This latest anthology contains thirteen stories, loosely connected by the theme of travel and holidays, something Iris and Panda do anyway. It gives us a good excuse to journey round the planet Earth in part though, from Egypt to Canada via India and Thailand, and with it comes the usual pastiches and homages to various literary types. Indeed, the stories veer wildly in style and genre, emphasizing the mismatched world of Ms. Wildthyme: we have murder mysteries, a small town under siege from an alien menace and trips into the realm of a coma patient's dreams among others.
A mixed bunch in tone perhaps but not, for the most part, in quality. 'Panda on Ice' provides a surprising emotional punch at the end, 'The Best Holiday Ever' is laugh aloud funny in places, 'Annabel Regina' manages to be surprisingly haunting whilst also being touching, 'How to Play Four-dimensional Chinese Checkers' plays with the notion of Narrative being the key to the multiverse. (These four stories alone as worth the asking price, and you can even read the last one for free.)
This time around, there is a more conscious effort it would appear to really delve into the post-modern interpretation of text that the Iris Wildthyme series has, with 'The Story Eater' exploring the idea of places being made up of a mixture of stories and Panda remarking on how well the Holiday Organiser speaks in Italics.
The adventures had by Iris and Panda are not just dissected versions of existing narrative frameworks or fictional stories: their entire Universe is quite literally made up of fictional narratives, story strands which they can travel along and delve. Just as we would drive along a road and take a left into another street, so they can travel to a story constructed around a dream, journey to an Eighteenth Century comedy of manners or reverse into an Agatha Christie-esque mystery just waiting to be holidayed in. They don't choose where to go, but they will end up in stories. This awareness of themselves as literary characters is only touched on, and probably rightly so as you would otherwise run the risk of philosophical paragraphs on the nature of the Fictional, something that would be interesting enough but not really suited to any of the stories here. (Maybe next time?)
Instead the familiar metaphor of life being one story, unwritten, our lives continually changing onto new pages, becomes the lifeblood of Iris: she doesn't so much write her own story as skip to the end and rub out some of the middle parts. History and Time are treated like post-modern narratives, squeezed and altered, tidied up and experimented with; they're just another couple of threads to be looped and pulled and woven into a new cluster of strands.
This brings us to the subject of Doctor Who. Now, I usually try to stray away from mentioning this show in relation to Iris Wildthyme. Yes, she was in many Who books and continues to be so, and yes, there are lots of nods to the series throughout the anthologies and other fictional works, be them on audio or in print elsewhere. (In this anthology alone, we get 'First Meetings', a possible retelling of the Doctor's backstory and origins, maybe, with a wink to this alternative notion of him taking a cluster of his future stories and then purposely and consciously living them so he can be a bit more exciting. Possibly. It's nice and ambiguous.)
I try to avoid the subject of Doctor Who though as the character of Iris Wildthyme has outgrown the series and tells stories that the show wouldn't really dare to do... or at least, it had. Right now though, Steven Moffat's interpretation of the show is airing, and with it comes lots of messing around with time and personal histories, toes dipped into the realm of the fairy tale, and Steampunk'd aesthetics and concepts: Romans with guns in their hands, miserly old men being turned nice by updating their pasts via time travel, mysterious forests with creepy monsters in them aboard spaceships. The Doctor once remarked that, "a straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting," and never more so has it be the case than right now. Just like Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor is now manipulating time and its ensuing narrative(s) like a game, tweaking things and wrapping himself up in paradoxes and pastiches. Indeed, in A Christmas Carol, he knowingly uses the plot of Charles Dickens's famous story to change a man's life by travelling in time and altering his history to better suit the fiction. The worlds of Iris and the Doctor have now met in more ways than one, which I find pretty exciting.
It means that the goalposts have been well and truly shifted in terms of what Doctor Who can and cannot do, and it means that the concepts and rules of Iris Wildthyme's adventures are now moving ever closer to the show (or is it the other way round?). True, she still gets pissed and flirts with anyone who will have her, cigarette in hand, in much the same way the Doctor doesn't, but now it's the awareness of fictionality that mostly separates the two. It'll be interesting to see if this has any bearing at all on either range.
Back to Iris: Abroad though. It's very, very good indeed. The stories I've namechecked above are, for the most part, my favourites. None of those in the anthology are bad at all, though a couple fell flat in comparison for me, 'The Story Eater' being perhaps a little heavy-handed in its political message and 'Couch Potatoes' perhaps a little blunt in its treatment of the overweight. That's not to say they're bad at all, just that I liked them least.
One of the best stories though comes last. It's Paul Magrs's contribution to the anthology, 'Hospitality'. Iris Wildthyme did not first appear in Doctor Who stories, but was instead featured in a series of books set at the fictional Phoenix Court estate (books which I shamefully have not read: that's something I really should rectify next year!). This story is a neat side-step into this world, with a very different Iris (in some ways: who's to say we cannot have a plurality of Irises next to our plurality of genres?) and a very real tale of a young gay man's rocky relationship with his boyfriend. It's a really compact and interesting snapshot into the protagonist's life, written in a light style I but wish I could write in myself, and proves to be one of the best stories in the whole book. The number thirteen is clearly not unlucky for Magrs.
I am keen to see what will happen to Iris Wildthyme and the range from Obverse Books next, and I am certain it will be nothing less than spectacular and interesting. Here's to all manner of irresistible chaos.
Delighted to hear you enjoyed Panda on Ice (and the collection as a whole). Thanks for the review.
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