The Man Who Invented the Daleks (42 page)

The biggest change made in the novel, however, lies in the ending. Five years on from the advent of the plague, Abby has come to the conclusion that the British climate simply isn’t amenable to the level of subsistence farming required, let alone to building something more durable. So she proposes to the group that they relocate: ‘I want to cross into Europe and move down to the Mediterranean. Probably Italy.’ It’s an argument whose foundations had been laid by Greg some time earlier: ‘In this country we have only about six months when the ground is workable. In that time we have to grow enough to eat day by day, enough to set aside for a six-month winter. Provide winter feeding for our stock. Collect fuel. There’s no way it can be done.’ However daunting the prospect of such a move, the alternative of remaining, with the ever-present danger from Wormley’s NUF, proves too much for the survivors and, reluctantly, they agree to the undertaking. And so the community uproots itself and begins the long trek to the south coast, where they hope to find the means to cross to France.

There, just outside Dover, with most of the group having already sailed, Abby finally comes face-to-face with her long-lost son Peter, for whom she has spent so much time searching in the wake of the outbreak. And, before he realises who she is, he shoots her dead.

If it’s a somewhat melodramatic conclusion to the novel, as fanciful in its way as Garland’s appearance on a white charger, it is at least in tune with the sense of hopelessness and the haphazard violence that has punctuated the whole story. Abby’s journey began when she woke up from her bout of the disease to find her husband dead (a particularly severe shock in the screen version, since it meant the loss of the ever-likeable Peter Bowles), and death has stalked her ever since, an unpredictable interruption to life. Nation’s artistic vision was becoming increasingly dark, although – given his chosen medium of populist television – the bleakness manifests itself in a slightly different manner to that of much contemporary fiction.

There weren’t, for example, the moral ambiguities and confusions of John le Carré’s novels, where the well-intentioned find themselves corrupted by the actions demanded of them. Rather Nation’s work still presents an essentially black-and-white world where there is little confusion about who are the good guys and who the villains, even if the baddies are more subtly written than before. This is not a post-apocalyptic world in which society and community collapse altogether – as in Barry Hines’s television drama
Threads
(1984), where even language falls apart in the aftermath of a nuclear attack – for there is still an optimism about humanity and morality. But there is also an abandonment of any suggestion that virtue might bring its own reward. The senseless brutality and bloodshed were almost reminiscent of the new generation of horror writers led by James Herbert, author of the best-selling
The Rats
(1974),
The Fog
(1975) and
The Survivor
(1976), except that in Herbert’s novels it is always clear who the victims are going to be; characters appear, have their life histories sketched in and are dispatched within the space of a few pages. With Nation there is no such certainty who will survive. A hero is as likely to die suddenly as a villain, and Abby Grant’s death, just at the moment of escape to a better future, just when she has discovered that her son has survived against all the odds, is the most startling manifestation of the theme.

Rather less convincing is the way in which the departure for Europe feels as though it’s tagged on to the end. The whole episode is covered in barely thirty pages, and one can’t help thinking that it would have made for a more coherent narrative if the group had embarked upon the project earlier, if the trek towards sunnier climes had been explored at greater length. Or, indeed, if they had got further than merely crossing the Channel, which was, Nation explained in later interviews, how he’d wished the story to develop. ‘Really what I wanted was to have them go back to the valley of the Indus. They have to go across the English Channel to France, and then find some way across the Mediterranean, and this was on a gigantic scale which we could never do on television.’

He was right, of course, that it was entirely impractical for a television drama, but he spoke too about writing ‘the novel of the length I wanted to do’. And this certainly was within his control, though not perhaps within his powers, for a book on the epic scale he was suggesting was an undertaking of a very different nature to anything he’d ever written. What did emerge was a hybrid that didn’t convince as a novel in its own right, while being too far removed from the television storyline to satisfy many viewers. By sticking too closely for too long to the scripts he had already written, by staying with the objectivity of television rather than the subjectivity of prose fiction, Nation sacrificed the integrity of a novel that could have stood alone.

