Doctor Who: Ghost Light

Few stories better exemplify the newfound ambition of late 80s Doctor Who than Ghost Light. There's a surfeit of ideas and influences (Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin, Richard O'Brien), and if they don't all quite come together, you can at least see they're all pushing in the same direction: Ghost Light wants to be a story about class and religion and personal demons, and all the rest of it all at once. It's realised what Doctor Who can do and is so excited: it's also a story about evolution versus stagnation. Which is pretty fitting.

"Everything has its place, Ace," the Doctor tells his companion at the conclusion of this novel, seemingly contradicting its previous seven hours. Claiming that Ghost Light would fit comfortably alongside modern literary takes on our Victorian heritage like A. S. Byatt's Angels & Insects would be a profound exaggeration, but like Byatt, Platt looks at the class structure and scientific revolutions of the Victorian period in a way that indicate their resonance with our own time-- and thanks to time travel he has a much more direct venue for the comparison!

The relationship between Ace and the Doctor is the high point of this novel. There's an early misstep, I think, where the Doctor internally complains that he's missed a chance to show more pedantically lecture Ace, but the novel soon recovers from this, showing the Doctor's genuine care and concern for Ace's growth and development. No one can deny that the way he drops her into this story is a little cruel, but the way she makes out at the end works really well-- I loved the closing lines of the story, and they showcase the Doctor/Ace relationship perfectly. There's a nice bit of internal reflection where Ace contemplates that the crew of the stone spaceship at the novel's end is a bit weird... but that her and the Doctor being together is no less weird, yet it's clearly their place. The two have adapted to one another.

According to Elaine Hadley's Melodramatic Tactics, "The Victorian novel... is both an instrument and a product as well as, less regularly, a critic of class society," and Ghost Light is truly Victorian in this sense. It seeks to interrogate the values that underlie our own society by critiquing those of the past-- and it finds them all wanting. Ghost Light might have some problems, as both a novel and a reading, but it's an imaginative, thoughtful story worth spending more than 75 minutes with. Though maybe not quite 411.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF. show less

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After enjoying most of Marc Platt's other work, including his novelisation of Battlefield, I was looking forward to reading this. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Once again, I realise just how vital the direction and acting of the TV version can be; and the intensely visual and subtle original just loses most of its vitality and mystery on the printed page. In particular, we lose the striking visual appearance of Nimrod the Neanderthal and of Light himself, who comes across as just some random and rather dull megalomaniac with super powers.

Scrapes through the Bechdel test: in most of the Ace/Gwendolen scenes they are talking about Josias and/or the Doctor, and the one exception is when show more they fight, and are then interrupted by Control. A fight is barely a conversation, but I suppose it will have to do. (Mrs/Lady Pritchard appears to communicate with the maidservants by telepathy.) show less