Virgin Missing Adventures Reviews: The Man in the Velvet Mask by Daniel O’Mahony (or, “Sade But True”)

I’ll be up front with you on this one: I had a very hard time wrapping my head around The Man in the Velvet Mask. I knew that I enjoyed it, but when I tried to sit down and start writing something about it, I’d always get a few hundred words in before deciding that it didn’t quite work.

This is actually my third attempt at starting this review, but when I did so I decided to do something I hadn’t done before: I went back and re-read another book before starting The Man in the Velvet Mask proper. Specifically, I went back to the author’s debut novel, Falls the Shadow.

My reasons for this are pretty simple to explain. O’Mahony is a writer that loves theme and atmosphere, and I thought it might be an interesting experiment to see if immersing myself in that atmosphere and those themes would help me to be get some kind of a grasp on his work. Naturally, I’ll try and keep my observations limited to The Man in the Velvet Mask itself, since I’ve already reviewed Falls the Shadow, but it’s always nice to get additional context.

Having done so, I realise that there are many themes that I could choose to explore as my opening salvo for this review. Ritual, performance, a grand mythic scale in which gods and devils routinely intrude into the affairs of mere mortals. All of these are topics that could probably form the basis of entire essays, and I’ll try and touch on as many of them as possible. However, what I think I’ll start with is the questions of light and dark which permeate all of O’Mahony’s work, as I believe it to be the most fundamental.

In many ways, a lot of the treatment of light and dark is simply a natural inheritance from the author’s predilection for including Gothic themes and imagery in his work, but O’Mahony also seems particularly fascinated with the in-between; the grey areas, if you will. In Falls the Shadow, this manifested most obviously in the form of the mysterious Grey Man and his realm of Cathedral.

The Man in the Velvet Mask carries on that tradition. This time, though, the greyness has seeped through into the “real” world, transforming what should be Napoleonic France into a nightmarish hellscape of clockpunk engineering and Gothic excess.

There’s a recurring emphasis in O’Mahony’s novels on characters being alternatively plunged into profound darkness or light, but Minski’s world seems to operate as a liminal space along the lines of Cathedral. This strange plane is constantly teetering on the edges of these two extremes, though it does often feel like the balance might be a little weighted in favour of the darkness.

Which serves as a good enough segue to talk about the tone of the novel.

This is easily the story’s most polarising and divisive aspect, and it’s not hard to see why. The world presented by The Man in the Velvet Mask is, to put it mildly, not a nice place. It’s full of sex, death, no rock and roll, gore, and plenty of suffering for afters.

If we adopt as a metric of quality the notion that a MIssing Adventure should accurately replicate the tone of the particular era of Doctor Who in which it is set, then this is undeniably a bit of a dismal failure.

Still, if you’re willing to overlook that – and it’s completely understandable if you can’t, since this isn’t the type of book that will be for everybody – I do think there’s a strange fascination and beauty to the atmosphere and tone that the novel evokes. It’s very much an edge case for the franchise, pushing things as far as they can reasonably go and offering a twisted reflection of Doctor Who tropes.

It’s a tale where the Doctor meets a historical figure… but that figure is the Marquis de Sade.

It’s a fairly traditional “Doctor thwarts tyrannical dictator” story… but the Doctor is constantly ailing and close to death.

The Doctor’s plucky young companion finds herself separated from him and hanging out with the denizens of the planet of the week… only to find herself exposed to a whole lot of vice and iniquity.

Again, it totally makes sense if people are turned away by this kind of stuff and loathe The Man in the Velvet Mask as a result. Even I find it hard to say I “enjoyed” the book as a whole, if only because it seems almost self-parodically repugnant and hostile to the very idea of enjoyment.

Still, I do think that the existence of such a book within the confines of Doctor Who is a worthwhile artistic experiment for the novels to engage in, even while I’m not exactly going to be clamouring for more books in its vein. Or its artery.

One of the things that most stands out to me about O’Mahony’s sophomore effort when compared to his debut is that there seems to be a much tighter grasp on the relationship between plot, theme and character. Falls the Shadow made good use of the traditional NA team of the Doctor, Ace and Benny, and he understood those characters pretty well, but I don’t think the book was really fundamentally about them.

Thankfully, this is corrected in The Man in the Velvet Mask, which I do think is a large part of why it succeeds. After all, good characterisation is arguably even more important in a Missing Adventure than in the New Adventures.

