Doctor Who and the Visitation by: Eric Saward

 

Doctor Who and the Visitation was written by Eric Saward, based on his story The Visitation.  It was the 70^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Visitation as a television story is one of those pseudo historicals that are quite good but if we are being completely honest was a good candidate to be among the first batch of Peter Davison stories to be novelized.  Eric Saward took the task of adapting the script himself and the book hit shelves six months after the original serial finished broadcast on BBC One.  This is the fourth novel from Eric Saward I’ve read, though actually the first he had written.  Eric Saward as a novelist seems paradoxical, Doctor Who and the Visitation is perhaps the best of the four books of his that I have read.  Perhaps this is because there wasn’t much time in between the serial airing and the necessary publication date so Saward really only had time to convert the stage action into prose without any of his additions.  This doesn’t have the trouble of attempting to be a Douglas Adams style farce where there was none, nor does it feel like this is a novelization done out of necessity and not interest.  It’s just a fairly straightforward adaptation of the original serial with few additions to really convert it.  This has happened before for a novelization, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot had Terrance Dicks adapt Robot in less than two months from when that serial finished airing and still made it a pretty fun adaptation.  Terrance Dicks as an author is a workman who is incredibly easy to read while Eric Saward is not.

 

Eric Saward as a writer doesn’t seem to understand entirely how to write an actual novel, his prose being incredibly bare bones.  I listened to the audiobook release of this by Matthew Waterhouse and Waterhouse is genuinely a great narrator despite having little material to work with.  There is also the general sense of Saward’s violent tendencies in terms of storytelling, the family at the beginning is killed in a particularly brutal way and there is this sense of the Terileptil threat being all the more violent in the novelization.  There also is little care for the female characters, Adric of all people being the one who gets some development with Saward foreshadowing the events of Earthshock with a desire to go home.  It’s not much characterization, but at least it’s something when the rest of the cast get nothing.  Okay that’s not technically true, Richard Mace gets some expansion, though without the television performance backing him up you can really see more of Saward’s tendencies as a writer.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Visitation is just one of those novelizations that are particularly fine.  It came out about a year before VHS releases for Doctor Who began and it’s saddled with a writer who is just so clearly uninterested in doing anything with the material it’s almost entirely unremarkable for what it does.  5/10.