Doctor Who rescued me from an airless literary world

As some of you may know, a few weeks ago a Doctor Who novel of mine saw the light of day. If you’re not a Whovian, or were unaware that the characters have a fictional life away from your telly in all manner of books – well, now you know. Back in the days when I was a kid, there were novelisations of the series that one could save up for or ask one’s parenets to buy and which one could then search for moments of genuine contact with alien minds, or use to replay adventures that had seemed especially adventurous, or who knows … perhaps young readers enjoyed the available evocations of wearing velvet and/or plastic tabards and wading across moorland, or running in quarries. Doctor Who always featured those activities extensively in my youth.

Then the show was cancelled. But those who loved it wanted it to stay around and therefore kept it alive in book form.

Old incarnations of the Doctor were explored further, the – apparently – final incarnation of the Doctor was taken on into new storylines and given new companions, and there were even excursions into the rather more adult themes and areas that fan fiction can sometimes feel it needs to generate (not exactly Fifty Shades Of Who but nearly). The reasons for this continued life were many, but I am rather fond of the one which runs roughly: Doctor Who and the idea of the Doctor himself are good things in the world – they are fun and sustaining and steadfastly well-disposed to children in a world that may not be. So Who should always be there.

As it happens, I think that quality fiction for readers of any age probably should be something that has a jolt of risk and life about it, that sustains and that is a friendly voice in the mind of whatever reader might encounter it. That’s the kind of fiction I’ve always loved to read and it’s the kind of fiction I’ve always hoped to produce.

The Doctor also has a love of justice and a liberating silliness and insists on trying to be kind. He has his dark moments and is an alien, but he has a good heart – you’d gladly leave your kids with him and they’d be OK, more than OK. In a world where remembered children’s entertainments are now disfigured by terrible shadows, the world of Who is still a clean space, a place of safety, where generations of kids having rotten childhoods have sometimes hidden themselves for a bit of hope. I respect that. And I wanted to be part of that tradition. What writer wouldn’t, really?

I’m not that much of a Whovian, but I believe in the utility of fiction and the conjuring of hope in words. I believe that fiction does more than distract, or offer a placebo. In a place of nightmares, we need sweet dreams, we need to know that cruelty and injustice and discomfort may be happening, but that they are not right and not everlasting. I mention this because I’ve met so many people who were small and powerless and not defended and, yes, a silly show on the TV with wobbly sets and made-up monsters helped them deal with the monstrous reality that might otherwise have swallowed them up and destroyed them entirely. They need more help than that and didn’t get it – but Who was something.

For me, like many other people, the Doctor was the beginning of thinking outside the standard boxes provided. As with all good sci-fi, the Who stories allow us to view our world and our habits and our species in an anthropological manner. I find that healthy, I think it’s particularly useful for children and I have always had a quiet appetite for sci-fi as a result. It can make for exhilarating reading and, if you’re going to end up being a writer, it’s full of the joy of unrestrained creation, that heady rush of anything and everything being possible and being organised into a world made new.

Full-blown fantasy of any kind, of course, is hugely demanding – it won’t work if it’s just a big bag of impossibilities, but when I think of the writing that has gripped me and changed me, it’s the work of people unafraid to go absolutely anywhere and to make it home, both utterly strange and home. So thank you Kurt Vonnegut and thank you Richard McKenna, but also thank you Shakespeare and Llosa and Borges and Calvino and Sterne and Beckett and Kundera and Thomas McGuane and Robert Olmstead and all of the other writers who made fully living fictions. And thank you to Alasdair Gray – the genius behind Lanark, that wild blending of dirty realism, magic realism, admonitory vision, legend, social critique, opium dream and out-of-body experience.

Which sounds weird – but why not? If it works, why not? If it’s alive and necessary and beautiful and urgent, then why not?

Fictions that advocate Whovian qualities are thin on the ground, because goodness is hard to capture, hard to get right. All the more reason then to offer him to children, people at the start of life who might be able to make a better future for themselves, in place of the rather bleak-looking one that adults tend to produce.

As far as adults are concerned, yes, I wrote a Doctor Who book because, obviously, I’m a fan. But I was at the same time writing a novel for grownups and I wanted that to be fun, too. I wanted to remember the power and the clarity of pure story in children’s writing and – as I’ve said elsewhere – I usually read children’s fiction just before I attempt a new novel. I wondered if actually writing a kids’ book and having the feel of that while I was also at work on an adult novel might not aid my cause. Next year I’ll see if readers think it has. At the moment I’ll say that I had fun writing both books. I’d been ill for a long while, I’d been over-busy, over-tired, tied up with all manner of mid-life issues and it was great to get back to just writing, just believing in writing.

And, of course, it was good to remember that children aren’t the only ones out there who need – to paraphrase the late, great Gill Dennis – to be offered comfort in their solitude.

In a literary landscape of nervous agents and terrified publishers, where no risk can be taken and the next novel should be like the last novel that did well, or a mash-up of two that did quite well, or a version of a version of something that had solid sales in 2010 … literate sci-fi may be the only arena where the wild, suprising and wonderful can hide. I’m not saying that my little Doctor Who book is that. But I was aware of the sense of space around me while I wrote it – the feeling that I was standing up straight and breathing fresh air. It helped me sustain that feeling as I wrote my “serious” adult novel.

It’s sad that so much of the air has gone from literary endeavour, that academic theorising and categorising have come to decide which novels are acceptable and reviewed, that literary publishing has squashed itself into more and more predictable boxes more and more often. Storytelling, company, human solidarity – they never go away, but they do seem to be moving away from the mainstream. It will be the mainstream’s loss. Readers will always go where they can find the joy they knew in childhood, the joy they deserve.