The Awakening by: Eric Pringle

 

The Awakening was written by: Eric Pringle, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 95^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Awakening is one of those stories that I always forget exists.  Nestled in the first half of Season 21, it’s essentially a rewrite of The Daemons despite Eric Pringle denying he had even seen or read Doctor Who and the Daemons.  It’s also the last in the long line of televised stories that terrorizes a member of Tegan Jovanka’s family for dramatic effect.  Pringle pitched the story as a four part serial and even began scripting it as one before script editor Eric Saward asked him to tighten it down to two episodes before production.  The novelization brings me to the conclusion that this is one Eric Saward decision that was the right move because Pringle ends up writing a novelization coming to 144 pages.  Certainly not the longest novelization published by Target Books, but is definitely longer than many of the novelizations of the time.  Pringle is adapting his own script for print and is an example of barely parting with a single word of the original story.  It means that the two episodes of the story, roughly 50 minutes of material, are expanded out far beyond their breaking point while Pringle pads the word count with attempts to add inner life to the characters that sadly amounts to them mostly being basic emotional descriptors.  This is made further odd by Pringle’s prose sometimes describing the action not in the terms of a novelist but in the terms of a film director meaning that the descriptions try to have the reader in the action as if they are the camera.  It becomes incredibly clunky to read, for instance when the first crack in the church wall appears the description is at length and feels like it is missing the music sting to indicate the audience seeing something the characters are not.  These drag the story out across the ten chapters of the book that are also structured around several scenes which is just adding to the pacing problems.  Yes, multiple scenes in a chapter is normal, but the way Pringle presents it feels like each scene is trying to end its own chapter.  The characters say the same dialogue in the script but so much of The Awakening feels sanded down and somehow thinner than the already fairly thin televised story.

 

Overall, the only conclusion is that the Peter Davison two-part stories really don’t service novelizations particularly well.  The Awakening is actually the strongest of the three but that does not actually say much, something that is a surprise since novelizations like The Edge of Destruction, The Rescue, and Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment all work quite well.  4/10.