Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [138]
The Great Gates of the Past or Future, under which the future slides or the past emerges, depending on which side you're standing, first featured in Time's Crucible. Plot dynamics so far prevent me from revealing who the woman in brown and the old harpy with an eypatch actually are.
Chapter 4
So here we are at last in the House of Lungbarrow. Many people have compared the House to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and I'd be the last person to deny any influence there. I love Peake's work very much, not just the Titus Groan trilogy, but the charming and quirky Mr Pye and a lot of Peake's poems and his illustrations.
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Both Houses are huge edifices that ramble for miles, as much characters in their stories as any of their inhabitants. Both Houses are prisons. But there are big differences too. Gormenghast is essentially a dead place, whose denizens perpetuate its endless rituals as if they might cease to exist if they stopped. But Lungbarrow is alive and an active participant in events. It's possessive of its inhabitants. It suffers from family pride in extremis. It has a violent temper and wil sulk for centuries on end. To walk along its passages is truly to walk on egg shells.
In the early days of working on Lungbarrow - the script, I put a note on the latest draft I was sending to Andrew Cartmel: "The furniture is getting increasingly predatory." Followed by the direction "The Drudges are herding tables into the Great Hall." I doubt the scene later on where the Doctor "surfs" on a runaway table could ever have been realised properly in studio, but that was the start of the House's character evolution. And the book allowed me to give full range to that. There are certainly elements of Beauty And The Beast here - not just the Disney version, but the ravishing Cocteau film before it.
As to the family? Well, families get everywhere. Not just the inevitable Groans and their retainers, but equally Robert Graves' Claudian family poisoning and politicking their way through Roman history; the completely batty Starkadder family from Stella Gibbons' gloriously funny Cold Comfort Farm - forget the softened up tv version, read the original. Even The Archers. Al soaps are filled with slightly crazy families, but any family would go mad if they had to live in the circumstances inflicted on the Lungbarrovians. Worse than Albert Square. You don't have to be mad to live in a soap opera, but it helps! One of the points of the book is: how could any family cope if the Doctor was a close relative?
Most Lungbarrovians cope by playing games, but over the years, decades, centuries, the games have got progressively more bizarre and deadly. You're given thirteen lives to start with... But in Lungbarrow, what else is there to do except be beastly to each other?
Cousins so far:
Cousin Arkhew, is a rather put upon little chap; the gul ible one who always gets the short straw when it comes to dirty jobs.
Cousin Owis is a bit of a sad Billy Bunter - not very nice, certainly quite dim. But extremely significant.
Cousin Glospin, the Doctor's arch-rival. In a surprising family trait, the "young" Glospin seems to bear more than a passing Byronic resemblance to Paul McGann.
Cousin Innocet, the House's moral minority, still possesses a remnant of the old Gallifreyan telepathy. In the Old Time, women were taller than the men and Innocet is tall and proud like her forebears. It's likely that the very tall body that Romana tries on before regenerating into Lalla Ward, is another throwback to the tal seer women of the Old Time - well, it could be! Innocet's long, long hair may have roots (ha!) in Rapunzel or Maeterlinck's Melisande or the braided Bride in the Stravinsky/Nijinska bal et Les Noces, but its weighty symbolism is entirely different and nothing to do with the loss of innocence. One day, Innocet will be Lungbarrow's Housekeeper, until then she keeps her journal and builds houses out of