People tend to lump Terrance Dicks novelisations into three periods, is my understanding: his early period, where the idea of a Doctor Who novelisation was relatively brand new and he was still going all out; his middle period, where he was cranking them out, but they were solid renditions that expanded on their screen counterparts; and his late period, where they were just the scripts with "said the Doctor" stuck in occasionally.
Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two |
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Collection published: 2022 Novels originally published: 1977-78 Acquired and read: December 2024 |
I haven't read enough of them to know if this is a fair characterization, to be honest, but it does seem to me that if it is, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang and Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock clearly belong to the middle period. I don't think either of these will set your world alight, but it did seem to me that both stories must have engaged Dicks's imagination enough that, like The Pyramids of Mars (1976), he gives the stories enough embellishment and energy to bring it all to life for a reader whether you've seen these stories or not. (I've seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang a number of times over the years, Horror of Fang Rock just the once almost two decades ago.)
I am of the camp that considers Talons one of Doctor Who's best stories, and Dicks captures it on the page well, especially its characters: Tom Baker's moody Doctor and Leela's directness are both on the page, and Dicks does particularly well, I thought, by Jago, Litefoot, and Li H'sen Chang, each of whom gets some nice moments of internal characterization that complements and expands on his screen performance. I imagine there are times cramming a six-parter into (in my Essential Terrance Dicks edition, anyway) just over one hundred pages could backfire, but it works well here, as we fairly rocket through an engaging story. Dicks clearly enjoyed Robert Holmes's script and brings it to life.
He also does well by his own script in The Horror of Fang Rock, another pseudo-historical of an alien trapped on Earth. There's good period details here, and he (of course, I suppose) captures the complications of the script well. I did find the guest cast somewhat thinner, though. The lighthouse crew are strong enough, actually, but the survivors of the yacht crash don't feel very lively; I'm guessing (it's been a long time since I saw the tv serial) that skilled performers brought them to life more. Still, this is good stuff, especially the early parts where Dicks is setting the scene.
As of this writing, I've read six novelisations reprinted in the Essential Terrance Dicks range, the five in this volume plus The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977) from volume one; I don't know what happened, but Talons and only Talons contains a large number of typos—missing quotation marks, incorrect words, line breaks in the wrong position. (See the last page of ch. 12 on p. 268 for an example of the latter.) Not having access to the original book, I don't know if this faithfully reproduces an original copyedit that was not careful enough, or if it's a product of whatever OCR process converted these twentieth-century books for a twenty-first-century reprinting.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors
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