Who Reviews Combat Magicks by Tony J Fyler

Tony engages in mortal combat.

There are sentences which, used as one-line pitches for a story, make the Doctor Who fan’s heart quicken.

The Daleks – on Earth! The Cybermen marching past St Paul’s Cathedral! Giant maggots! Shop window dummies that kill!

You get the idea? OK, try this on for size:

The Doctor meets Attila the Hun.

Yyyyeah, you’re in, aren’t you? Just the idea of those two forces meeting and clashing and maybe even finding ways to work together against an even greater threat – that’s a thing you want to see or read or hear.

Welcome to Combat Majicks, by Steve Cole, read by Yaz actress Mandip Gill.

Attila the Hun and his hordes of…erm…Huns are facing one of the biggest battles of their lives when a strange blue box materialises in the forest into which they’re running, many of them wounded and fleeing. Perhaps the arrival of these new witches will be the thing that turns the tide towards Attila, against the forces of witchcraft deployed by his enemies.

Oh yeah – did we mention the witches? The enemy have witches, who re-animate the dead and send them surging toward the living.

So, that’s nice…

The Doctor and Yaz are obviously powerful witches themselves, emerging from thin air, and producing a medical gel that seals wounds, saves lives and otherwise beggars about with the would-be causes of death in Attila’s day. And so begins the central battle of Combat Majicks – on the one hand, battle to survive and keep Attila and his soldiers alive so they won’t slit the throats of the Tardis crew, annnnd on the other, work out who the other witches are, what they’re doing on the battlefields of Attila the Hun and just possibly what it will take to make them naff off and leave history alone.

All in a day’s work for the Doctor and her Fam.

There’s something of an issue with this audiobook, in that it begins to feel overly similar to The Witchfinders, the TV episode which had people being brought back to life in the mud through the powers of an alien kind of witchcraft, for the purposes of the alien witches. And it also feels like a loooooong listen as there’s the surface battle between Attila and his enemies, the behind-the-surface battle between the witches and…well, life, essentially, and then a whole extra phase of ‘sorting out what to do about the witches’ which if you’re a fan of the modern show will feel too much and too slow – akin to the last two episodes of The Invasion Of Time, you know there’s a purpose to them, but you guess the ending fifty minutes early, and then you’re just watching the clock, waiting for that ending to unfold. That’s the sense of the final act of Combat Majicks – the villains feel muddy in several senses of the word, and while there’s a clarity to their ambitions, the fact that they take quite so long to get around to achieving them feels a touch contrived.

That said, there’s plenty to love about Combat Majicks – including, incidentally, a kind of Imperial Roman Torchwood, which is a sheer joy to hear Ryan stumble across, and a resolution which comes about almost inadvertently, but as the result of an act of unthinking kindness on the Doctor’s part early in the action. In itself, this innovation from Steve Cole feels like it could be a useful direction for the characterisation of the 13^th Doctor to follow when the show returns to TV – a Doctor torn between not getting involved and her own native compassion, not so much the Time Lord Victorious as the Time Lord Compassionate, leading to complications down the line. It’s a simple thing, but it feels like a stab at defining an arc of characterisation for the 13^th Doctor, which could bear productive fruit.

Mandip Gill, as Yaz, is interesting and vibrant and brings a youthful energy to the show. Mandip Gill as a reader, taking on a host of characters, including a mighty warlord and several of his chiefs and captains, feels a little out of her vocal depth, and if you’re among the fans who have trouble with the Sheffield accents on the show, you’re probably best getting this one as a visual book, rather than an audiobook, because the run-time of this reading is a lot of Sheffield for your buck.

Overall though, Combat Majicks is a solidly atmospheric 13^th Doctor story with alien shenanigans hiding in relatively plain sight alongside Attila the Hun and his armies. And while it devolves into the alien storyline and seems to take a while to do the things you know it has to do, you’ll still come away, as fans used to back in the Hartnell era, feeling like you’ve learned a significant amount about a figure and a battle that you might not have been especially aware of before the Doctor took you to live alongside them for a while.