NA #50 Happy Endings

Happy Endings by Paul Cornell

In Brief: It's Benny & Jason's wedding and everyone's invited.

Even The Master.

Happy Endings is one big wedding-cake of a book: Huge, sprawling, over-done, sugary, loud, important and not actually very good. Considering that Paul Cornell has written several of the best entries in the New Adventures (and also No Future) as well as that I remembered really enjoying this "celebration" of the series back when I read it in 1996 I was surprised to find the book trite and irritating this time around. The whole thing really just felt lazy with the book being rather smug and feeling like a massive inside-joke rather than a proper piece of literature.

The plot of the book is purposefully light, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (for instance the similarly "light" The Also People was brilliant) but here has no interesting environment or characters to fill the gap. Most of the book involves the various guests arriving from all of time and space in the village of Cheldon Bonniface (from Cornell's earlier Timewyrm: Revelation) in the far-off year of 2010. There's a reference to almost every other book in the New Adventures, with many characters getting a bit of a coda to their previous adventure. I remembered "back in the day" really liking the rather insane result with sub-plots involving Roz, Chris and Sherlock Holmes meeting up with The Brigadier to thwart a small plot by The Master. Or the camp light-entertainment Silurians.

But this time the whole thing just felt too indulgent. What was also frustration is that a much better book occasionally peeked out, cutting through all of the fluff like a knife. The Brigadier's story involving his facing his death due to illness in old age is beautifully bitter-sweet and gives the book a much needed twinge of sadness to counter-point the festivities. Unfortunately it doesn't last long and ends uncomfortably, with the character given an unlikely extra lease on life.

Overall, perhaps Happy Endings is perhaps too self-conscious, being too meta-textual and self-referential for its own good (although it *was* the mid-90s when irony was king). Or maybe I'm just a miserable sort who can't join along with any sort of fun. But regardless I found a lot of the book somewhat tedious (in particular the large section in the middle that describes in great detail a game of cricket between the village locals and the wedding-guests). Everything just felt too forced, too artificial. Comparable television stories would be the likes of earlier "celebrations" such as The Three Doctors or The Five Doctors which suffered under the weight of being "events" rather than decent stories.

More modern examples include "Journey's End", "The End of Time" or any Steven Moffat-penned episode from 2011.

Doctor Who just doesn't work for me when it spends too much time looking backwards at its own history. Things become too bogged down in silly detail and it just sucks the fun out of everything, which is perhaps the ultimate irony of Happy Endings. But like I said, 15 years ago I clearly recall gobbling this up, loving all of the references to old stories and "getting" the jokes. This time around I needed substance under all of the light-hearted romping.

But at the same time I shouldn't complain too much considering that at least the book tried something different for the series. While my opinion of Happy Endings is no longer what is once was at least the book was never boring (except for the cricket bit that is) and at least kept me reading despite the irritation. And the book does end very well, with Ace (or Dorothee as she's now known) getting a lovely scene with her Mum while Benny & Jason start a new life exploring time and space away from the Tardis (thanks to some time-rings provided by The Doctor).