Let’s cut to the chase here, especially after Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom. This is horrible. There’s a delight in pain and torture here than goes beyond giving the action a visceral edge. Count Federico at one point his captain across the face in frustration, and Hinchcliffe, feeling this isn’t quite enough, describes the crop ‘leaving a vicious red weal where it struck’ (3), while a post-torture Marco is not just ‘limp and motionless’ but with a ‘face streaked with tears and dirt’ (4). Now, bits quoted from the novelisation don’t really look so bad in themselves, but it’s the way that relentlessly through the whole book it’s the visuals of the violence that get dwelt on rather than the sensation, the victims objectified to create an unsettling action-adventure equivalent of the male gaze – the schoolboy-sadist’s gaze. There’ll be no Jackanory moments here.

    You could argue that this is all an attempt to give history real sense of threat, to communicate how truly brutal the past can be. But then Hinchcliffe adds in lines like the Count declaring ‘I want to spit in his sightless eyeballs!’ (5), which manage simultaneously to be cartoonish and conjure up violent, ghoulish images. Rather than being visceral, there’s a lasciviousness to the writing here, and you can only imagine the excitement Hinchcliffe anticipates from his readers as they pass their eyes down the contents page to see chapter titles such as ‘Execution!’ (6) and ‘Torture!’ (7). What’s more, he actively brings a sexual element into all of this when he describes Hieronymous quivering at the thought of the ‘undisguised degeneracy’ in which he’ll be able to indulge once he rules the world (8). ‘What pleasures […] could be denied him’ indeed?

    It all gets especially unpleasant around Sarah, who spends much of the book getting battered, bruised, drugged, hypnotised, endlessly manhandled and rendered mute. Barely moments after the Tardis lands in San Martino, a large hand is ‘clamped’ over her mouth and she’s ‘dragged away roughly’, struggling even to breathe (9). Next she’s seen, she’s ‘inert’ (10) and little more than a ‘bundle’ (11). By the time she wakes up, she’s ‘tied and gagged’ (12) and then swiftly starts ‘losing control of her senses’ again, blacking out (13) so that, by the time she’s on the sacrificial slab, she’s reduced again to a ‘defenceless form’ (14). Having escaped for a bit, she returns to the tunnels to be ‘roughly seized’, out comes the gag once more and ‘thick ropes […] bind her wrists and arms’ (15), before she’s again ‘bundled’ (16) and ‘half pushed, half dragged’ for ‘what seemed an eternity’ (17). She gets a brief moment to reflect that she’s ‘Cold, bruised, and utterly exhausted’ before returning to a ‘semiconscious haze’, Hinchcliffe throws in the bonus that ‘her body [is] numbed by the tightness of her bonds’ (18). Finally, in what basically constitutes a repeat, she’s ‘still bound and gagged’ when she comes round (19) and is this time not just ‘lying limply’ but ‘prostrate’ (20).

    It’s so bad, even the doubles entendre aren’t funny anymore. When Hieronymous holds her head with a ‘gentle but insistent’ grip to ‘force […] down her throat’ something Sarah ‘couldn’t prevent herself from swallowing’ (21), the innuendo elicits uneasiness rather than a titter. And, whilst I’ll admit, an apologise for, the fact that I know the double entendre is largely of my own subconscious making, it is fuelled by the male gaze descriptions and the hint of sexual depravity that Hinchcliffe has definitely included in the text.

    What else? Well, Hinchcliffe clearly has some specific and individual ideas about Time Lords. It’s now ‘part of [their] job to insist on justice for all species’ (22), all the while assisted by some ‘telepathic power’ (23) and ‘guided by inner forces not fully understandable to humans’ (24). This unfortunately rather takes the wind out of the sails of the declaration that the Doctor fights ‘oppression and tyranny’ wherever he finds it (25), what with that now being basic operating procedure for all Time Lords.

    And then there’s the attraction between Sarah and Giuliano. I have a vague memory of this coming across on screen too, but I can’t find anyone else who even references it and it doesn’t seem apparent in the script. Unfortunately, that attraction hardly penetrates deep. Aside from the ending, it gets two moments, the first when Sarah realises ‘she [finds] him very attractive’ (26) and the second when he finds ‘himself strongly attracted to’ her (27); she’s seemingly keen on his ‘soft firm voice’ and pre-Renaissance outlook, though I’m sure the fact he’s ‘handsome [and] young’ (28) helps, he likes ‘the delicate nape of her neck, her lustrous hair’ and the fact that ‘There were no other girls quite like her in San Martino’ (29). Plus I’d always been convinced Giuliano was already taken anyway (30).

    It’s quite a nice set-up actually, especially in Sarah’s penultimate story and, in the context of the novelisations, shortly after the Doctor was reflecting on her departure in Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin and just before he’ll do so again in Doctor Who and the Face of Evil (31), to show her feel ‘a deep longing to stay’ (32) at the end. It suggests a sense of growing up, of reaching a stage of maturity ‘the Doctor would not understand’ – as demonstrated by the way he actually is aware of what’s going on and his reaction is a bit of playground teasing (28) – and clashes with his ‘itchy feet’, and lends an inevitability to the fact she’ll soon leave the Tardis on way or another.

    It would be nice to think that Sarah’s closing reflection on the Doctor’s immaturity of nature and lifestyle was in some way a comment on the try-hard violence of, predominantly, the first half of the book. It would be nice to think the book was floating the idea that Sarah’s growing tired of taking part in a genre that has so little seeming space for her as anything more than a peril monkey, keener to ‘share [the] task’ of ‘reparation’ after distressing events than to just get caught up in some more elsewhere. Thing is, as I said, there’s not really enough attention given to Sarah and Giuliano’s attraction for it to balance all the pseudo-pornographic pain and violence of the first half. At least it means Doctor Who and the Zarbi’s no longer the worst novelisation of the range.