(urth) The Daleks of Saltimbanque Street

[Craig Brewer]

Awesome, sir.




----- Original Message ----
From: Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Sun, January 9, 2011 10:52:49 AM
Subject: (urth) The Daleks of Saltimbanque Street


Gene Wolfe's tripartite novel, _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, has excited and 
exasperated all those who have tried to interpret it in the thirty years since 
it was written.  The mystery is at last resolved!  Wolfe, in his inimitable 
style, has cunningly reflected stories and themes from the popular BBC serial, 
Doctor Who.

The central character is presented obliquely.  We learn of a Doctor (of 
anthropology, the study of humankind) about whom the central issue is a question 
of identity.  Cleverly, Wolfe has created a literal Doctor Who, without once 
mentioning the name.  (In case some readers missed the clues, Wolfe later 
matches him with a young - though male -companion, and makes it clear that he 
has recently undergone a regeneration.)

Less obscure are the identities of characters in the house at 666 Saltimbanque 
Street, where our story commences.  The house is presided over by Maitre, whose 
frenchified name does little to hide his identity as Doctor Who's arch-enemy, 
renegade timelord The Master.  His character is soon eastablished as he rants 
about his "failure to rule even this miserable colony planet" - as always, the 
Master intends to rule the entire Universe.

Other characters we meet here are Number Five, a clone of the Master, and Mr. 
Million, also apparently a clone of the Master, but encapsulated in a sort of 
mobile mechanical casing.  Mr. Million is obviously a Dalek, or a prototype of 
one.  But what are we to make of the numbers?  The most obvious explanation is 
that Mr. Million represents one of the countless Dalek footsoldiers who will 
soon emerge to conquer the universe, whereas Number Five is being groomed for a 
position of authority.  Already, though, the Master drugs and torments Number 
Five nightly, beginning the process of transforming him from a seemingly normal 
human being into one of the insane hate-filled creatures that animates the shell 
of every Dalek, even the golden-shelled ruling class.

Another person here is David, a transparent soubriquet for a young clone of 
Davros, creator of the Daleks in the original series.  Although seemingly on an 
equal footing with Number Five, David/Davros is not experimented on by the 
Master to anything like the same degree.  Wolfe does not elaborate on this 
aspect of the plot, but it's clear that the Master and Davros have teamed up to 
create an army of world-ravaging Daleks.  Who will stop them?

Enter the Doctor, who arrives one night at Saltimbanque Street and is let in by 
Number Five.  Five is suspicious of him, but the Doctor ably deflects his prying 
questions, and asks instead to speak to the person he has come to see, 'Aunt 
Jeannine', otherwise known as anthropologist Aubrey Veil. Jeannine is an early 
victim of the Master's experiments - she has been fitted with a prototype Dalek 
drive which allows her to glide around the house well enough, but renders her 
crippled outside.  Unbowed by this horrible fate, she has hit upon the ruse of 
anthropological discussions to contrive an excuse for the Doctor to enter the 
Master's domain.  Number Five is sent away while the Doctor and Jeannine discuss 
how to stop the Master's dastardly plans.

In the end, it is Number Five whom the Doctor and Jeannine use to foil the 
Master.  As a Master clone, Five is already naturally primed to demand supreme 
power for himself at any cost, and the Doctor and Jeannine cleverly exploit 
this.  Number Five is already motivated by ambition and resentment of the 
Master's experiments.  When Jeannine tells him of the Master's hidden wealth, 
his emotions boil over and he resolves to kill the Master.  The Master realises 
he ihis becoming a threat, and (ironically) calls in the Doctor, who he believes 
to be an ordinary anthropologist, to reason with him.

In the climax, the Doctor - who abhors killing - does indeed try to reason with 
both Number Five and the Master.  But it is too late.  Number Five sends him 
away and murders the Master, he is then arrested by the police. The threat to 
the universe is resolved.  Aunt Jeannine lives on at 666 Saltimbanque St., 
keeping Dalek prototype Mr. Million as a servant.  [Of course, the Master never 
truly dies - at the end, Number Five is back preparing new plots for future 
episodes.]

