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APRIL 2010

Third in this first batch of eleventh Doctor novels is Brian Minchin’s The Forgotten Army, which comes sporting a very fetching cover featuring a rampaging mammoth. I’m always a sucker for a prehistoric beastie, so the fact that a mammoth - albeit a highly atypical one - features heavily in this story means that I’m bound to enjoy it. The set-up, with the Doctor and Amy arriving in New York just in time to get involved with the events at the city’s Natural History Museum. Poor palaeontologist Sam has to deal with his new woolly exhibit coming to life and storming through the museum’s halls. It’s action-packed from the get-go, and it isn’t long before the Doctor is winding up the NYPD and riding on the back of the Pleistocene pachyderm.

Needless to say, the revivication of an extinct animal is only part of a much wider plot. It soon becomes clear that the entire strange chain of events witnessed here is part of a massive plot to invade the Earth by aliens called the Vykoids, who are intent on enslaving as many humans as they can capture and shipping them off to their asteroidal dung mines. Sadly, once the main thrust of the plot gets going, things rather fall apart; the Vykoids are simply far to feeble an enemy to get worked up about. Only about an inch high, looking like angry little troll dolls, they are far to ridiculous to ever feel threatening. Their leader is called Erik, for heaven’s sake - surely the most unthreatening sounding name for a military leader other than Kenneth.

Fair enough, this adventure is written in a comedic style, but a sense of threat is vital if this kind of story is going to work. The Vykoids refuse to kill even a single person, lest a valuable slave be wasted. Even their use of clever temporal technology is wasted; rather than using their super-speed to gain any true advantage, they spend most of their time using it to play practical jokes. The comedy needs to work alongside the plot, not in place of it. In any case, even in a children’s book, which this very much is, the comedy needs to be funny. Aside from a great line that describes the Vykoid leader as resembling Wayne Rooney, I can’t remember any parts that actually made me laugh, regardless of how many mammoth farts were thrown in.

Minchin’s grasp of the characters is fine, and Amy in particular gets plenty to do, especially while the Doctor is captive and she joins forces with a well-meaning but ineffectual cop. Sadly, the fine action-packed opening, the well-drawn if simplistic characters and the mighty mammoth go pretty much wasted in a rather throwaway read.