Doctor Who and the Zarbi by Bill Strutton
illustrated by John Wood
The interesting thing about reading these first Doctor novelisations in publication order is that it encourages you not to think about them as installments in a series of books designed to novelise every Doctor Who story—this wouldn't be the case, of course, until they were reissued in 1973. Instead, just as Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was the only Doctor Who book, Doctor Who and the Zarbi (the novelisation of 1965's The Web Planet) is the second one.
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| Originally published: 1965 Acquired and read: July 2024 |
If you think of it that way, you spend your time reading it not thinking of it as "yet another tie-in" but "the second book"—and thus you spend your time comparing it to The Daleks. I had never really thought of The Web Planet is comparison to The Daleks before, but they're actually quite similar. This makes sense, because as I understand it, the production team was trying to recapture the success of the earlier serial. The Web Planet isn't really anything like what we now think of as a "Dalek story," though, so this might be hard for a modern viewer to notice.
But it is like The Daleks, and reading it right after the previous novel brings that out in a way that wasn't true when I watched The Web Planet on VHS. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi begins with a long extended sequence of the TARDIS crew (or, rather, Tardis crew) exploring a seemingly deserted planet. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi features dangerous bodies of water! Like The Daleks, The Zarbi features two opposing forces on this planet that have been in conflict a long time. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi is interested in evolution and devolution; just as The Daleks focused on how the Daleks and Thals has changed over time, a key part of The Zarbi is the discovery of how the Menoptera left behind in subterranean Vortis have devolved into a different species. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi is often at its best when focusing on the alienness of the planet and the titular species. Like the Daleks, the Zarbi are dependent on some kind of centralized force that gets neutralized by the TARDIS crew. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi ends with a promise of a new age on its planet, as the planet is reclaimed by the "proper" species.
Now, the Zarbi did not take off like the Daleks did, clearly, but I hadn't realized how much work they were definitely putting into recreating the previous story—but also amplifying it. The Zarbi are weirder than the Daleks in some ways, and unlike the Thals, the friendly alien species is also obviously inhuman.
Though while The Daleks tried to pretend there were no other Doctor Who stories than it, to the extent of ignoring the entire television programme, The Zarbi does retain explicit references to tv serials, including The Rescue and The Romans; it may be the second book but not the second story. I haven't seen the tv story in two decades, so I can't comment much on specific changes, but I did notice that while on tv the "astral map" is a little device on wheels the Doctor pulls out of the TARDIS to show the Zarbi, Strutton actually renders it here as one-sixth of the TARDIS console, which can be detached! And, infamously, the narrative pretty consistently calls its main character "Doctor Who" (and it's also used at least once in dialogue that I noticed).
All that said, while the alien element comes through fairly well, I found The Zarbi otherwise an inferior experience to The Daleks. Bill Strutton doesn't have David Whitaker's interest in characterization; The Daleks gave us a strong sense of Ian's voice, and subplots about Ian's relationships with the Doctor and Barbara, but here we mostly just have dialogue that you have to imagine being brought to life by the actors. The characters do clever things (even Vicki, who at first I thought Strutton was neglecting), but we don't get that novelistic access to their thoughts. And my guess is (I don't remember my VHS copy of The Web Planet very well) that the alien Voice controlling the Zarbi probably comes through as more interesting on screen than in prose.
I've been reading the modern reprints of the Targets when available... unfortunately the Amazon seller I bought this from sent me a 1981 printing of the 1973 edition, rather than the 2016 reprint I actually ordered. (They did refund my money when I complained.) I did really like the pictures by John Wood, though; simple stuff, perhaps, but he takes the visuals of the television version and amplifies them by drawing them as they ought to have been, not as they were. Unlike Schwartzman's illustrations for The Daleks, he picks visually striking moments that capture the weirdness of the text.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Crusaders
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