The Professor in Erin, by L. McManus – alternative history where the Irish side won the Battle of Kinsale in 1602, and in 1914 Ireland is a proudly independent European state
My favourites of these are the two autobiographical books about Belfast, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane (which you can get here) and Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty (which you can get here). A Brilliant Void, edited by Jack Fennell, is very interesting on an underexplored part of Irish culture (and you can get it here).
He turned from the window on hearing a knock at the door. MacFirbis came in. Had the Herr Professor passed a good night, he asked in German; was he well? And the Professor, declining to speak his own language, answered in Irish that he had slept soundly and felt in good health.
I was inspired to seek this out by reading Jack Fennell’s anthology, A Brilliant Void. Originally serialised in Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin newspaper before the First World War, and then published by M.H. Gill in 1918, it’s the story of a German professor of the Irish language, who is visiting Dungannon, Co Tyrone, falls and hits his head, and awakens in a parallel universe where the Irish side won the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Ireland has subsequently developed as a civilised and powerful state, proud of its Gaelic heritage, ruled as a constitutional monarchy by the High King in a rebuilt Tara and with the provinces ruled by junior monarchs.
Our hero has a series of increasingly treacherous adventures, being mistaken for a German spy (including by the German ambassador) and becoming involved with romantic dynastic conspiracy between the different clans of historians, as well as a spot of guerrilla gardening. He also has no idea what has happened to him, and is very confused by the absence of any familiar Irish landmarks constructed after 1601. This is all very amusing and really quite fun.
The geography in the book is somewhat confused – starting from Dungannon, we are told that it’s only 30 miles to Westport in Mayo (in fact it’s more like 150 miles, 240 km) and the route that is taken from Dungannon to Tara and Dublin doesn’t make much sense. Possibly the author decided at a very late stage to make the location of the story Dungannon, the ancient capital of Ulster, rather than Rathcroghan, the ancient capital of Connacht; though even that is 60 miles / 95 km from Westport. It’s odd; as a Mayo woman herself she must have known the geography well.
The first 22 chapters are online here, and I calculate that that takes us roughly 80% of the way through the book. Unfortunately I have not been able to find the last 20% online anywhere, and paper copies of the one and only edition published in 1918 are selling for vast amounts online, so I will have to remain in suspense about the ending until I find it in a decent Irish reference library. Though it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen; there will be a rousing climax and then the protagonist will return to our timeline – the author says as much in the introduction.
McManus died in 1944 (at the age of 91) so A Professor in Erin has long been in the public domain; some enterprising publisher – perhaps even Gill Books, who brought it out in the first place 106 years ago, and are still going strong – could probably profitably revive it.
When I first watched the two-part ending of the second Jodie Whittaker season, I wrote:
I was tremendously excited by one aspect of the first episode – no single minute of TV Doctor Who had ever previously been set in Ireland, as I have previously written. Of course, with the revelation of the second part, it turns out that there is still no moment of Doctor Who set in the “real” Ireland, is the one that exists in the same universe as the Doctor and the Tardis rather than just being in the Doctor’s imagination. Again, as someone who saw The Brain of Morbius first time round, I’m not unhappy with the disruption of what a lot of people thought was established continuity.
Rewatching it, I felt that there was a bit too much telling and not enough action. If the real point of the story is the true nature of the Doctor, why are we worrying about the Cybermen? (Except that they are obviously a Bad Thing.) But again, I enjoyed the Irish sections in the first episode, and the revelation of the Doctor’s origins in the second.
Ryan Bradley’s Black Archive on the story is longer than usual, but has only three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, so that’s a bit of a variation on the usual format. In the introduction, ‘Everything You Know is About to Change’, he sets out his stall: he believes that Chibnall’s agenda as show-runner always was to have the Doctor experience the ‘ego-death’ of psychedelia, and that the story considered here draws heavily on the story of the (real-life) CIA’sa MK-Ultra brianwashing project. These are strong claims.
But in the first chapter, ‘The Harp That Once’, he diverts from those issues to one that is very close to my own heart: the question of how Doctor Who treats Ireland, and especially how Ireland is treated in this episode. I have written myself (at length here in 2018, abbreviated and updated here in 2019 a few months before Ascension of the Cybermen was broadcast) about Ireland in the show. Before getting into Bradley’s analysis, I’ll recapitulate my own: I believe that TV Who doesn’t go to Ireland for much the same reason as it doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or to other historical atrocities: these are topics too controversial for a family show.
Chibnall did nibble at the edges here, with Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, but I would argue that these are different cases – Rosa Parks’ heroism is not remotely controversial these days, and the worst aspects of the 1947 Partition are somewhat sanitised by telling it as the story of one rural family, rather than the urban massacres. It’s also worth noting that Chibnall never returned to that semi-historical format after his first season: The Haunting of Villa Diodati is not presented as historical fact, let alone Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or War of the Sontarans.
There are more, but still not many, references to Ireland in spinoff novels and comics, and they are generally unsatisfactory – note especially the First Doctor era villain Questor.
