The Daleks of Saltimbanque Street

Gerry Quinn · 09 Jan 2011, 16:52 · from 2011-January.txt.gz
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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 16:52:49 -0000
Subject: (urth) The Daleks of Saltimbanque Street
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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
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