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**INSIDERS: A Critical Appreciation**
Review by Graham Woodland
Original story by Jeri Massi
Featuring the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith
This is, quite simply, one of the strongest pieces to be posted to
alt.drwho.creative in a good long while.
In its episodes the reader will find: solid Who tradition; horror;
orcs in space; detective capers worthy of Messrs Campion and Lugg
at their most energetic (with authentically Allingham-esque dark
undertones); moments of pure slapstick; and a serious, specific
exploration of a religious philosophy of mercy. The combination
turns out so well balanced as to make a heady brew indeed, and a
story I'll not soon forget.
A moment's digression before we set off, since this issue will be a
breaker for some: like all of Jeri Massi's stories, Insiders
reflects and advances an unapologetically Christian worldview.
There are those who will find this intrinsically un-Whoish, or even
an inherent lapse of taste. Now, I am a passionate agnostic and
anti-supernaturalist, whose nearest approach to religion is a
debatable kind of philosophic Deism; and spiritual tub-thumping is
the wellspring of so much bad writing it isn't funny. And one of
the problems I do have with this story relates to the author's
final handling of her thesis. But to miss or blame this story on
such grounds is indistinguishable in folly from the much-derided
practice among certain fundamentalist Christians of boycotting non-
Christian literature. This story is not a tract: it is a thumping good
read, and---like such other Massi classics as The Dangers of
Exceeding the Blinovitch Limitation Effect---does not, in fact,
mention Christianity *per se*, nor insist that one believe in
anything like it, even within the context of the story!
Nonetheless, the Doctor is quite plainly abroad in an essentially
Christian universe; and those unable to conceive of any interesting
fruits of such a situation may hereby consider themselves warned,
and additionally whacked over the head with a kipper, in hope of
stirring their slumbering curiosity.
And now to specifics. Spoilers much ahoy:
The structure of Insiders is one of its greatest strengths. In a
nutshell, it conforms to one of the oldest tricks in the Who book -
Doctor and companion are separated; they pursue different plot
strands whilst trying to stay alive long enough to meet up again;
they are reunited in either triumph or (at least) definitive
survival. Insiders, however, uses this framework to very
particular and rather audacious ends; and from the beginning, the
plot is constantly veering round blind corners and coming up with
new surprises. It seems both more predictable (which I think is
deliberate) and somewhat less effective (which is clearly not) in
the single-stranded portions. More of this anon.
The double-stranded section uses parallel stories of very different
tones to support each other, and to maintain the piece's
characteristically fast pace.
Sarah's story is emotionally harrowing, and perforce largely
inward-turned: she spends most of the tale infected and terminally
sick, stuck in a deep cave on a barren planet, with the orc-like
Ivorites hunting her for food and a lethal giant spider blocking
her exit, and with the perverted spiritual carrion-eater that has
brought her here waiting for her to die so it can steal her body.
Her options are, to say the least, limited: in fact, all she can do
is begin to commune with the empty, dreadful, and intangible alien
Presence of Fomalhaut that haunts these caves, and come to
appreciate this essentially passive being's benignity and purpose
enough to gain its help. Fomalhaut's defining and specialised
concept of 'mercy' is both expounded and illustrated at some
length. Normally this would be, to put it mildly, a poor way to
construct a story. Indeed, for me, not all of it works---but it
is, as a whole, successful.
Ms Massi accomplishes this by two means. Firstly, Fomalhaut is
*very* alien---we are constantly discovering just how much so, up
until the moment we leave it. To communicate with Sarah at all, it
has to personify itself in quasi-human form in her mind, and teach
her to look at things through what it calls the right 'glasses'.
Even then, more has to be left out than can actually be said; and
the reader is left even more uncertain than Sarah as to just where
it is forced to resort to metaphor, and where it is able to speak
its meaning plainly in human-compatible concepts. This distancing
and mutual struggle for understanding is used both to drive the
story, and to escape the worst pitfalls of authorial lecturing. It
is also true that Fomalhaut is a limited, fallible, and ultimately
shockingly vulnerable creature. Much of its nature is discovered
through its actions, and through Sarah's and its dealings with the
spider Athena, the marauding Ivorites, and above all with the
Insider in the story's climactic confrontation---which,
extraordinarily, takes place before the Doctor can even reach the
scene. The way Sarah is almost (but not quite) forced into that
dreadful confrontation is morally insightful and memorably
wracking. Speaking of the Doctor...
