Enlightenment

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Enlightenment

Author	John Lydecker
Published	1984
ISBN	0 426 19537 X
First Edition Cover	Andrew Skilleter

Back cover blurb: In response to a warning of great danger given by the White Guardian, the Doctor sets new co-ordinates and the TARDIS materialises on the heaving deck of an Edwardian racing yacht. But the Doctor soon discovers that this is no ordinary yacht - and no ordinary race. Captain Striker is competing for an unusual prize - 'Enlightenment.' The crew will be lucky to reach port safely - but with such a prize would they be lucky to win?

• Almost As Enlightening as on TV by Jason A. Miller

Almost As Enlightening as on TV by Jason A. Miller 3/10/22

Barbara Clegg, the first woman to write a novelization, and still one of only four women to author a book under the Target banner, doesn't waste much time establishing herself as a superior author. She hits the ground running in Enlightenment, her first (and, as it turns out, only) novelization. Her very first paragraph neatly prefigures and summarizes the entire plot of the book to come:

" 'Check!' There was satisfaction in Turlough' s voice as he moved his queen into position. He had his opponent on the run now, and very soon the white king would be cornered and completely surrounded".

After this great start, I had high hopes for the rest of the book. It's Clegg writing without all the padding or other silliness imposed on her scripts by Eric Saward. The Guardians wear headdresses on their heads here, not birds (none of the Black Guardian trilogy novelizations ever mention the birds), and Captain Wrack's Part Three direct-to-camera cliffhanger rant (which Lynda Baron nailed, by the way) is not here. Jackson, one of Captain Striker's crewmen, is less featured in in the book, since many of his TV scenes were Saward-added padding not original to Clegg's story. The Part Two ending (end of Chapter 6) is also missing Mark Strickson's cliffhanger acting and shouted dialogue, which I rather miss, actually.

Clegg does add the sort of creepiness to the Eternals that wasn't possible in studio in 1983. Tegan's cat-and-mouse game during her first meeting with Marriner, belowdecks, is properly unsettling, with Marriner appearing unexpectedly, and having eyes that were like space, "limitless and empty". But the book does feel highly truncated. A lot of dialogue exchanges are condensed into simple prose, notably the Doctor and Turlough's introduction to Striker's crew.

Turlough, at least, benefits from Clegg's prose, in the final story of his introductory trilogy. Clegg tells several scenes from his sinister point of view. He laments that his personality brings out the bully in others, and his newfound faith in the Doctor upends his personal philosophy to "look after himself first and not fall too much into the trap of caring too much about anybody else". Even in a non-adversarial moment, he "could not resist a momentary smile of pleasure at the Doctor's discomfiture." He reflects that he "was not quite the coward that he always claimed to be". And Clegg clearly pinpoints the moment where he stops asking the Black Guardian for help and calls instinctively for the Doctor instead. So even though three different authors adapted Turlough's first three TV stories, and looked at him through different lenses, his on-screen story arc is preserved pretty well.

In lines that didn't make it to TV, Clegg milks ambiguity out of Turlough's final act of heroism:

"Although I wasn't sure for a minute which of us you were going to push," [the Doctor] said softly to the boy. "Neither was I" was the enigmatic reply.

"[A]s his eyes came to the face, [Turlough] got the surprise of his life. Captain Wrack was a woman. She was also beautiful, with white skin and auburn curls, and a smile."

Even worse, Clegg's treatment of Mansell, the one black Eternal, is pretty patronizing, if not outright racist, and the paragraph describing him is pretty darned uncomfortable to read, even given that it was written 35 years ago. I'm not going to quote it.

There was only one moment in the book, actually, where Clegg writes directly from what I assume had to have been her own direct, personal experience:

"For the first time, Tegan felt that she could cope. There had been other young men boringly concerned about her in the past. She was on home ground. 'Thank you. You needn't have been' she said, dismissively. The squelch did not work on Marriner. He ignored it, and simply continued to state good own feelings, which appeared to be quite impassioned. 'I missed you' he said hotly. 'I was concerned.' He looked into her eyes. 'I am empty without you. That was enough for Tegan. 'Please go away,' she said firmly. But none of her usual ploys seemed to work. Marriner still went on. [...] She did hate emotional scenes, particularly when she could not return the emotion."

Clegg doesn't do too much to improve on the TV visuals -- not that the TV episodes need improving -- but I quite like her narration of the Part One cliffhanger reveal, and Wrack removes Turlough's chains, having them "glimmering to nothing under her hand". She also seems to mock the Eric Saward-penned ending with the Guardians (" 'This whole thing has become more like a boardroom meeting than ever,' Tegan thought hysterically").

Also, while we get zero insight into the character herself, Wrack is still pretty awesome in print, befitting Lynda Barron's superlative TV performance. Wrack gets expanded dialogue; we learn the ghoulish secret of how she discovered wine from the mind of an Earth buccanneer captain. And there's a fun moment where "Rage restored the Doctor, more than any amount of resting would have done".

And a last note. All the teeth gnashing over Leee John's performance as Mansell? He's just as deliciously over the top in print as on TV (check out his big Part Three cliffhanger moment, here reprinted early in Chapter 10). If the book is based on Clegg's scripts, John was playing the part exactly as scripted. Exactly. As. Scripted.