In the latter, you can build off of long-running character arcs in something resembling a logical progression. If a particular novel’s portrait of Ace or Benny or Roz falls flat or is a little cringeworthy in some aspects, you can rest assured that there’s generally another attempt at capturing those characters around the corner.

The Missing Adventures don’t really have that luxury. You generally only have one shot at depicting a particular TARDIS team, unless you’re talking about a particularly popular incarnation like the Fourth Doctor. Even still, it can be months between each of those chances, so it’s important to get it right. By and large, I think that The Man in the Velvet Mask succeeds in this task.

This is the only full-length novel to take place in the gap between Steven’s departure at the end of The Savages and the arrival of Ben and Polly in The War Machines. Naturally, such a gap wasn’t really explicitly acknowledged in the show itself, but it’s not ruled out either. This, along with other factors, really gives O’Mahony something of a free rein in how he approaches the characters of the Doctor and Dodo. And boy does he ever…

We’ll discuss Dodo in a minute, but for now let’s look at the Doctor. Like in Falls the Shadow, there seems to be quite an emphasis on taking away a lot of the character’s power. In the earlier novel, it was mostly because he was dwarfed by the sheer power and inexplicability of Gabriel and Tanith. Here, so close to the First Doctor’s regeneration, it’s made quite clear that he’s simply on the brink of death.

Again, there’s something of a sense here that O’Mahony is pushing his conception of Doctor Who to the very limit, perhaps explaining why the bulk of his full-length stories from this point on are for Doctor-less spin-off series like Bernice Summerfield, Faction Paradox and Kaldor City.

The Doctor is still presented as rather enigmatic in typical NA style (though, again, I must stress that this was never as uncritically embraced as a lot of the NAs’ critics like to claim it was), and the emphasis on grand, epic scale clearly marks O’Mahony as rooted in that particular era of Doctor Who.

Nonetheless, he’s wedded this grand tapestry to a fundamentally weakened and powerless Doctor, and while that’s something that both this novel and Falls the Shadow catch a lot of flak for, I think it’s an interesting and uncommon enough vision that it’s at least worth a second glance.

If you can overcome the fact that the Doctor doesn’t seem nearly this weakened or maudlin in the TV stories surrounding this book (and, once more, that’s yet another big “if,” so I completely understand if you can’t), I think there’s a lot of genuine poignance to be found here.

It helps that the fear of ageing and finding yourself losing the ability to do things as easily as one once did is a pretty universal feeling, and O’Mahony capitalises on it pretty well. There is a certain inherent tragedy in seeing a heroic figure like the Doctor succumbing to the ravages of time in such a fashion.

Of course, there is also a very particular resonance to the real-world health problems which William Hartnell was experiencing in this period. So for better or for worse, The Man in the Velvet Mask is covering ground that very few other Doctor Who stories do, at least with a main character like the Doctor.

Which brings us to Dodo, and the part that the novel is probably most infamous for…

First of all, it’s important that we address one simple question: Does Dodo die of syphilis in this book? The answer is, in fact, no. This is a common misconception which seems to conflate events in this novel with her death in Who Killed Kennedy (which is a topic for future discussion when I get to that book).

(Ironically enough, syphilis isn’t even mentioned in either The Man in the Velvet Mask or Who Killed Kennedy… but it is mentioned in Falls the Shadow, so make of that what you will.)

It is true that, in this novel, she ends up contracting a genetically engineered virus through the course of her sexual relationship with Dalville. Indeed, the story does make a point of noting that she will pass the virus on to any of her future sexual partners, as well as any children she might one day have.

All this is to say that I can understand why the “Dodo caught syphilis” interpretation persists, inaccurate though it may be. I also think the waters have been further muddied by O’Mahony’s penchant for writing rather dense and esoteric stories, as well as a segment late in the day where Dodo imagines the virus “eating through her nervous system and her brain.”

I do think there are some important incongruities to note here, however. Perhaps the most salient among these is the fact that Minski’s virus is really more a science-fiction conceit than it is a recognisable analogue for any kind of real-world venereal disease. It’s essentially just a McGuffin in Minski’s plan to control the thoughts and actions of everybody in his world.

What’s more, O’Mahony makes it clear that it would have been possible to contract the virus simply through the ingestion of contaminated food and drink, so the framing of this plotline as “Dodo contracts syphilis and dies” is ultimately one that doesn’t really hold up to much scrutiny.

There are some undeniable issues with the way Dodo is treated here, particularly when you place it in the larger context of non-televised Wilderness Years media, but on the whole I think the story does quite well by her as a character.

