe how physically alien these creatures are, and the descriptions of these reptilian people go a long way towards redeeming the book. But the visual aspects to their alienness are as far as the book develops them, as the way these creatures talk and act make them human for all intents and purposes. They even use human figures of speech in their everyday conversation. It almost feels as though Gatiss had finished writing the novel with humans in the lead role, but then went back and made a few cursory changes to the narrative in order to make the monsters seem otherworldly. There is just too little effort shown though; these aliens just aren't alien.

Anyway, as one could guess, the Doctor and Benny (Ace has been left to vacation on another planet) soon arrive and become entangled in the local politics. Not to get into spoiler territory, but the arrival of what the back-cover blurb describes as "an unknown force" seems to render inconsequential a lot of the earlier running around. It's this unknown force that brings the bulk of the unfortunate religious aspect to the story, which drives ST ANTHONY'S FIRE down from being merely an uninspired, unoriginal runaround to the depths of serious Deep Hurting.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a good bit of satire, but unfortunately the religious/fundamentalist theme to this story is the least subtle thing this side of that master of understatement, THE GREEN DEATH. It's as subtle as a bright pink poodle. As subtle as being hit by a bus. As subtle as Jim Carrey dressed as a bishop and preaching out of his bottom. In short, subtlety is not this book's strong point. The religious persons shown here are all varying shades of evil; some are evil in greedy ways, others are evil in self-preservationist ways, while still others are sadistic purely for the reasons of being sadistic. The only religious characters who aren't actively evil are just stupid. I'm would not consider myself a deeply religious person, but this sort of boneheaded sledgehammer moralizing just strikes me as being vapid and lazy. It's trying to say something profound, but because of its shallow nature, it ends up saying absolutely nothing at all.

The conclusion to the story is simply unsatisfying on almost all levels. Instead of having the religious satire taken to its logical conclusion of fundamentalism being rejected in favor of some good old-fashioned peace and understanding (or at least something that at least seems aware of the themes that were running through the novel), we get an ending where the forces of the evil religion are defeated by a load of technobabble and people pushing buttons and pulling levels. The story itself relies on too many information dumps where huge portions of the plot are spelled out by people making long speeches. It's a pity because there are elements of the plot that were quite interesting, and would have been more effective if introduced in a more engaging way.

To be fair, I did like several of the (non-satiric) characters in the novel, and what Gatiss does with Ace I found to be genuinely shocking and disturbing, in a good way. The Ace subplot is probably something I should have guessed in advance of its revelation, but the author had me completely fooled. Still, these positives can't save a story that simply doesn't seem to be fully thought through. The only nice thing left to say about this book is that the cover is quite a good painting, even if the Doctor looks more like a Cardassian than a Time Lord. Definitely not a memorable or engaging book here.