Castrovalva by: Christopher H. Bidmead

 

Castrovalva was written by Christopher H. Bidmead, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 76^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Now the last novelization I wrote a review for was Logopolis and like the two television stories in pair, they are like night and day in terms of quality and presentation.  I don’t necessarily hate Castrovalva on television, but it is a very slow story and lacks the atmosphere of Logopolis that really made that serial and novelization work.  You may find this review of the novelization of Castrovalva just a bit short is because this is a novelization where it feels as if nothing is changed.  This is perhaps the platonic ideal of translating the script into a novel literally, something that makes it difficult to really take any time to discuss.  The only change is again a bringing to the forefront of the major themes, this time the themes of recursion, with quite a lot of time given to the early TARDIS scenes to actually explain recursion between Tegan and Nyssa.

 

The relationship between Nyssa and Tegan is something people apparently ship and it might just be this novelization that gave rise to that.  This is at least apparent since this is the story where they are together on the page the most and have this very deep friendship despite not actually really knowing each other.  Bidmead does a lot to explore this relationship through the first three-quarters of the novel, especially since the Doctor doesn’t actually get to do much.  There’s an almost interesting attempt to lean into the absurdity of some of the plot, with some interesting little additions referencing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass which while not dealing with recursion have, I guess, some of the contradictory elements that Bidmead was going for.  The big problem here is that the pacing is poor, it’s a book from a serial that really didn’t have enough plot to fill all four episodes and that translates back here in the novelization which is a shame, the other Bidmead novelizations I genuinely liked.

 

Overall, Castrovalva is kind of just a big pile of meh.   The prose is a bit bland and the pacing is completely off from an already slow paced television serial and there isn’t anything to make the tension of tense scenes work.  It’s perfectly fine and does the job I guess, but isn’t one I’m going to be revisiting anytime soon.  5/10.