The sexual relationship between Dodo and Dalville is uncomfortable at first, but it’s evidently meant to be. For all that he initially tries to give these grand, philosophical soliloquies about his efforts simply being an inquiry into the corruption of virtue through vice, I think it’s hard to really construct a reading where one can take those proclamations at face value.

Like just about every other character in the book (and quite a few of the author’s other books), there’s something deeply unnerving lurking underneath Dalville’s façade. It just so happens that, being an actor, he’s a much more direct realisation of that theme.

In a lot of ways, the character as presented in the first half feels like a remarkably prescient commentary on self-professed “nice guys.” He doesn’t really see Dodo as a person, but as a romanticised and fetishised puzzle. To him, she’s something to be solved and, more than that, to be possessed.

Naturally, he claims that that’s not an accurate summary of things at all, but since we’re constantly reminded that a lot of his actions are affectation and grandstanding performance, the lines of what’s genuine and what’s a lie become rather tricky to discern.

Even when he drops the whole “corruption of virtue” spiel following Bressac’s death and seems to genuinely soften towards Dodo, the fact that he’s already spent so long immersed in this elaborate and possessive fiction makes it hard for the reader to feel entirely comfortable in their scenes together.

There is something rather cleverly unnerving to be found in that, and while there’s definitely a conversation to be had about whether the books needed to do a story like this, I think there is enough of interest to make things at least a little more complex than a simple brief of “Let’s put Dodo through hell.”  Maybe my brain is just reading too much into this plotline after the somewhat messy handling of “alpha males” in Warchild, but I do think there’s something there at the very least.

The scene where Dodo reflects upon the play she is forced to perform in, a play which is helpfully summarised as just being “pain and sex and death,” seems acutely aware of the notion of the male gaze. When Dalville tells her that the play’s objectification of her is because her audience and the playwright are men, she reflects that the censors will at least cut out the scenes of gratuitous nudity. However, there’s no respite to be found there, as “[they’re] men too.”

There’s perhaps something of a critique of Doctor Who‘s historical treatment of companions to be found there, and the presence of Dodo can’t help but seem especially biting in that light. Reading The Man in the Velvet Mask, I do get the sense that the book is at least trying to make an effort to actually engage with her as a character and respect her agency. On its own, I do think that’s a laudable goal because, let’s face it, Dodo wasn’t exactly well-served by television.

1960s Doctor Who companions, especially those who happened to be women, were rarely the deepest and most complex individuals. As I discussed with Victoria last time, it often seemed like the defining features of their backstories were softened and subsumed as time went on, and they began to slot into a more narrow, neatly-defined role as “the girl.”

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not directing my ire here at any of the actresses, because that’s woefully misguided. It should go without saying that actors in a show like Doctor Who can often only do their best with what they’re given, so if anybody should get the blame it should be the writers. Unfortunately I feel the need to clarify this because, well, fandom often likes to dogpile on the actors.

(Strangely, nobody seems to apply that same zeal or fervour to Peter Purves when it comes to the fact that Steven’s astronaut training rarely came up or was sometimes rather blatantly disregarded. Hmm, if only there was some kind of word that described disproportionate and especial anger directed towards women… Maybe it should start with an “M…” Oh well, I’m sure we’ll think of something.)

So, long story short, I don’t blame Jackie Lane for any of the issues with Dodo on screen at all. All indications are that the experience wasn’t a happy one, as she pointedly refused to ever return to Big Finish or any other kind of reprisal of her role.

It really just seems like her character was an unfortunate casualty of the shift in the production office’s plans when John Wiles and Donald Tosh were replaced by Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. It seems like the writing was on the wall almost from the moment the character was first introduced, and it culminated in one of the worst and most perfunctory companion exits in the entire show. The Doctor snaps her out of the trance placed upon her by WOTAN in the second episode of The War Machines, she exits stage left and is pursued by… nothing.

They don’t even bother giving her a proper on-screen sendoff, in what should surely be in some kind of cinematic dictionary somewhere under “wound, salt in the.” Instead, she just gives a letter to newcomers Ben and Polly where she lets the Doctor know that she’s staying behind, and that’s the last we ever hear about her.

Because of that extremely hurried departure, it only makes sense that the treatment of the character in the expanded universe would attract some scrutiny, particularly when it’s as intense as it is here or in Who Killed Kennedy.

On its own, I think The Man in the Velvet Mask isn’t such an awful way to approach the character. Throwing her into a historical nightmare world heavily influenced by the works of the Marquis de Sade is certainly a case of going from zero to one hundred rather quickly, to put it mildly, and I can see how it would turn some people away.