If Sarah's strand of the story is stark, psychological, and full of
waiting, the Doctor's is correspondingly gaudy, action-packed, and
racy. In the one whopping co-incidence of the book---which is
written down to some form of foresight on the part of the TARDIS---
he materialises in Guardian City, a part of Ms Massi's patented
future from The Book of Five Ringsand elsewhere, inhabited
inter alia by her Rules, Tarks, and Salafians. These belong to
the familiar school of 'specialist' aliens who are 'good at'
particular things, the culturally dominant humans being the
generalists - though this perspective may itself be humanocentric,
and not shared by any of the aliens themselves. Five Rings
afficionadoes will be quickly gratified by the prompt appearance of
Mags Hardbottle---Detective to the Stars (and her Ogron sidekick
Kogrik), to get the Doctor out of some official hot water.
Mags is one of Ms Massi's most inspired creations, and she doesn't
disappoint here. Her appearance in any given plotline immediately
sets the tone to the brighter side of 20s/30s detective pulp. This
is unsurprising, because even in the Guardian City universe, Mags
Hardbottle is a fictional character from a long-running potboiler
series of precisely such a nature (from which a hilarious excerpt
kick-starts Five Rings).
However, *this* Mags is a juvenile Tark
of unhappy history, who having first clung fiercely to the
Hardbottle books as a means of escape, has parlayed herself into
the real-world rôle through sheer obsessive application, general
chutzpah, and carefully hiding her extra arms beneath her Detective
Coat. She is also, of course, an excellent detective, and by the
time of this story has become rather rich with the aid of her
fictional original's reputation. Having practically coerced
reality into her personal genre, it comes as no surprise that she
has dragged the Doctor---along with the reader---into it within
moments of appearing.
Mags, Kogrik, and the Doctor race to track down Sarah from the
sharply limited data available, and save her from the slow death
the Insider has certainly planned for her. The pace soon becomes
frenetic, as the Doctor struggles mightily to cope with drug-
trafficking, gladiatorial combat, slaving rings, multiple double-
crosses, porcophilia, inebriation, and walking around with a bag
over his head. LAUGH! GASP! and HOWL, AGHAST! as the plot pulps
its way like a good 'un to the final resolution on Fomalhaut's
world.
It is now time to clear up. Fomalhaut, in the cause of permanently
removing the Ivorite infestation, throws the traditional 'delayed
collapse of everything' lever, which has its usual effect of
triggering a race against time to escape. Mags and Kogrik must
also rescue some young Ogrons who have been shanghaied here as
slave labour by the Ivorites. Fomalhaut is obviously a mistress of
timing: the Ogrons are rescued, and the Doctor is able to bring
Sarah out in time to reach the TARDIS. He brings her home,
thoroughly exhausted but still radiant with the effects of
Fomalhaut's 'mercy' (which, in fact, does not ultimately stem from
the thoroughly passive Fomalhaut at all). He is touched by its
effect on her, but as we leave him we see him as a thoroughly good
man left profoundly and uncomprehendingly in the spiritual cold, as
if peering with slight bewilderment through a winter's window at a
hearthside scene - an effective take on the Doctor's traditional
character in general and Ms Massi's particular version of him in
particular. Here endeth the appreciation.
I shall be briefer in critique. The opening sequence, though
critical, felt oddly sterile, and Sarah's invasion of the TARDIS
comes over a little too Peter-Rabbit-ish for my taste. It does,
however, hold attention, because of its unrelenting pace, and the
deadly and compelling duel between the Doctor and the Insider. The
race against time at the end is contrived, but (just) gets away
with it on pulp value from one strand, and symbolic from the other.
The powerful images of divine mercy in this story reflect a
difficult, even abstruse view of the concept. This works well when
illustrating---through Fomalhaut's awkward communication with Sarah---
the distance and alienation that lies between its 'true fount'
and the everyday, sometimes positively banal use of the term by
humans and our ilk. Sarah's fumbling attempts to explain her new
intuitions afterwards should indeed be awkward, but they are
perhaps some degrees of explicitness and repetition too many. This
scene with Liz Shaw, which uses Liz's development in Ms Massi's
other stories to fine effect, is a necessary one, but inspires in
me the irritating feeling of crying out for some revision I can't
quite put my finger on. Though this whole closing scene remains
emotionally and spiritually affecting, I found the very end of it
frankly overwritten. Nonetheless, Insiders as a whole is a
strong and ambitious work, which tackles an unusual theme with
vision, wit, and brio, and can only add to its author's already
considerable reputation. I await her next serial with great
anticipation!
Click here to go to Insiders!
Click here to go to Jeri's Dr. Who fiction page
Click here to go to Jeri's Dr. Who Non-fiction page
Click here to go to Jeri's Main Page!