Audio is a different matter. There are no less than six Big Finish plays and a BBC Audio Original which are entirely set in Ireland. These go to places where I don’t think TV Who could go – Cromwell’s atrocities; the Famine. Of course, for audio it’s very easy to portray an Irish setting by simply hiring actors with the right accent; TV has to try much harder with the locations (and even here, the relevant bits of Ascension of the Cybermen are filmed in Wales, but indicated as Ireland by diddly-dee music).
Ryan Bradley, like me, is from Northern Ireland, and in this first chapter he explores the conception of Ireland in British culture and in Doctor Who. He points out that Ashad the semi-Cyberman is actually played by a Northern Irish actor, Patrick O’Kane, and draws a parallel between Ashad’s half-transformed nature and Ulster Unionism, or indeed Northern Ireland itself, constructed political concepts which have outlived their original purpose. Ko Sharmus in this story is also played by an Ulsterman, Ian McElhinney.
He goes on to look at some of the previous mentions of Ireland in Old Who, including the Gallifrey joke, and makes the point (which I had missed) that in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Terror of the Autons, Harry Towb’s Northern Irish character McDermott is transformed into a ‘stocky Northcountryman’. He misses a few other examples: Casey in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the less obvious case of Clark in The Sea Devils, and the fairly major characters of McGillop in Day of the Doctor, Morgan Blue in Into the Dalek and Angstrom in The Ghost Monument. (I’ll forgive him Bel in Flux, as it post-dates 2020.)
He then looks at law enforcement, especially the dubious aspects of the history of the Garda Síochána in Ireland (more briefly also the RUC), and at Chibnall’s previous depictions of (British) law enforcement in Broadchurch and Born and Bred. To my surprise my great-great-uncle is mentioned – not one of my Irish family connections (and my great-great-grandfather James Stewart actually was an Irish policeman), but the former US Attorney-General, George W. Wickersham, who chaired the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in 1929-31. His report is mainly remembered as giving the Hoover administration a ladder to climb down from Prohibition, but it made many interesting findings on police brutality and corruption as well.
But, perhaps because of his concentration on the Gardaí (and to a much lesser extent the RUC), Bradley misses what is surely the most spectacular portrayal of Irish law enforcement in science fiction and fantasy: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which also features human beings turning into machines. (Well, bicycles anyway.) The Third Policeman himself is clearly in the old RIC rather than a Garda, and the novel is set firmly in the Irish Midlands rather than on the coast, but I’d have thought it worth a mention.
[Edited to add: The author himself got in touch to tell me that references to Frankenstein and The Third Policeman were cut from his draft for reasons of space.]
Having said all that, the chapter is very rich in detail and references, and while there are some things that I would have liked to see included, there are others that were new to me, and I found it all very thought-provoking. I don’t think I have ever before written 800 words on a single chapter of a Black Archive (or indeed of any other book).
The second chapter, ‘Any Idiot Can Make Themselves Into a Robot’, starts by looking at Ashad in the context of Bradley’s overall themes of loss of self and hybridization, and briefly notes poor old Lisa in the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman, before moving on to absorption of personalities in Chibnall’s other work, with reference also to Robert Graves and to the First Doctor story The Savages.
The third chapter, ‘Half Sick of Shadows’, looks at what we learn here about the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:
The story has been critiqued for being a ‘scroll through a newly updated Wikipedia page’, but it essentially creates new sections on that page with entirely blank or fragmented entries under them³. Paradoxically, we know more and, perhaps more significantly, less about the Doctor than we previously knew. Their home planet, their species, the number and order of their lives, are all unknown now. Whether audiences should know more or less about the Doctor’s apparent home and past has long been a subject of spirited debate⁴. In one of the most quietly important moments in Ascension of the Cybermen, the Doctor tells Ravio, ‘Don’t need your life story’. While this appears as an oddly self-aware jab at the ill-served side characters of both this story and the Chibnall era as a whole, it anticipates the central issue that the Doctor wrestles with before deciding – both here and at the end of Flux – that she doesn’t need to know everything about her own life story either. ³ Moreland, Alex, ‘Doctor Who Review: The Timeless Children’. ⁴ See Howe, David J, and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, pp313-14.
I’ll be honest, this one lost me a bit in discussion of the Buddhist concept of anattā, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Chibnall’s previous work (again) and She-Ra, among others, but it succeeded in convincing me that the story as a whole is semiotically much thicker than perhaps I first appreciated. (Which maybe makes up for it not being better television.)
A brief conclusion argues that the story is “worth ruminating on”, and I think the book as a whole makes that argument well, though I also think Bradley goes on about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme at unnecessary length. You can get it here.
His instincts stirred, the deep-seated ancient knowledge of hunter and hunted, intuitive and primal. Standing still as a statue, the late afternoon crowds flowed around him. Light broke through a far off gap in the clouds and fell on her. She glowed with it – special. He couldn’t shake the sense that she was special. And that discomfited him more than he could say. Mistle had already noticed her, after all, and it took something mighty special to get him to crawl out of whatever bottle he was currently drowning himself in.