The book was published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (who were to have published
The Incredible Robert Baldick
) and in paperback by Futura, and sold well enough to merit a sequel, particularly in light of the television series being commissioned for a third season.
Survivors: Genesis of a Hero
emerged in 1977, though it had no involvement from Nation himself, and was written instead by John Eyers. Unable to use the continuing story from television, he starts at the point where Nation’s book left off, on the beach near Dover where Peter Grant has just shot his mother. The narrative then follows Peter as he rises through the ranks of the National Unity Force, before he falls foul of court politics and defects to a rival society in Wales. It’s an entertaining romp through post-industrial barbarism, but has nothing to do with the television series or with Nation’s conception. (Only one other book ever appeared under the name of John Eyers, a spin-off from the ITV series
Special Branch
titled
In at the Kill
, published in 1976, and it is generally accepted that it was a pseudonym.)

Nation’s awareness of his own limitations when it came to writing prose, however, needs to be balanced by the success of the only other novel he wrote.
Rebecca’s World
, published in his
annus mirabilis
of 1975 – when ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and the first season of
Survivors
also made their appearance – was a children’s book, named for his daughter, to whom, he announced, he was assigning all the royalties. It’s the tale of a small girl named Rebecca, who is accidentally transported via a transmitter beam to another planet, rather in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling down a rabbit-hole. The world on which she finds herself has four suns and a wide variety of wildlife, including Silkies (bat-like creatures that spin silk as they fly), Swardlewardles (who breathe out laughing gas to render their prey helpless) and Splinter Birds (who remove splinters from people). Sadly, however, there is little now for the latter to do, for this is a world in which all the trees have been chopped down in order to feed the vast furnaces making the glass out of which the buildings, and most other things besides, are constructed. This has had unfortunate consequences for the population, since it turns out that it was only the presence of the trees that kept at bay a tribe of evil, shapeless monsters called GHOSTS (the capitalisation is Nation’s own). Without the trees the GHOSTS can now prey on the people at will.

Rebecca soon acquires three companions: a deeply depressed man named Grisby, who has a Hancock-like obsession with his feet (they are, he insists, ‘the sorest pair of throbbers in the entire history of feet’), an unemployed spy named Kovak, who believes he’s a master of disguise, though he always remains instantly recognisable, and a would-be superhero named Captain ‘K’, whose only power comes from his possession of the last stick of wood on the planet that isn’t owned by the all-powerful Mr Glister. It was the Glister family who discovered how to make glass and who now control the whole planet. When the magical power of the trees became apparent, the Glisters had the last remaining specimens chopped down and the wood made into planks, from which were constructed GHOST shelters. Now, whenever the GHOSTS attack, the populace swarm into these shelters to hide, for which privilege they are charged by the grasping and wicked Mr Glister. ‘Nature has endowed me with all the finest qualities a man can have,’ he brags. ‘I am a splendid liar, a marvellous cheat and a magnificent bully. I have made myself rich by being vicious and cruel.’ There is, however, one small ray of hope. A map exists showing the location of one last tree, hidden deep in the Forbidden Lands, guarded by GHOSTS and accessible only by passing through a series of challenges and trials. And so Rebecca and her three new friends set out in the hope of saving the world.

Apart from the echoes of the Alice stories, there are also nods to
The Wizard of Oz
– a small girl and her three ill-assorted companions set off on a quest, albeit from a glass city rather than to an emerald one – and there is even a hint of the Daleks when the GHOSTS, believing that they have destroyed the last remaining tree, become hysterical in their demands that the people bow down before them. ‘We are the victors!’ they shriek. ‘The supreme power of this planet!’ And, of course, the theme of a world in which technology has triumphed over nature to the detriment of the inhabitants parallels much of Nation’s thinking in
Survivors.

