Its Jerry Corneilius, friends, lovers and frenemies in the decade we called the eighties, in Thatcher's Britain. And if you had to try living through that era it felt like Thatcher's World. Which off course it was not. Not even close.
"I'm in danger of turning into a second rate Doctor Who," Jerry says at one point. A second rate 5th, 6th or 7th Doctor? You might well have asked yourself at slice of self perception that damns all round with faint praise. Actually, you might well have asked yourself no such thing. It nagged at me, though. Tap dancing around the periphery of my imagination. You should bleedin' coco, Jerry. well, not so much my imagination as the disorderly filing cabinet where I store my pop cultural references. Not to get too snooty about it but whoever has the most wins.
As you might surmise from his comment, his self observation, Jerry Corneilius is getting older but not much wiser. With Ms Brunner morphing into an uber-Thatcher to a bone crushing matriarchy that is ,in its own way, as tedious as any given patriarchy.There is no place for a court clown in such a society, as the life of a rake is just not fit for purpose in such a serious world. All the women Jerry has polluted over the years with his many, and formerly endearing, needs come into their own with Earth altering effect. Jerry is not the man he was, he finds himself tied to the railway track of something that distantly resembles a plotwith Catherine and Unarealy the only two to release him from the crushing onslaught of multiversal destiny. Having outgrown the age, devolution is his only refuge , with the bracing need for a ressurection of the Final Programme the only possible road to anywhere else. Complex and bewildering at times The Alchemist Question really has no answer and boy, is'nt life just like that.
Perhaps not like mine, perhaps not like yours, but possibly like ours.