However, I can appreciate that O’Mahony has at least made an effort to expand on the extremely scattered crumbs of characterisation from the TV series and sculpt an interesting character, and I think it’s a much stronger crack at squaring that circle than anything we were given on-screen.

But of course no work of art exists in isolation, and it’s hard to talk or even think about the treatment of Dodo in this novel without also reflecting on the casually brutal fridging that she would be subjected to in Who Killed Kennedy just two months later.

Again, I do rather firmly believe that The Man in the Velvet Mask respects Dodo as a character enough to allow her some measure of dignity and control over her own fate, and that certainly stands in stark contrast to the cold, calculated way in which she is disposed of to motivate Stevens’ arc in the later book. Nonetheless, I do think it still represents a stepping stone along the path towards that death.

That cannot be ignored in an honest appraisal of the book and its impact, as it’s a road that the New Adventures never quite seemed to overcome. The off-screen death of Liz Shaw in Eternity Weeps serves as another high-profile example, for instance.

I don’t necessarily think that companions’ post-Doctor futures need to be all sunshine and rainbows, but I do think that there should be some level of tact taken when you consider the historical issues that Doctor Who has sometimes had in giving farewells to its regular cast members. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with characters like Liz or Dodo who never really got any substantive goodbye scene to speak of, as you run the risk of just exacerbating an already less-than-ideal situation.

On that note, it’s interesting that O’Mahony did apparently have a plan to feature a different lineup than the First Doctor and Dodo. Speaking with David J. Howe for Doctor Who Magazine in the early 2000s (as reproduced in the recent and rather excellent reference work The Who Adventures), he reflected:

I knew it was going to be a sensitive choice, so I did suggest that, if there was any problem on Virgin’s part, I could change the line-up to the third Doctor and Jo. That was for fairly prosaic reasons on my part, as I’d already written a sample chapter for them for another – rejected – novel called The Drowned Towers, and I didn’t want to have to write more sample text for the first Doctor and Dodo! Fortunately, Rebecca [Levene] liked my original choice. It would have been a horrible third Doctor story!

I’m inclined to agree with the author’s assessment on this one, though it is complicated. It might have avoided contributing to setting the unfortunate precedent of putting Dodo through hell and back, but you probably also would have lost a good chunk of the Doctor’s reflections on his own mortality.

So ultimately, yeah, I don’t really have a definitive answer on anything to do with this topic other than the question of “Does Dodo get syphilis?” I think the book manages to exercise just enough restraint to avoid becoming irredeemably awful, and there’s a limit to how much I think it can realistically be blamed for a story decision made by an entirely different author. Still, it undeniably fits into a larger, more unfortunate pattern, and I think that should be acknowledged. As with so much of this book, though, your mileage may vary.

Anyway, putting aside all the character stuff, how about the plot?

Well, on a basic structural level, it’s a fairly standard alternate history tale, with a Gothic clockpunk flavouring for variety’s sake. You’ve got all your Who storytelling stalwarts, with an oppressive dictator being overthrown by a ragtag bunch of subversive elements aided by the Doctor and their companion(s). As with a lot of O’Mahony novels, though, there is some really interesting stuff thrown in on the sidelines of all of this.

Most obviously, there’s the concept of the Pageant and their world machine. The Pageant are an extremely novel and inexplicable creation, so much so that it almost feels fitting that they’ve received absolutely no further references beyond a single line in The Quantum Archangel.

It’s never entirely clear on what level these beings operate, or how much of the dense and strange prose O’Mahony uses to describe their native state should be taken literally. Still, they’re absolutely fascinating, and they play into the themes of ambiguity, performance and masks that suffuse the whole book. I hope you’ll forgive me if I find them a little too strange of a concept to really wrap my head around and offer much in the way of commentary beyond “I like it,” though.

What I can talk about, though, is the world machine. Well, OK, that’s also confusing as all get out, but at least my analysis-addled brain can string together some semblance of an argument about it. At its heart, the world created by Minski is yet another instance of the books of 1996 proving particularly interested with the legacy of fascism and the Second World War.

The book may take place in a self-contained bubble over a hundred years before the Nazis came to power, and it may be inspired by the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade and not Adolf Hitler, but a lot of the imagery seems strikingly familiar: the nightmarish industrialisation, the emaciated prisoners in the Bastille, Minski’s horrific and ghastly experiments. Even the choice of Paris seems rather pointed, as does the description of an aerial military force sweeping over Normandy to liberate the city.