The structure too is recognisably Nation. Ever since ‘The Daleks’, he had regularly used the device of his hero arriving on a planet in the midst of a story and having another character bring him up to speed on the history of the place. Even
Survivors
had started with the epidemic in full sway, with much of the background sketched in after the fact. The same is true here, as Rebecca’s new friends fill her in on how they got to this parlous position. Similarly the perils and predicaments that they face, as well as the plans they concoct to escape, are characteristic of his work, though, as so often, it is the villain who commands centre stage. Glister is a wonderfully evil creation, a monstrously caricatured capitalist who becomes self-indulgently maudlin when he thinks about the poor. ‘Call me silly and sentimental if you will,’ he tells Rebecca with a sob in his voice, ‘but one day I hope that everybody in this world will be penniless, hungry and in rags. With poverty on that scale I could love them all.’

The book was well received – ‘a pleasant, entertaining and imaginative tale for 8 to 12s’, thought the
Daily Express
– and in April 1976 it featured on the children’s story-telling series
Jackanory
on BBC television, read in five fifteen-minute episodes by Bernard Cribbins, who had a decade earlier battled the Daleks in the second Peter Cushing movie. It ran to more than a dozen printings and attracted a great many enthusiastic readers, both among children and teachers, the latter finding that it lent itself admirably to being read aloud to a class. Perhaps it was appropriate that the best prose writing of a man who worked almost exclusively in television was more suited to oral delivery than it was to solitary reading. ‘I’d been reading children’s stories to my daughter and to my son, and I get really very bored with some of them,’ he explained. ‘And I wanted a book that was going to please the adult who read aloud and please the child who was listening to it.’ In common with much of Nation’s work, it continued to find new audiences after his death, being released in 2010 as an audio CD, read by Paul Darrow, while early editions became highly sought after collectors’ items, partly in tribute to the beautiful illustrations by Larry Learmouth.

But if 1975 was mostly a series of triumphs for Nation, he didn’t exactly end the year in style. November saw the broadcast of ‘The Android Invasion’, his first non-Dalek story for
Doctor Who
in over a decade, and perhaps his least celebrated of all. Its low critical standing is perhaps a little unfair, for it starts tremendously well, with the TARDIS landing on what is assumed to be Earth (‘Oak trees don’t grow anywhere else in the galaxy,’ reasons the Doctor), just outside a picture-postcard village that Sarah Jane Smith recognises as Devesham. Almost immediately the travellers find themselves in an altercation with men who wear white isolation suits and helmets and who shoot with their fingers; they also witness a soldier running off a cliff to his certain death for no apparent reason. Escaping their pursuers, the Doctor and Sarah make their way into the village, only to find it entirely deserted, until a flatbed truck arrives, from which disembark dozens of villagers who behave as though they have been brainwashed. The Doctor goes off to investigate at the nearby Space Defence Centre, leaving Sarah in the local pub, where unfortunately she is discovered – by the very soldier they had earlier seen killing himself. Nor is the Centre immune to the strangeness.

It’s a great first episode, the image of the abandoned English village reminiscent of an episode of
The Avengers
or, more particularly, one of the best
Department S
stories, Donald James’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hambledown’. To confirm the impression, the Doctor comments that it’s all a bit like the
Mary Celeste
, the original reference point for
Department S.
And while the title of the story, ‘The Android Invasion’, seems to give the game away, there are other details to suggest this might not be simply a reprise of the 1956 movie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
; most puzzling of all, it appears that every coin in the vicinity is from the same year. As the story progresses, it turns out that they aren’t actually on Earth at all, but on Oseidon, a planet occupied by a race of rhinoceros-looking aliens named the Kraals, who are planning to invade Earth to escape the rising radiation levels at home, and have built this replica village for the purpose of a training exercise. The invasion of the androids has not yet happened, and it can still be prevented if only the Doctor and Sarah can get back to Earth in time to deliver a warning, a process made more difficult by the fact that they have temporarily lost the TARDIS.