All Fall Down

So here we are at last in the House of Lungbarrow. Many people have compared the House to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and I’d be the last person to deny any influence there. I love Peake’s work very much, not just the Titus Groan trilogy, but the charming and quirky Mr Pye and a lot of Peake’s poems and his illustrations.

Both Houses are huge edifices that ramble for miles, as much characters in their stories as any of their inhabitants. Both Houses are prisons. But there are big differences too. Gormenghast is essentially a dead place, whose denizens perpetuate its endless rituals as if they might cease to exist if they stopped. But Lungbarrow is alive and an active participant in events. It’s possessive of its inhabitants. It suffers from family pride in extremis. It has a violent temper and will sulk for centuries on end. To walk along its passages is truly to walk on egg shells.

In the early days of working on Lungbarrow - the script, I put a note on the latest draft I was sending to Andrew Cartmel: "The furniture is getting increasingly predatory." Followed by the direction "The Drudges are herding tables into the Great Hall." I doubt the scene later on where the Doctor "surfs" on a runaway table could ever have been realised properly in studio, but that was the start of the House’s character evolution. And the book allowed me to give full range to that. There are certainly elements of Beauty And The Beast here - not just the Disney version, but the ravishing Cocteau film before it.

As to the family? Well, families get everywhere. Not just the inevitable Groans and their retainers, but equally Robert Graves’ Claudian family poisoning and politicking their way through Roman history; the completely batty Starkadder family from Stella Gibbons’ gloriously funny Cold Comfort Farm - forget the softened up tv version, read the original. Even The Archers. All soaps are filled with slightly crazy families, but any family would go mad if they had to live in the circumstances inflicted on the Lungbarrovians. Worse than Albert Square. You don’t have to be mad to live in a soap opera, but it helps! One of the points of the book is: how could any family cope if the Doctor was a close relative?

Most Lungbarrovians cope by playing games, but over the years, decades, centuries, the games have got progressively more bizarre and deadly. You’re given thirteen lives to start with... But in Lungbarrow, what else is there to do except be beastly to each other?

Cousins so far:
Cousin Arkhew, is a rather put upon little chap; the gullible one who always gets the short straw when it comes to dirty jobs.

Cousin Owis is a bit of a sad Billy Bunter - not very nice, certainly quite dim. But extremely significant.

Cousin Glospin, the Doctor’s arch-rival. In a surprising family trait, the "young" Glospin seems to bear more than a passing Byronic resemblance to Paul McGann.

Cousin Innocet, the House’s moral minority, still possesses a remnant of the old Gallifreyan telepathy. In the Old Time, women were taller than the men and Innocet is tall and proud like her forebears. It’s likely that the very tall body that Romana tries on before regenerating into Lalla Ward, is another throwback to the tall seer women of the Old Time - well, it could be! Innocet’s long, long hair may have roots (ha!) in Rapunzel or Maeterlinck’s Melisande or the braided Bride in the Stravinsky/Nijinska ballet Les Noces, but its weighty symbolism is entirely different and nothing to do with the loss of innocence. One day, Innocet will be Lungbarrow’s Housekeeper, until then she keeps her journal and builds houses out of circular playing cards.

Cousin Jobiska: Edward Lear’s Pobble Who Had No Toes had an Aunt Jobisca who gave him to drink lavender water tinged with pink. When a close relative of mine was suffering from advanced Alzheimer's and had to go into Hellingly Hospital, a giant rambling NHS institution in rural East Sussex, there was a tiny and very sweet old lady on his ward, who constantly said "Take me home, dear. I want to go home." Bless her, I don’t think she really remembered where home was. It seemed to change on a weekly basis, rather like Jobiska’s age. Hellingly, with its gothic architecture and warren of corridors, was yet another inspiration for Lungbarrow. It was closed in the cutbacks, a lot of patients went back to the community (maybe some got into government) and the place is now something like luxury flats. The House of Lungbarrow would not have stood for that.

The God of Pain is one of the old Gallifreyan Gods, aka the Menti Celesti, who could also be Eternals (Enlightenment.) They turn up throughout the New Adventures, most notably Time (as the Doctor was her champion) and Death. I had to coordinate the writing of Lungbarrow with Kate Orman, whose Room With No Doors was the previous book in the series. I rang Kate in Sydney and she was in the middle of her birthday dinner. After we’d both stopped going "Oh, my God!" at each other, she pointed me towards a painting, The Death of Arthur by J.G. Archer, which shows the dying King Arthur laid on a seashore, tended by three queens before he’s ferried off to Avalon. Kate saw the three women as the embodiment of the Gallifreyan Gods - Red/black for Death, white for Pain and an unfixed shifting colour for Time. Bizarrely I knew the picture and had already used it in the novelisation of Battlefield. Things, like Gallifreyan clocks, run in complex interlocking circles.