Ian Marter’s back, which means the story gets a lick of Hinchcliffe whether it likes it or not. Let’s save that for later though, since it turns out to be quite a fundamental flaw by the novelisation’s end. What’s actually most noticeable for a lot of the book is how funny Marter’s happy to be, embracing and embellishing the most Williamsy bits of the story.

    Let’s start with K9, in whose peculiarities Marter seems to delight. It’s made explicit that he can’t help but deliver reports on his progress even when there’s no one around (3), an aspect of his ‘chattering away to himself’ at most times (4) and nothing at all to do with a scriptwriter wrangling with these short solo scenes. What Marter zeroes in on is K9’s prissy self-importance, made clearest when his declaration that ‘humanoid emotion’ is beyond his understanding (5) gets quickly undermined by his stealthily scarpering at the first sign of danger, leaving a bemused Romana to reflect on his instinctive grasp of fear (6). Further to his hypocrisy, K9’s pomposity is undercut by his glaring gaps in understanding, failing to grasp tone when preparing to detail to the Doctor everywhere he’s been (7) and thinking of Romana’s innards as ‘circuitry’ (8). These might not be the most sophisticated bits of comic business, but they ensure K9 is a character rather than a simple combination of exposition and firepower.

    On a similar note, Marter captures Romana’s approach to her first adventure well, focusing on her spectacular disinterest in anything that doesn’t involve the key to time. Indeed, he ups her onscreen disapproval of ‘wasting time’ on a ‘stranger’ (9) by making that time ‘valuable’ and the stranger ‘insignificant’ (10), and he inserts additional incidents, Romana warning the Doctor off meddling in ‘petty crime’ (11), reminding him of their ‘assignment’ (12) and contemplating going it alone in the face of the Doctor’s seeming eagerness to embrace distractions (13). Marter even puts in the effort of creating a greater sense of life on Ribos, describing the ‘clustered dozens of ramshackle lean-to hovels’ and the ‘ragged, fur-clad figures’ on this icy, pseudo-medieval and fuel-poor planet, just to emphasise Romana’s lack of engagement (14).

    Unlike on TV, Marter hints at some hypocrisy in Romana’s stance: her reproaching the Doctor’s lack of focus, just after his (admittedly bizarre) carelessness has endangered the Locatormutor (15), sits oddly with her readiness to use it ‘as a bludgeon’ earlier on (16). Less murkily, Marter also emphasises the way in which Romana’s exclusion of everything but the assignment would have led, left to her devices, to failure, her focus on ‘the Crown of Ribos’ (17), addressed only in passing on TV (18), is both emphasised and receives a pay-off at the end, Romana castigating herself for a ‘lack of perception’ (19).

    Beyond the regulars, Marter also embraces the comic interplay between Garron and Unstoffe. To give just one example, the scene where Unstoffe hams up the plan to con Vynda Ka adds (or makes explicit – I’m not entirely sure) the detail that Unstoffe’s presence in disguise as the relic-room shrieve is a complete surprise to Garron (20), leaving him to ‘only stare at his grinning young associate in silent disbelief’ (21), then struggle to hide his ‘anger and dismay’ (22) and finally stamp on his foot in an effort to silence him (23).

    This being a Marter book, however, as I said at the start, we must eventually turn the discussion to crowbarred-in visceral unpleasantness. Where things go wrong is following the death of Binro. Now, I should make clear that the change of tone is not unique to the novelisation – El Sandifer observes of the TV story that ‘Binro's death spark[s] off a shockingly violent conclusion’, even adding that the final act ‘would have been considered terribly violent and over the top if Philip Hinchcliffe were still the producer’ (24). But let’s look at Binro’s death: ‘a searing volley of photon bolts […] blew away almost the whole of one side of Binro’s frail body’ (25). This is a character described by Sandifer as ‘kind, altruistic, […] rationalist and intelligent’ (26) and by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker as ‘perhaps the most fascinating and well written [sic] of all the characters’ (27). It could be argued, as indeed I would argue, that the fact of his death, the death of the character the reader is most likely to feel for most keenly beyond the regulars, is enough to signal shift from romp to bloodbath. Instead, Marter insists on blowing away half his body and emphasising how unnecessarily gruesome this is with a reminder that he’s ‘frail’. This isn’t giving Binro’s demise extra weight; this is spicing it up with a bit of extra gore.

    Not everything about the violence of the final act is bad. Sticking with Binro, Marter captures the bleak nastiness of Binro’s outcast existence on Ribos beautifully, showing how the ‘wasted’ (28) old man is subject to casual violence, as when a ‘hulking young Shrieve’ (29) grabs his neck ‘in his huge paw’ and threatens to snap it, a far more potent threat than the shrieve’s rather remote TV speculation that Binro’s ‘neck […] would snap like a dry twig’ (30).

    Marter also does good work establishing the sadistic danger of the Graff Vynda Ka, adding a wonderful scene where the Graff tries to find entertainment in two scorpions into fighting each other and, when they won’t, disappointedly kills them with a shovelful of hot ash (31). There’s also some lovely little bits where we see Sholak, himself far from the most peace-loving character, step in to stop the Graff going too far (32), a task in which he ultimately fails, left only to ‘[ease] the laser-spear from his master’s hands’ after Graff has killed yet another person out of nothing but frustration (33).

    You could even argue Marter makes the destruction of the shrivanzales feel gratuitous in a way that elicits unexpected sympathy for the monsters and highlights the callousness of the Graff and his men as their ‘relentless bombardment’ (34) leaves nothing but ‘a twisted tacky mess’ (35). But that gratuitousness, even if here perhaps serving character and tone, brings us back to Binro’s slaughter.

    The problem with Binro’s death is that it’s difficult to come up with a reading that gives it any decent purpose. The key, I think, is the fact it’s not Binro that’s described as ‘frail’, but his ‘body’. And not in a way that leaves the reader to feel the sudden loss of the character, reduced to nothing but a corpse in an instance, but simply so that he can become an object on which the effects of the weapons can be described in gleeful detail. It’s ugly, and its only purpose is to find a thrill in the violence rather than a shock. This is the problem with the visceral Hinchcliffe approach that Marter employs far more indiscriminately than the Hinchcliffe era ever did on screen – there are times when it just doesn’t serve the story to paint the violence vividly, and Marter doesn’t seem to have noticed that, under Williams, Doctor Who’s telling that type of story more and more.