NA #24 Tragedy Day

Tragedy Day by Gareth Roberts

In Brief: A colony world in the future. The planet-wide fund-raiser Tragedy Day is about to occur, celebrities are actually robots, there's a secret organisation that wants to turn society into Ozzie & Harriet and an Eight-Legged assassin is out to kill the Doctor.

I enjoyed Tragedy Day a lot, although not *quite* as much as Roberts' earlier The Highest Science. However after the recent continuity-heavy recent run of books I appreciated that this book was almost completely free from old monsters and/or characters. No meddling with The Doctor's past, no returns to locations from old stories, just a new adventure in a new place.

I remember that when I originally was reading these books back in the early/mid 1990s I loved all of the references to past stories, as if that somehow made them "real" Doctor Who. Of course this was back in the days when the concept of there being any new episodes made was almost impossible. So now that we're over 5 years into the show being back (and more popular than ever) I was finding the constant mention of all things 1963-89 to be very distracting. This makes a novel such as Tragedy Day more enjoyable now than it was back in 1994. Although I say that based on the fact that I didn't remember much from this book which means I must not have liked it that much at the time.

Again Roberts demonstrates that he's a very good writer with his dark sense of humour coming through both in his characters as well as in the style of writing. It's one thing to have killer blob-monsters who will eat everything in their path, it's quite another to successfully write entire passages from their point of view.

The other thing that's notable about the book is that we're given the series first outright gay character in Forgwyn (who's mother is one of two assassins trying to kill the Doctor and steal the Tardis). Amazingly it's not a facet of the character that impacts the plot whatsoever, it's just mentioned once or twice and left at that (and he even survives to see the end of the novel!). It's another way that the book feels much more like modern Who with its myriad of sexual preferences (although it seems more in the pre-Matt Smith years, unless Rory is due for a "realisation" at some point in 2011...).

Unfortunately I can't completely praise Tragedy Day since the actual plot of the book is a bit of a mess (and has about 2 endings too many). Rather than just keep to main crisis of the organisation of Luminus and its attempts to control the population of Olleril we have The Friars of Pangloss pop up about 2 chapters from the end and try to kill the Doctor. While there were mention of these characters earlier in the book (they're behind several assassins trying to kill The Doctor) we end up with pretty much all of the plot-strands of the novel wrapping up before they finally appear. It makes their threat seem anti-climactic.

And I suspect Roberts must have realised the problem but may not have had time to go back and do a total redraft. The method of their final dispatch feels very rushed and basically admits to being a bit of a cheat.

And while a lot of the parts of the book are very good (the repressed society, the satire of media, the Slaggs) it all doesn't quite all come together, which also makes the ending somewhat disappointing. However despite the last 30 pages or so Tragedy Day is a very good read (and it's not like there aren't other good Doctor Who stories out there with poor endings).