Tony’s feeling a bit witchy.
You can tell almost
immediately that Terrance Dicks probably enjoyed writing this novelization.
You can tell because from
very early on, it’s clear that he wants you to enjoy reading – or indeed
listening to – this novelization. The tells are all there – the lives of even
minor characters are decently fleshed out, so that you feel that, even if you don’t
know them, you’ve had a sufficient peek into what drives them and makes
them tick, just before Dicks, as is his relentlessly jolly wont, kills them off
in some horrible, horrible way.
That’s not as easy a trick
to pull off as it sounds. It’s been tried in the recent history of Who and it ended
up feeling mawkish and manipulative by degrees (Yes, Kerblam!, we’re
most especially looking at you). Dicks was always a master of the combination
of giving just enough information to get the mood or motive of a character
across so we’d buy into them, and then killing them off, mostly to mess with us
but crucially also to deliver some advancement in the storytelling. In Image
of the Fendahl he practically gives us a pre-credits death, before bouncing
us into the business of mysterious human skulls where they should be
impossible, time scanning equipment, and a living version of death, a gestalt
creature made up of twelve sluglike, tentacle-mouthed Fendahleen, and the core
of their being, a previously rational scientist named Thea Ransome. There’s
something gleefully demented in Chris Boucher’s original TV script which, to
his credit, Dicks maintains in the story of these deathslugs who are fatally
allergic to salt (the irresistible idea that the story emerged from the
practice of killing actual slugs in this way, and possibly the idea of them
wanting some payback, flits through the mind when listening to it – especially
when the Doctor rather casually does a thing which was only rarely done in
Classic Who, though more and more in New Who in the Russell T Davies era,
dropping in the notion that the Fendahl was a creature from the myths of the
Doctor’s own people, and later confirming it when we understand that the
records about how the Time Lords dealt with their slug infestation have
been time-looped so they can’t be accessed). The story, like some others that
would come after it, blends ritualistic mumbo-jumbo with scientific flapdoodle
and creates something which is a heady mixture of both, but in which against
all the odds you never for a moment doubt the reality of what you’re told or
shown – there’s a quite gruesomely high body-count in this story, and that
helps convince you of the seriousness of what you’re dealing with, even in the
face of relative absurdity, with power-hungry dark witches in the basement,
salt-dispersing white witches in the village, time-tampering scientific
archaeologists with really dodgy names and more besides.
Dicks, in bringing all
this to his novelization, does not in any sense hang about. It’s not a rushed
delivery, and it also never feels too thin or brief in its coverage of the
world or the dangerous scenario with which it’s faced, as for instance, his Robots
of Death novelization rather did, but it belts along, taking us in a
reasonably logic sequence of events from the Doctor and Leela being forced down
to Earth by the effects of Professor Fendelman’s time scanner, through the
sudden escalation of events once the riddle of a too-ancient human skull is
uncovered, through witchcraft one way and another, saving the world from
temporal implosions and ultimately throwing a skull into a supernova.
As you do. Week after week
on Classic Tom Baker Who. Because why the heck wouldn’t you?
Louise Jameson’s reading
of this story matches her tone and speed to that of the novelization, so you
get quite a jolly romp, with the quirky Time Lord and his ‘noble savage’
companion rushing into danger with a relatively cast iron sense of right and
wrong, mixed with an underlying darkness always pulsing along through the beats
of the story’s structure – a combination which more or less defined Jameson’s
time on the show as Leela, and which not without reason continues to make that
period one of the fandom’s firmest favourites.
It’s rare that the sense
of good and evil has been as distinctly painted as it is in Image of the
Fendahl, because for all it deals with gestalt entities and distinctly ugly
sluglike creatures, its fundamental philosophical position is that the Fendahl
is simply…death. ‘How do you kill death?’ asks the Doctor at one point, and
it’s a question that seems ultimately unanswerable – which means the best that
can be done is to keep killing off individual Fendahleen so the Fendahl itself
never reaches full realisation…and then of course to throw the skull that
houses its existence into the nearest supernova you can find. It’s not death
for the Fendahl, exactly, it’s more the Naughty Step Of The Fendahl,
where the incarnation of death itself can think about its actions in a nice
warm environment until someone or something sees fit to break it free again.
In addition to this
black-and-white battle of life versus death though, the human stories are what
keep us enthralled in the story: Thea Ransome, guilty of nothing but falling in
with a moderately psychotic crowd; Max Stael, probably destined to be a wrong
’un no matter what walk of life he fell into; Dr Fendelman, his destiny
probably manipulated since the dawn of human ascendancy to reach this moment so
he could unwittingly serve the power of death; Ma Tyler and her grandson Jack,
trying to merely get along when the ultimate evil drops into the lives.
You should of course feel
entirely free to speculate on your own headcanon in which Jack Tyler grows up
to be the father of a son named Pete, and a granddaughter named Rose, and that
the whole of New Who as we know it is actually a dark Fendahl plot to engineer
another encounter between the Fendahl and the Doctor. You should feel free to
go entirely nuts with that. But meanwhile, the audiobook release of Image of
the Fendahl is punchy, well-rounded, delivered with verve both by Terrance
Dicks and by Louise Jameson, taking you back to one of the several ‘golden
ages’ of Doctor Who and blending science and witchcraft together in a way that
absolutely shouldn’t work – but absolutely does.
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