Spoilers ahoy! Here's a three-part short story, and I almost split up my review accordingly; but I didn't have quite enough to say...
Part One: The Valiant Woman
"These are the last days." So thinks Barbara Wright, on a bus to her job at Coal Hill School in 1963, travelling across the ruins of a dying London in the future, unconsciously echoing the thoughts of Jewish rebels trapped in Masada in 72AD. She has these episodes, you see, where she can't tell what is real and what is... something else.
Still, she manages to get to school, and with enough time to tidy herself up. She briefly encounters Ian Chesterton, a man she has pigeonholed as liberal - "wrong but romantic", quoting the immortal words of Messrs. Sellar and Yeatman, historians extraordinaire. Though they applied the phrase to the Cavaliers; and it makes one wonder how she sees herself: a conservative Roundhead, "Wright but repulsive", perhaps?
She makes it through the school day, just, but not without cost. A contretemps with class weirdo Susan Foreman involving decimalisation, dollars and cents (and why did the author have to bring US currency into it?) leads to her investigating her pupil's home. A policeman directs her to Totter's Lane, she finds and enters the junkyard, approaches a Police Telephone Box which is humming - and it becomes clear that her viewpoint is that of the camera in the opening scene of An Unearthly Child, and of the show as a whole.
So far, so good. If it weren't for the "episodes", this could be a fleshing out of Barbara's life in the time leading up to her conversation with Ian in the scenes following that fog-filled beginning.
Part Two: The Watchers on the Walls
But she is having episodes - appropriately named, too, since they are effectively adventures (though of a more horrific sort than we got to see on TV) - and she has one right at the beginning of the second part. It's disorientating, which is good, and then she has dinner with Ian. More background-filling. And after he's gone, a nightmare. Back to school for a book being requested by the class weirdo, and we have caught up with the next scene.
The back-and-forth between the utter mundanity of Iananbarbara's everyday lives and the horror of her visions has drawn me in by this time. There's a sense that reality is indeterminate, that we're not meant to choose between the horrific and the mundane. It's a bit like the unreality of Campaign, though on a smaller scale. If things continue in the same vein, Part Three will skip past the scene with Susan in the classroom and fill in the gap from there to the moment when Iananbarbara are waiting in the car.
Part Three: The Only Living Thing
But that's not what happens. Instead, we get a more detailed (but slightly warped) view of that scene in the classroom, with Barbara mishearing the name of the group as John Smith and his Companions, an event which points out that even in these sections we are in a postmodern story. Then we skip to the two teachers in the car, and realise that everything has shifted so that we are now in phase with the An Unearthly Child. The sign on the gate, apparently reading IamFORman, keeps us on our toes, but things remain resolutely normal.
Until they search the junkyard and find, not a Police Box, but a strong box. Right back in my first review I said of the Doctor, "It sort of looks as if he is keeping Susan locked up in the police box, and although it doesn't feel as if the program is that grim we have been kept off-balance enough to pause. If not, why is he so desperate to keep the teachers out?"
Here the story really does feel that grim, and when Grandfather attacks we know things are very wrong...
And then they aren't. The mind-manipulating menace is defeated, everyone's back in the TARDIS, recovering, and all is right with the world. Except it's still a postmodern world, and we are gifted with the wonderful, contradictory (though not self-contradictory) statement "You can't change history. Not one word." Barbara wanders through the normal (for Who) world of the TARDIS, off-balance.
Then this, too, is shown to be a lie, and (like a certain point in the film Labyrinth) she is back fighting Grandfather. Two teachers stumble away from the conflict, while echoes of another reality filter through Barbara's consciousness, and an alternate beginning is offered.
So, where and when is this story? Is it all a dream induced by some psychic alien, as implied earlier, in which case the menace still needs defeating; or is it an alternate reality? Or perhaps it's just make-believe, outside the chronology, beyond the Whoniverse? I have a strong pull to make everything fit together, but there are some stories - like The Longest Story in the World, elsewhere in this collection - that cannot fit. Nothing at the End of the Lane is a borderline case, deliberately so.
I don't like this story, it's nasty and incomplete. I really like it, it's finely crafted and chilling. Both these statements are true, at the same time. People's minds are not one-tracked - we can hold contradictions in our heads with ease, and O'Mahony makes use of that quite brilliantly here. It's not a story I want to come back to often, but I've happily read it three or four times; and each time I get a little more out of it. Which is all I can ask for, really.
Published:
Date: March 2000
ISBN: 0-563-55599-8
Rating:
6.5/10.
Next Time:
Back into the past again for another short trip: Mire and Clay.
No comments:
Post a Comment