This isn’t exactly new ground for O’Mahony, of course. The character of Jane Page in Falls the Shadow was quite clearly a servant of a fascistic government, and one of that book’s chapter titles even borrowed from Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle. Not to be outdone for subtlety, the author even threw in a line from one of the Mandelbrot Set proclaiming that they “must be fasces.”

Much like with Just War and Warchild, The Man in the Velvet Mask seems to betray a palpable anxiety over the prospect that, fifty years on, the horrors of Nazism might wind up forgotten or repeated. It’s telling that what ultimately motivates Dodo to sleep with Dalville is the knowledge that this nightmarish Paris will be erased and forgotten, and her desire to remember him in some capacity.

One cannot help but be reminded, in this talk of memory and history, of real-world discussions of Holocaust denial, which were very much a key topic of discussion in the 1980s and the mid-1990s. The German neo-Nazi pamphleteer Ernst Zündel had been put on trial twice in 1985 and 1988 for disseminating a publication whose title posed the rather bluntly abhorrent question Did Six Million Really Die?

Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust was published in 1993, and was subsequently the subject of another highly-publicised trial when David Irving, an English historian named in Lipstadt’s book as a Holocaust denier (and who had served as a witness for the defence in the Zündel trial, no less), launched an unsuccessful suit against the book’s publisher for libel just over six months after the publication of The Man in the Velvet Mask.

Even within France, the 1988 and 1995 elections had seen a creeping increase in the share of votes afforded to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, a politician with a storied history of making remarks downplaying the severity of the Holocaust. Indeed, this trend would continue to the point where he rather alarmingly managed to make it to the second round of the 2002 presidential elections.

As ever with this kind of historical context analysis, I don’t mean to say that all of this directly influenced O’Mahony. Hell, it might not have even consciously crossed his mind at all, but I do think that it speaks to the fears of a certain time. Given the resurgence in fascist ideology we’ve seen over the past few years, those anxieties have aged rather well, I think.

So for all of that, I believe The Man in the Velvet Mask is a much better and more well-rounded piece of work than the common consensus would suggest. O’Mahony seems to have gotten a better handle on his undeniable talent for language and uses it in service of a much less meandering and more meaningful plot.

Not only that, but he’s also allowed Dodo a measure of agency which she never really got on-screen, even if her experiences here aren’t entirely the most pleasant, and offered a snapshot of the Doctor in a much more vulnerable light than we’ve ever really seen anywhere else. Ultimately, I’m not really sure I would want every book to be like The Man in the Velvet Mask, but I remain broadly glad that it got the chance to be made.

Miscellaneous Observations

O’Mahony claims that he wanted to write a follow-up to The Man in the Velvet Mask entitled Viet Cong!, described as “a kind of freewheeling black comedy new wave historical set in 1916.” My instinctive reaction is one of skepticism that such a thing would ever have worked, but I do also feel a certain twinge of curiosity. If anyone could have pulled it off, it’d probably be O’Mahony/

As ever, there are a few points that I didn’t really touch on. For instance, there’s the second-most infamous aspect of the book beyond the alleged “Dodo gets syphilis” factor: the second heart regeneration hypothesis. In brief there’s a single line that implies that Time Lords don’t grow their second heart until after their first regeneration, in an attempt to paper over the continuity pothole caused by Ian referring to the Doctor having a singular heart in The Edge of Destruction.

Again, much like the “Dodo gets syphilis” rumour, I do think that this has been blown out of proportion a little bit. I don’t really have anything to say about it, because I do think there are much more interesting aspects of the novel to discuss. As is, it stands as a weird continuity blind alley that very few writers really chose to pick up, probably by virtue of coming in such a weird and offputting book.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, The Man in the Velvet Mask. If all goes well, I should get this out on the 24th, which will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog. It’s genuinely hard to believe that I’ve stuck with it for this long, but whenever I sit down and write a review I’m reminded of just why I keep going.

I truly enjoy doing this, and would do so even if nobody ever read my stuff. However, I still remain eternally grateful to everybody who has supported me over these five years. Here’s to the next five.

Sorry this one was so long, but I had a lot to say about it. I fear it may have been too rambling a review, even by the standards of this blog. I dunno, I just hope some of my words were intriguing enough to hold your interest. Regardless, join me next time as we begin the next five years of Dale’s Ramblings with the return of Kate Orman, and we delve into the true beginning of the Psi-Powers arc with SLEEPY. Until then, though…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper (Five years! How crazy is that?!)