Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The long association of intertwining Earth’s history and the fictional lives of the Doctor has always been a passion of many of the fans of the television series of Doctor Who. An abundance of rich and varied accounts, the grand moments, the seemingly small and possibly inconsequential, all are ripe for exploring, for adding the most important of human instincts and emotions to what the chronicles will teach us; to enthuse imagination to any possible recorded scene and to question the authority of those that wrote it.
The point of the historical meeting is to set up a fondness for a subject that some with ulterior motives will have dumbed-down, made in their minds unquestionable, in a similar vein to a Government’s view of seeing the Arts and its studies as nothing more than a hobby, a side-line interest which bears no reality to the world that needs ever more science in its grip. To study Art is akin, they will suggest, to praising the ethereal, that literature is a spent force, that learning from history is the new magic, it means nothing in the scheme of things.
It is of course smoke and mirrors, to study is to think and the only conjuring act that is to be avoided is that of political speak, that we must do everything in our power to combat deceit that sway us from finding the historical interesting and worth investigating.
It is to a history lesson in which Steve Cole brings the story of Combat Magicks to Jodie Whittaker’s incarnation of the Doctor, a story of kings and emperors in which many in the U.K. will be unaware of. The names will be vaguely familiar, the Roman general of Flavius Aetius and the looming presence of Attila the Hun but how British children are aware of the seismic battle fought at Catalaunian Plains, now located in north-eastern province of present day France, how this decisive, but bloody conflict saw the start of the end of two empires and the start of a darker history across Europe with scant understanding of what joins the era in which we live in.
Stuck between the two warring factions under the command of Aetius and the Mongol general, The Doctor and her three companions are separated, accused of being witches and dealers in magic potions and yet all the time a far greater insidious danger stalks the land of Gaul, one in which even The Doctor might find impossible to dispel from Earth.
Steve Cole’s contribution to the world of Doctor Who has always been incisive, entertaining, but one in which the Doctor’s life can be said to hang on a difficult precipice, between life and death, whether in the new adventures such as The Feast of the Damned and The Art of Destruction or in the collaboration with Paul Magrs in The Wormery. Such is the level of historical research that goes into this latest novel and expanded universe story, that it is perhaps a wonder that the story never once loses its fine balance and exploration of what brings the past to life.
A detailed tale involving the fear of magic and the art of warfare, a study opened up with the most enquiring of minds, Combat Magicks is a thrilling enchantment.
Ian D. Hall