Fantasy novel set in Dublin – very much in Dublin, firmly moored to the city’s landmarks, and yet also a Dublin that exists in parallel to the supernatural world of Dubh Linn where the Sidhe keep an eye on us mortals and often intervene. Our teenage protagonist discovers that she is connected to both worlds and has a destined role to play in the battle between evil and not-quite-so-evil factions on the supernatural side. Well observed, in terms of both human and physical geography. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018 and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. (Sorry Ruth!) Next on the former pile is Yes Taoiseach, by Frank Dunlop; next on the latter is Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, but it will have to wait until I have finished all my 2018 books.
In Belfast in April, I spotted that Waterstone’s was selling a CD copy of the Big Finish audio drama “The Battle of Giant’s Causeway”, by Lizzie Hopley, which came out earlier this year. The story reunites the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann, with his audio companions Charlie Pollard and the alien C’Rizz, played by India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas respectively, to a conflict between Sontarans and Rutans playing out at the Giant’s Causeway in 55 BC. I didn’t buy it in Belfast, but I got it from the Big Finish website as soon as I got home.
It’s charming to have the old gang back together again, fifteen years after C’Rizz was written out of the Big Finish continuity, but a lot of plot is left unexplained, presumably because it’s the first story in a series. I bounced off it, I’m afraid, because I was less than impressed by the throwaway remarks in the script about Celts and Ireland.
At 7:30, we have this exchange:
Doctor: “Humans are one of the deadliest life forms I know. No offence, Charlie.” Charlie: “Oh, none taken.” Doctor: “This is 55 BC. The reign of the warrior race. The Celts are definitely vying for most barbaric.”
Nobody’s perfect, but it’s news to me that the Celts were particularly barbaric by the standards of 55 BC, and it grates to have the Doctor declare this as a fact without supporting evidence. Indeed, Charlie Pollard clearly thinks differently at 9:40 when the travellers discover a pile of corpses on the Giant’s Causeway:
C’Rizz: They’re soldiers! Judging by their armour. Doctor: Not just soldiers. They’re legionnaires. Except… Charlie: Roman legionnaires? Goodness. C’Rizz: Are legionnaires not Celts then? Charlie: Oh, Romans are far more deadly.
This however is not endorsed by the Doctor. We progress a bit further when the Doctor and Charlie confront the Sontaran commander for a bit of exposition at 21:45.
General: We plan a revenge raid against the Celtish devils at dawn. Charlie: The Celts did not kill your Sonturions. tell them, Doctor. General: Sonturians? Doctor: It’s a long story. But. It appears you lot are a battalion from Sontar that somehow travelled back in time to Earth in the distant past, met some Romans, lost all sense of identity and purpose, and now think you’re part of the first Roman invasion of Britain. Doctor (thinking): Actually that means – that this isn’t where you landed. Why target Ireland? Even the Romans weren’t that stupid.
The whole scenario is weird anyway; at the time of Julius Caesar’s raid into Britain in 55 BC, it would have been impossible for Roman troops to seriously mount a similar exercise in Ireland. Even with that in mind, perhaps my hackles were up, but the line that invading Ireland is in itself a particularly stupid idea landed rather badly with me; along with the explicit assumption that Ireland is part of Britain.
And a third line from the Doctor at 40:15, where he refers to “Rutans and Sontarans in Celtic Britain”, also landed badly with me.
The Giant’s Causeway is not in Britain. Ireland is not in Britain. Celts were frankly about as barbaric as Romans. It’s a shame that the script for this play says otherwise, and it’s a real shame that these words are put into the mouth of the Doctor. Big Finish normally does better than this.
‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ the Doctor said acidly, as a pulse round exploded a bloom behind his head, splattering his cheek with thick, sweet-smelling sap. ‘I’ll tell that to our lungs, shall I? I’m sure they’ll understand.’
A story of the Tenth Doctor and Donna, visiting Dublin to witness the first ever gig of (fictional) girl band the Blood Honeys, only to find that the event has been infiltrated by a trio of alien sisters out to exploit the emotional energy generated by the event. The aliens have a number of near relatives in both Doctor Who (the Carrionites) and Irish mythology (many cases of three sisters).
Rudden, who is himself Irish, gets the feeling of Dublin in the early Celtic Tiger days very well (even though he would have been roughly eight years old at the time the story is set), and you can very plausibly see Donna and the Doctor interacting with the changing entertainment scene. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who the five-member girl band making their debut in the mid-1990s are based on, but a pinch of satire can help a story run smoothly.
I am preparing a post grumbling about the failures of Big Finish to get Ireland right in a recent audio play, but I have no such grumbles in this case. I enjoyed this and you can get it here.
Bechdel pass in Chapter Four, where the three alien sisters discuss their plans for Earth.
