Marco Polo by: John Lucarotti: The Key to the World

Marco Polo was written by: John Lucarotti based on his story of the same name.  It was the 94^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Target novels can be a great insight to missing episodes especially when they are adapted by the original author, which is the case with Marco Polo.  John Lucarotti novelized all three of his scripts for the Target Books range often from his own scripts, but in the case of Marco Polo this happened to cause a little bit of a curse.  Sadly the very few changes Lucarotti made to his original script did damage to the story in general.  Now the biggest change is that this story focuses mainly on the Doctor, so we get a lot of the characterization of Marco Polo, as seen on television in the journal entries, left out.  The reader no longer knows how conflicted Polo is about his decision to seize the TARDIS on the way to Kublai Khan’s court making him much less sympathetic of a character.  This makes it even more disappointing when Lucarotti cuts out the battle between Marco Polo and Tegana which served to redeem the character in the television script.  Now one of the Khan’s guards shoots Tegana with an arrow instead of Tegana impaling himself which takes away from Tegana’s own characterization.  That said Lucarotti is still an engaging writer and the novel is a really quick read as the journey portions of the novel are tightened up which makes the novel engaging.  It should also be noted that Lucarotti was writing the Doctor as he would in The Aztecs not as he was in Marco Polo which works really well.

 

To summarize, Marco Polo is a case of where the television story is better than the novel in almost every aspect with both of them sharing some of the flaws.  Lucarotti still gave it his best effort and writes the characters well except for the titular Marco Polo.  70/100