Reviewed: Touched by an Angel (WHO)

In 2003 Rebecca Whitaker is killed in a road accident, not only ending her life but carving a piece out of her husband Mark’s life. She was his soul-mate and in the eight years afterwards her passing hangs over him. But one day Mark receives a letter that has been waiting to be delivered to him for a very long time. It appears, impossibly, to be in his own hand-writing and it says there’s still a way to change Rebecca’s fate.

That night, Mark catches sight of what looks to be a statue of an angel. It’s everywhere he goes and seems determined to catch him. But there’s also a strange man in a tweed jacket and his two young companions who seem determined to save him from this corner-of-the-eye menace.

But it appears they may be too late as Mark finds himself back in the 1990s and faced with a series of tasks, choices and threats that will ultimately decide just how much he cares about the love he lost…

The BBC is republishing a collection of Doctor Who novels as part of the follow-up to its Fiftieth Anniversary.  Under a banner imprint as the ‘Monster Collection’, the selected titles feature various individual incarnations of the Time Lord facing off against familiar villains and nefarious forces from the television series.

Touched by an Angel, as the title suggests, features the Weeping Angels, originally  created by current show-runner Steven Moffat for the episode ‘Blink’, generally considered to be one of the best ‘Nu-Who’ stories

Like Blink, Touched by an Angel plays with the structure of time and how the inanimate thieves of potential energy seek to touch and manipulate humans by displacing them in time. While clearly a doff of the hat (inevitably a Fez) to that classic tv outing, this novel from Jonathan Morris (originally published in 2011) stands on its own merits as a clever insight into the ideas of loss, nostalgia and regret. 

While wholly accessible to all ages, as Doctor Who should ever be, it will play best with those old enough to have experienced not just the warmth of a first real love, but also those who have experienced the pain of it as well. Though one could argue that Rebecca Whitaker’s death is the pivot of the book’s premise, the better truth is that the story is actually the biography of a life lived well and with love…  

In that sense, it perhaps also echoes another Moffat classic The Girl in the Fireplace… but this has a less flippant and more personal feel. While ‘Fireplace’ was a fantastical mystery with an emotive coda this book reverses that polarity and makes it essentially a love story with the time-travel aspect simply providing a look through a mirror darkly.

Monsters often need to be a kinetic adversary, but Morris finds interesting ways to make the Angels scary without actually seeing them move… letting the blinks and glances punctuate their real threat.  The story runs to a concise but well-considered and intricately-plotted two hundred pages, leaving the reader feeling they’ve experienced a tale that would have worked well  as a story on the television screen – and one that arguably feels more nuanced and better crafted than recent ‘Angels’ episodes themselves. 

Like the written self-fulfilling maguffin at the centre of the tale, Touched by an Angel has action, pathos and an epic slant, but is first and foremost an intimate  love-letter to the modern show, sometimes bittersweet and sometimes all-too-knowing, but one with  recognisable voices, a few surprises and a real heart. As such the Angels themselves would probably have a feast on this tome’s potential energy.