The Burning

Where we left off, the 8th Doctor was stranded on Earth with a broken re-growing TARDIS and his memories thoroughly addled.  His only clue about his identity is a note that says “meet me at St. Louis'” on a certain date in 2001, signed by Fitz.  He remembers that he’s called The Doctor, and remembers that he was a traveler, and he seems to retain a good deal of scientific knowledge beyond the confines of 19th century Earth, but there’s no hint of his awareness to be an alien with a different biology.

And so The Burning is like a soft reboot for the 8th Doctor’s tenure; with his memory gone and the major story arcs of the first 36 books tied up, it’s like a fresh start for him and for the reader.

The Doctor doesn’t appear in this book until somewhere around page 45, and even then he sort of sneaks in quietly – present at a dinner before the reader knows it’s him.  Before then there are teases of if/when he appears.  A world traveler arrives in Middletown who is coy about his identity briefly seems to match the Doctor’s description, but then Lord Urton, who met him on the road, discovers the man’s name to be Roger Nepath.  The local Vicar is introduced, and his open-mindedness and keen interest in comparative religion and the sciences briefly makes him a potential Doctor, until he introduces himself as Matthew Stobbold.

As a Vicar named Matthew, myself, I couldn’t help but take a keen interest in the character of the Rev. Stobbold, and was very please with his development and survival throughout the book.  It’s a great example of a positive handling of religious characters, something that the sci-fi genre often struggles with.  Doctor Who has a very mixed history in this regard, so it’s always a delight to see such an important cultural feature (religion) treated with respect and not merely as a superstition for close-minded characters.

In line with how the Doctor has been developing throughout the novel range, he is very much a man of action in this book.  He is energetic, moving from place to place, breaking and entering, climbing and jumping, kicking foes into creeks, and just generally very physical.  By contrast, with his memory gone, the Doctor no longer seems to have other worlds and planets in mind, let alone the Time Lords and Faction Paradox.  He isn’t attached to the TARDIS as his home, though he does have an affinity for its remains – currently a shiny black cube.

The Plot

As Doctor Who stories go, this was actually a pretty simple and predictable tale.  The setup in the first two (of twenty) chapters was enough for me to correctly guess how it’ll end.  There is a sort of fire monster that lives underground near where a mine recently closed, there is a dry river bed and a new dam.  Obviously the solution will be to destroy the dam and flood the valley where the fire monster resides.  And that’s exactly how the book ends.

Despite that predictability, the build-up of dramatic tension throughout the story was still interesting, probably largely due to the fact that the nature of the fire monster, and its connection with Roger Nepath, is a mystery that does not give up its secrets readily.  The Doctor, Professor Dobbs, and the Rev. Stobbold spend over half of the novel researching, spying, and asking questions trying to get to the bottom of things.  The fire creature, an amalgamation of various fire deities and monsters from mythologies worldwide, turns out to be a large-scale villain that threatens the world, and the transformation of the valley into a volcanic caldera makes for some fantastic imagery that would have been expensive-but-awesome to see on screen.

Unsolved Mysteries

The nature of how the fire creatures takes over and replaces people was not always very clear to me, especially at the end of the book when one of the possessed/replaced people turns out to have survived, albeit maimed.  I mean, it was lovely to see at least one of the assumed-dead characters alive again in the final pages.  But it left me all the more puzzled as to what really happened to the people who were filled with (or surrounded with, or coated with?) liquid fire, or shape-memory rock, or whatever the material aspect of this creature actually is.

Another mystery, one that I suspect may find its counterparts in subsequent novels, is what happens roughly halfway through the book to the TARDIS.  At one point, the Doctor has a marble-sized ball of the strange material that can be molded but returns to its original shape like a rocky memory foam.  It’s sitting in his room, and suddenly erupts an impossible amount of lava seemingly to attack and destroy the Doctor, but instead is soaked up by his little TARDIS cube, which then grows to the size of the Police Box the reader is familiar with.  It also turns blue.  It had also, previously, led the Doctor to this place (before the story began) by heating up one face of its cube in the direction he should go.  So somehow the TARDIS was drawn to this fire creature, and somehow the fire creature helped the TARDIS grow and develop its exterior to a stage a lot closer to its normal form.  I can only assume that something like this is going to happen again through the next few books as the TARDIS continues to recover its original features.

The final summary

At last, this is a novel that I can recommend to the new reader.  As a soft reboot of the series, it’s an excellent place for a new reader to jump in.  Of course it’s nice to know why the Doctor is stranded on Earth and why the TARDIS is so damaged, but you don’t need to know all that.  Instead we can revel in the mystery, with the Doctor, and enjoy his process of rediscovery of self.

Also, after so many complicated story arcs weaving together, it’s nice to have a simpler story again, unencumbered by pre-established canon.