We have come to the end of the first and original novella, of which the complete 
novel is an expansion.  As a Doctor Who story, it is also by far the most 
standard in construction.  In the third novella, VRT, Wolfe plays with the 
concept, combining two typical Whovian tropes and, in a bow to the episodic 
nature of the original series, ending in a cliffhanger rather than a firm 
conclusion [VRT probably stands for Vestibular Rehabilitation Therapy, an 
acronym for medical treatments intended to restore balance].

In VRT, we alternate between present and past on the twin planets.  In the 
present, the Doctor is immured in a sinister prison controlled by the brutal 
police force of Sainte Croix.  It is suggested that he is under suspicion for 
the murder of the Master in the first episode - yet we know that Number Five has 
already been sentenced.  An alternate timeline, perhaps?  There are hints that 
all is not as it seems - the three 'brothers' who arrest him, one of whom has 
apparently had a brain operation... Cybermen?  It is unclear just which enemies 
the Doctor is facing.  Perhaps Wolfe has purposely created ambiguity here in 
order to point to the recurring tropes of the series, in which the Doctor is 
forever imprisoned and escaping, forever battling enemies whose nature is 
recurrent though different in detail.  We are introduced to Celestine, whom we 
are given to understand will somehow escape with him and become his Companion 
for the next series, but little in the way of detail plot is provided.

The rest of VRT is a similarly oblique and incomplete tale, in which the Doctor 
appears on Sainte Anne, claiming to have travelled by starcrosser from Earth (a 
likely story!).  He adopts a young male companion - and as with Celestine 
Etienne, Wolfe does not shy away from the notion of sexual attraction, 
heterosexual or otherwise, between the Doctor and Companion, something which the 
BBC has shied away from until the recent reboot.  Like the BBC, however, Wolfe 
is never explicit on this aspect, which would be disruptive to the main Whovian 
themes if placed too muych in the foreground. With his companion, the Doctor 
explores the wilderness of Sainte Anne. There is some disaster - as in the 
'present' sequences of VRT, we are never shown what.  The Companion dies and the 
Doctor regenerates.  And this very regeneration feeds back into the central 
myster of Who's identity (if any) and is the reason he is imprisoned in the 
'present' sequencves of VRT.  The 'past' sequences have no middle but an ending, 
the present sequences have no ending but are all middle.  Indeed, in VRT Wolfe 
has presented an intriguing confection which riffs on the instability of Story 
when time travel is in play, viewed from the perspective of a central character 
who is an immortal shapechanging alien who cannot die (one student of Wolfe has 
observed that this is a central theme of much of his work).

What are we to make of the second novella, though?  Neither Doctor Who not the 
Master appear here, though apparently it is a story (or legend) of the past of 
Sainte Anne, as told by the Doctor.

We must remember the genesis of _Fifth Head_.  Wolfe originally wrote the first, 
and most simply constructed novella, as a tribute to the BBC serial. Then his 
editor asked him to expand it to novel length.  Wolfe obliged, and the third 
novella, VRT, moves on from standard plots into an extended meditation on themes 
of time and identity.  But still we have rather a short novel.  Wolfe resorts to 
a technique he has used repeatedly elsewhere, which if used by a lesser author 
we might call 'padding'.  He includes a story, as usual a dreamlike legend of 
earlier times, whose direct connection with the plot is obscure, but which 
touches lightly on themes in the surrounding novel.  Often such stories are 
included by means of a storytelling contest, or an ancient book read by one of 
the characters - here Wolfe has the Doctor tell the story, perhaps describing a 
time when he visited pre-discovery Sainte Anne in his Tardis.  Themes of cloned 
twins amd other concepts found in the other novellas are prominent.  In VRT we 
see hints that some of the characters live on after the colonisation of Sainte 
Anne, but they seem to have no more direct connection with the characters of the 
other novellas than do Fish and Frog in the legents incorporated in Book of the 
New Sun.

All in all, _Fifth Head_ is quintessential Wolfe, taking tropes from the pulp 
fiction or media of the day but putting them to novel use.  Even now that the 
puzzles which have perplexed so many are solved once and for all, I am sure it 
will continue to be the subject of intense discussion, as new aspects of the 
Doctor are teased out from its complex and intertwined stories.

- Gerry Quinn




_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net