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Worthy entry in Dr Who world
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A.L. Kennedy, the feted British writer of high-end literary fiction, knew she was reaching a different audience when websites such as Nerdist.com started praising her depiction of Dr Who.
The Scottish author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Costa Book Award winner, has just switched dimensions into sci-fi by publishing “The Drosten’s Curse,” her first novel starring the face-changing time lord first made famous on BBC TV.
“I’ve always loved the Who world, although not obsessively, and it seemed a fun thing to do. I’d been asking for ages and they finally let me,” she said.
The novel makes her a fully fledged member of the Dr Who universe — a phenomenon that started as a British children’s TV series in the 1960s and, boosted by a revamp 10 years ago and a dedicated fan base, has spread to win audiences on BBC America and beyond.
Kennedy’s past grown-up novels such as “Day” — which delves into the psyche of a World War II veteran — are all page-turners but also challenge readers with their narrative complexity.
“The Drosten’s Curse” kicks off with the sentence: “Paul Harris was dying” and charges on with the Doctor and his helpers confronting a carnivorous golf bunker which turns out to be a mind-bending monster “at the edge of reality’s nightmares.”
“In literary fiction you’re ideally going through a process that produces prose that’s as crafted as poetry, but also pushing ahead a plot and characters — that’s the toughest gig you can have as a writer,” Kennedy said.
“In genre fiction, you’re serving a kind of brand, certainly in this case, and you’re reining in some of the prose because it would get in the way of the forward motion. It’s a different kind of story and you’re using a different part of your voice.”
Her Dr Who is clearly based on actor Tom Baker’s TV portrayal of the time-traveling alien through the 1970s, complete with scarf, jelly babies and manic, toothy grin.
“The invention of sci-fi is exhilarating because that isn’t a part of literary fiction so much,” said Kennedy, now based in London. “You can’t usually alter the real world that much, unless you’re writing magic realism, which I don’t generally.”
The book has drawn praise from both the Who-verse — “10/10” Blogtor Who — and her usual reviewers, with The Independent newspaper calling it “giddying and adventurous”.
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