The Man in the Velvet Mask

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Dodo to a twisted version of post-revolutionary France where the Revolution never ended and terror is everywhere. The Doctor is falling ill and having trouble concentrating, and Dodo falls in with a troupe of travelling players who draft her into service in an unsavoury role. The Doctor becomes a prisoner of the Bastille and meets the mysterious Le 6, the longest imprisoned man in France, while the Marquis de Sade and his adopted son Minski rule. But there's still another layer to what is going on; the Doctor knows that history has been tampered with but even he does not realize the extent of the events in France.

I have to confess that the first time I read this in 1996 and here I am 20 years later plunging back into it with only vague memories and impressions of the text. It was like reading it again for the first time and it was so tremendously enjoyable to do so; The Man in the Velvet Mask is an absolute joy. The atmosphere of fear in the twisted version of Paris is palpable in the novel; one can never imagine the sun every rising on this place with all the sinister goings on. The Marquis de Sade has a well earned reputation in history for his writings and views on extreme liberal sexuality, but coming with that is a sense of depravity which infects the city of Paris as a whole. Sade himself is not entirely to blame for what is going on, though; his son, Minski, is the real twisted devil of the novel, callously experimenting on people as if they were just objects, although to his mind they are there just to serve him.

Rampant sexuality spills over from the Bastille to the city outside where the players are routinely getting it on together (their carry-on is much akin to that of the players in Moulin Rouge some years later) in the name of their art, immersing themselves in their roles to such an extent that they do not even go by their real names. Dodo becomes one of them to replace the missing character Sophie, and attracts the attention of one who beds her repeatedly. This has to be one of the more shocking things about this book - the sheer amount of sex that is thrown into  the narrative. There was intent for this range of novels to evoke the feel of the era in which it is placed but this one is way out in left field when read right after hearing a classic episode on audio. The new series on TV has all sorts of innuendos and tee hee moments to get fanboys and girls all a-giggle but this is just a few adjectives shy of soft porn, at least by Doctor Who standards. Dodo is a bit of an unlikely choice to plunge into this realm, but then again we don't really know her very well as most of her short screen time has been lost who is to say this is not the real her? Is all the cheerful perky teenager-ness just a show? Maybe - she confesses that she is not handling the travels with the Doctor very well, so there is more going on than just being glib; she already admits that she is something of a player already having been raised by an aunt and having to adopt a different accent to impress people. In Mask she even drops into something of a deep funk, some of it from remembering how her simple case of the common cold nearly wiped out humanity in The Ark. If she's been putting up a front for so many years already who is to say that she doesn't have a breaking point. And if Dodo was so horny all the time why did she never make a play for Steven while he was still around? It's a bit of a contrast to how when she was forcibly confined by an alien in Salvation she reacted in panic when he tried to seduce her, but then again she's been with the Doctor a bit and the travels may have affected her.

If the Doctor cottons on to Dodo's slutty affairs he doesn't let on - he's got bigger things on his plate, and that's outside of what's going on in Paris. If it were anyone else you would think they were dying; senility gnawing away at perception, memory failing, body failing (even enduring a heart attack), but anyone even slightly familiar with the series knows what's coming: the Doctor is nearing the end of his first life. There have been hints and clues up til now in some of the expanded universe novels, but as far as the televised series went there was no notion of story arcs and foreshadowing back then, so he did not start to exhibit signs until the actual episode where he does regenerate. I like to think that the events in The Savages may have contributed to the Doctor's state in this novel, having been fed upon by the machines of the Elders and left almost a vegetable. It is unlikely, though, that it was actually planned to be a catalyst for the Doctor to regenerate, so I'll just think of it as a nifty coincidence.

So I liked it. I remember back in 1996 when I would speak to other fans about the novels there would usually be noses turned up at the mention of titles I happened to enjoy for the extreme departures they took from the mood of the series. My take on that kind of thing is simple: daily life doesn't always go on at the same pace or in the same mood; extreme things can happen and people can do extreme things in response. The odd blip in the tone of the series is not a bad thing, it's good to experiment and take the TARDIS crew into those dangerous places that are not just planets or Dalek bases.

But there were other tales with Dodo that were not told, not until Steven started looking back upon his days before he left the TARDIS...

NEXT EPISODE: MOTHER RUSSIA