The Last Dodo

This is my first Tenth Doctor/Martha book, and I’m the first one to have checked it out of the Swansea Public Library! Have I said I want to be Jacqueline Rayner when I grow up? I wouldn’t mind being Helen Raynor either, but definitely one of them. Although I think I preferred The Stone Rose, this proves she can write any Doctor and any companion really well. I missed the plot complexity of The Stone Rose, but the conceit of this book was really fun.

I have a slight problem with the point of view in the book, simply because it goes against everything I was ever taught in creative writing! There are three points of view, Martha’s, an “objective” third person, and a dodo’s. Yes, a dodo’s. Actually, I’ve no problem with the dodo, as it’s a good way to open and close the book (if it had been used more extensively I might have found it limiting). Nor do I have a problem with Martha’s point of view; in fact, Rayner writes Martha really well, even better, in my humble opinion, than she wrote Rose. (Actually, for some reason, Martha tells us, he [the Doctor] keeps trying to feed me chips . . .) The problem is that I wish she had stuck to either Martha or the objective POV, because it kind of smacks of laziness or amateurism to switch between the two.

I’m impressed with the relationship between Martha and the Doctor as represented here, as it’s not too mushy-gooshy but Rayner really captures the fondness that’s already grown between them. Martha begins the book by describing the Doctor as a really good friend, someone she has tons of laughs with. And while Rayner writes the Tenth Doctor’s bounciness quite convincingly, he seems rather mournful throughout most of the book. Shades of the Ninth Doctor, really. When Martha asks him to take her to the zoo, The Doctor sighed and drew in a deep breath. ‘OK. It . . . hurts. The thought of anything being caged hurts me.’ And while this could easily go under the Hurt/Comfort category on A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, it does ring true. As does the Doctor’s more noble moments, such as The Doctor grabbed her hands in his. ‘Martha! No, no, no! Hate what some of them do, hate some individuals if you must, hate intolerance and injustice and slaughter and man’s inhumanity to man but never, never hate people.’

I wonder, if pressed, Rayner would be able to say she doesn’t have the slightest crush on the Tenth Doctor. ‘Cause it seems to me she does. (Takes one to know one, I guess.) Look how (potentially) wickedly the Doctor offers to be frisked! ‘ . . . And if you’re still not convinced, and if you ask nicely, you can even pat down the sides of my legs to check there’s not a rhinoceros sewn into the turn ups of my trousers.’ Later Martha notices that he smells of peaches and patchouli, which just seems a weird observation to make! Still, it could just be some of the oddball humor that crops up in this book, culminating in a laugh-out-loud scene with Martha running from dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers pushing a shopping trolley with a dodo named Dorothea in it! (I drew a picture of this improbable scene.) Also, when asked what the acronym MOTLO stands for, Martha suggests, ‘My Odd Theoretical Love Outlet?’ [Hence the web address for this blog.]

In point of fact, it stands for Museum of the Lost Ones, which is a museum set up a bit further in our future which preserves the last of every species in Perspex boxes on an entire planet. Of course, the Doctor and Martha spend most of their time in the Earth section (and the Doctor almost gets trapped there, as the last of the Time Lords). The concept is that people from the museum are employed to find out when each last example of a species is dying out and go whisk it away for a living death (which naturally fills the Doctor with horror). Of course, they don’t have time travel but the museum has existed for a long time so it’s got all our extinct species, from dinosaurs onward (including creatures Rayner at least thinks will be extinct in the next forty years or so).

Specimens have gone missing, and it’s up to the Doctor and Martha to find out not only where they’ve gone, but to unravel the madness of the museum’s owner (revealing quite a few twists worthy of The Resurrection Casket), the illicit trade in furs and horns, and then all hell breaks loose with bombs disguised as dodo eggs, and the aforementioned prehistoric creatures running around causing havoc. To be quite honest, I got a little confused toward the end, which might have been due to the fact I was trying to watch TV at the same time. The secondary characters are surprisingly flat (even though one is an android) but serve their purposes; in fact, Dorothea the dodo is less annoying than Frank, one of the villains.

Still, what makes the book enjoyable rests entirely on the conceit. I bet a lot of kids wishing they had time machines would go back to see animals like dinosaurs when they actually existed; the book is something of an extension of that. It resonates quite a lot with me because one of the highlights of my stay in Paris in April 2005 was the Natural History Museum and its hall of extinct animals. It did have a dodo, albeit a sculpted one, but more interestingly it had one of the last Tasmanian tigers that lived. Maybe I’m morbid for having been so fascinated by this hall of long-dead creatures (the oldest specimen was, I think, a quagga from the 1790s). So the setting is inspired, but so too is the fact Martha has gotten from the Doctor an I-Spyder book that gives her points for every “Earth” creature she sees, making it fun sort of game throughout the book (and no guesses for how many points the Doctor gets in the litany!).

There is, of course, a serious side to all of this—extinction is happening around us all the time, most of which we aren’t aware. Would it be ethically acceptable to preserve the last of everything in a museum of this sort? Or try to save two to start breeding them, or cloning them? Rayner is pretty diffuse on this point, but the Doctor does have this to say: ‘Being apart from your own kind forever—that’s quite a burden to bear, you know. . . . However much you’re loved.’