Ghost Light was
written by: Marc Platt, based on his story of the same name. It was the 156th story to be
novelized by Target Books.
The joke in Doctor Who
fandom that isn’t entirely a joke is that Ghost Light is a story that’s
too difficult to understand which is one of those little ideas that I don’t
actually agree with. As presented on
television, Ghost Light is a serial Marc Platt is putting in full of subtext. It’s a serial all about stagnation, Victorian
society is presented as rigid and impossible to change as a parallel to the
alien survey team inhabiting the house of Gabriel Chase insisting on cataloguing
all life on Earth as a stationary definition of life. Ace’s arc is also about change, letting go of
her adolescent anger while holding onto that strong sense of justice which can
be channeled into helping others (she is responsible for Control realizing her sense
of self represented in the Victorian social order as an Eliza Doolittle type). It’s there in the subtext of the television story,
it just doesn’t come right out and explain what the plot is, realizing that the
audience paying attention. What is
interesting is that because this is why Ghost Light works so well on
television even if it is compressed into 75 minutes, novelizing the story
should lessen that subtext because it makes it text. That is not the case. Marc Platt’s novelization of Ghost Light
should also be hindered by taking the first episode and making it half the book,
something that is not a problem because Platt knows exactly what he is doing
when it comes to writing a book. The prose
itself does not feel like an adaptation of a script, but an original novel.
The key to making Ghost
Light work is not reintegrating several of the deleted scenes, although
that is something that is done, but it’s just how the character work
happens. If we take the script of
everything that was filmed that still does not make up everything in the
novelization. The story is
recontextualized from the opening: it opens with Ace burning down Gabriel Chase
in the aftermath of the hate crime committed against her friend Manisha. This in the original story is a twist, but
placing it at the beginning creates an immediate sense of foreboding while the
reader makes the connection between the opening and the setting of the
story. It adds this idea that the story
itself is going to be cyclical, Ace at one point even being frightened that she
may be in some sort of paradoxical time loop.
Ghost Light is about Ace at its core and it’s telling that she is
the main focus of the novelization.
While Platt uses third person perspective and certainly does additions
to different characters, it’s Ace that gets the most. The Doctor is making this explicitly a test
for her own development and she must face her own traumatic past so she can grow,
evolve even.
The supporting characters
are equally fleshed out, the most interesting addition is a brief flashback to
the opera where the Reverend Matthews sees in their box Josiah Samuel Smith and
Gwendoline, being startled by a phantasmal light and Smith’s insistence on
staying in the shadows. It’s this
encounter that prompts Matthews to go to Gabriel Chase in the first place, he
could have picked any follower of Darwin and Wallace after all. Gwendoline is also a character presented in
the novelization to somehow be further on the edge, Platt emphasizing how
confused she is despite the performance under Smith’s influence. It makes her initial spiral parallel the
spirals of Mrs. Pritchard and Redvers Fenn-Cooper who are equally added. The relationship between Gwendoline and her mother,
like the television story is just in those final moments, but Platt deepens it
so much by bringing parenthood as a theme to the forefront. Light here is also presented as slightly more
ethereal, Platt taking advantage of the fact that anything can be achieved in
prose and not be limited by the special effects budget of a television show.
Overall, Ghost Light
surprisingly deserves its title in novelization form. It does feel like one light left on the stage
after Gabriel Chase should have been abandoned long ago. The satire of both the Victorian period and 1989
Britain (the stagnancy of government is a jab at the rule of Conservatism at the
time) feels all the more pointed here while the characters just create the
depth because Platt is more interested in writing a novel and not a
novelization. 10/10.
