BOOK
Doctor Who
The Cabinet of Light

Author: Daniel O'Mahony
Telos Publishing
www.telos.co.uk
RRP £10.00 (standard hardback), £25.00 (deluxe hardback)
ISBN 1 903889 18 9 (standard hardback)
ISBN 1 903889 19 7 (deluxe hardback)
Available 10 July 2003


In London, 1949, a "fixer" called Honoré Lechasseur is hired to find a woman's missing husband, a man known only as the Doctor. Who is this semi-mythical figure who seems to have appeared off and on throughout history, and why are certain people searching for a "cabinet of light" that is associated with him...?

I haven't been kind to Daniel O'Mahony over the years. Back in my DreamWatch days, I found his short story The Parliament of Rats, part of the Doctor Who anthology Short Trips, fairly incomprehensible. More recently, Kill the Mouse!, his contribution to the Bernice Summerfield book A Life of Surprises, made even less sense to me. But perhaps in the novella format he has found his perfect canvas. Here he has the space to develop a comprehensible plot while throwing in plenty of unusual connotations.

Like Kim Newman in Telos' Time and Relative, O'Mahony intrigues us with subtle references to earlier Who narratives, particularly the very first one, 100,000 BC (a.k.a. An Unearthly Child). For example, we are given a feminised account of the First Doctor's encounter with Neolithic humans; we are taken to a location that is almost certainly Totter's Lane; and the very end of the book echoes the final line of Terrance Dicks' novelisation, An Unearthly Child.

These allusions to the origins of Doctor Who are entirely appropriate, since this novella marks the debut of Honoré Lechasseur, a character who is about to embark upon his own series of adventures in Telos' Time Hunter range. In case you didn't know, Telos is about to lose its licence to publish Who fiction, just as Virgin Books did back in 1997. (If you didn't know, then you should read our David J Howe interview right away!) Just as Virgin prepared its readers for the solo adventures of Bernice Summerfield via the almost Doctor-less New Adventure, Eternity Weeps, this hard-boiled detective-style tale is very much Lechasseur's story. A very engaging and sympathetic protagonist he is, too.

Despite the lengthy absence of the Doctor, Lechasseur's assignment is to find that very person. Therefore the Time Lord's essence permeates the narrative, aided by the aforementioned textual references. The fact that the woman who seeks him claims to be his wife renders the case even stranger, and is perhaps a witty allusion to The Doctor's Wife, a fabricated story title that '80s TV producer John Nathan-Turner once pinned to his notice board for the sole purpose of provoking fan speculation.

When the Doctor finally does appear, he is not in an incarnation we are familiar with. This has been a year of new Doctors, what with the hiring of Richard E Grant for November's BBCi webcast and the various actors who have assumed the mantle for Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound series. The incarnation described in The Cabinet of Light could be the Nick Briggs version from the fan-produced Audio-Visuals series of many moons ago. Quite coincidentally, he also resembles Richard E Grant - spooky!

One frustrating aspect of this book is that we never really learn what becomes of the Doctor. And since this is presumably a future incarnation of the Time Lord, we probably never will. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing and idiosyncratic work, which bodes well for the Time Hunter series.

Richard McGinlay

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