Ghost Light
Ghost Light
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Ghost Light |
Target novelisation Ghost Light |
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| Author | Mark Platt |  |
| Published | 1990 | |
| ISBN | 0 426 20351 8 | |
| First Edition Cover | Alistair Pearson |
| Back cover blurb: Perivale, 1983 A column of smoke rises from the blazing ruins of a forgotten, decaying mansion. Perivale, 1883 In the sleepy, rural parish of Greenford Parva, Gabriel Chase is by far the most imposing edifice. The villagers shun the grim house, but the owner, the reclusive and controversial naturalist Josiah Samuel Smith, receives occasional visitors. The Reverend Ernest Matthews, for instance, dean of Mortarhouse College, has travelled from Oxford to refute Smith's blasphemous theories of evolution. And in a deserted upstairs room, the Doctor and Ace venture from the TARDIS to explore the Victorian mansion... Who - or what - is Josiah Smith? What terrible secrets does his house conceal? And why does Ace find everything so frightening familiar? |
A Review by Finn Clark 28/4/02
Marc Platt's novelisation style differs from Ben Aaronovitch's. He doesn't go in for the detailed backstories we saw in Remembrance of the Daleks, concentrating more on extra scenes and atmosphere. I've just flicked through the deleted scenes at the back of the Titan script book (snippets which reached the rehearsal stage but didn't survive through to the final programme through time pressures) and most of them were familiar from the novelisation in some form. Again, this is a lot like a Director's Cut.
This is a spooky book. Gabriel Chase on television was pretty, a credit to the set designers, but it didn't particularly evoke a haunted house. This is genuinely eerie, with Josiah being positively vampiric. It's disquieting, even subtly disgusting.
As a story it works very well, with events moving surprisingly fast. I like the brisk pace of these novelisations, though the complexity of the TV story has been retained. You'll have to concentrate if you want to follow everything that's going on. The characters are lively and actually develop and do stuff, which is also an advance on Lungbarrow and Time's Crucible. Admittedly the theme of evolution is a big help, with no one ending up the same as they began. There's less ambiguity though, with the Doctor's agenda for Ace being presented directly through point-of-view scenes right at the beginning.
The dialogue is great. The Doctor and Ace have a life and sparkle to them; novelists can sometimes drone a bit, but this has been filtered through a performance. There are some wonderful lines here, while the character interactions often sparkle. The culture shocks with Ace's anachronistic apparel are funnier than on TV (though I missed the Reverend Ernest Matthews' facial expression after being called "bogbrain").
Page 110 has Turn of the Screw in-jokes, with reference to Mrs Grose. Grrr, snarl... but actually, as in-jokes go, they're quite good ones.
Judging by page 122, I'd say it's possibly more important to read the Target novelisations than to watch the TV stories if researching a McCoy and Ace story. This was where the writers laid out the backstory that was only referenced obliquely on television, in this case "families and mums and mum's fancy man".
Marc spends more time building up the beginning of the story. Episode one takes us almost to the novelisation's halfway point. However that doesn't mean the story's conclusion is hurried or skimmed, with McKenzie's demise being disgusting (all the more so for being understated) and the fate of Gwendoline and Mrs Pritchard is possibly one of the most horrible things in Doctor Who prose fiction. That bit really got to me, possibly because I'd been drawn into sympathising with the characters almost despite myself. Gwendoline's poor confused mind gets a particularly good airing.
This is a luscious book that compares favourably with many NAs in every department, though it's shorter by a third. I reckon it's Marc Platt's best book to date, blending rich complexity with a enthralling story and rattling pace into something that's damn near perfect if you can just forget it's a novelisation.
When The Novel(ization) Is Better Than The Original by Matthew Kresal 26/8/11
It is no secret that several stories of the later years of the original series of Doctor Who suffered from edits made for reasons of running time rather than plot necessity. Ghost Light was one of the best examples of this and it does indeed remain a Doctor Who story that raises a lot of questions. Some of those questions though have been answered and have been for some time. The Target novelization of the story, published in 1990 and novelized by Marc Platt (the same writer who wrote the television story), shows that in some cases television stories work better on the printed page.
What shines through the most is the plot and the details of it lost in the television version due to the aforementioned editing. A novel (or rather novelization) by definition gives the author a chance to let the reader get inside the heads of character's and also to allow for more depth in terms of the plot. Ghost Light's novelization does exactly that. Platt doesn't do any huge in-depth background about characters, but he gives them depth by adding little pieces here and there. This means that things that perhaps weren't quite clear in television version (such as who Light really is, what's he doing and why he sets out to do what he attempts to do towards the end) are all brought into greater focus. There's also the neat addition of a couple of new scenes in the first chapter that help set up the story and a major plot revelation that comes much later in the story. The result is a story that is much more coherent.
What also shines through is the characterization. Ghost Light has the distinction of being one of the best acted of the original series stories (or at least in my humble opinion anyway) so that fact alone might be surprising. But what the novelization reveals is that not only was much of that on the page all ready but also something else. From Josiah Samuel Smith to the Reverend Ernest Matthews to Nimrod, Control and the mysterious Light itself, this novelized version of Ghost Light gives Platt a chance to shine. This is large part thanks to his descriptions for the characters, their mannerisms and the occasional change of point of view to them at just the right moment for dramatic effect. However, the characters who come through the most are the Doctor and especially Ace. This is very much an Ace story and from the new material in chapter one right through to the very end, that fact is in abundance. The result is that, despite the complexity of the plot, this remains very much a character driven story.
Yet despite all that, it moves at a good pace Those additional bits here and there have some interesting consequences. The big one is that almost half the page count is taken up with just getting through what was the first part of the television story. This is because Platt, like in the television version, builds up the atmosphere of Gabriel Chase and then introduces a bewildering array of characters within it. Yet once Ace goes underground, as it were, the story really starts moving and building up the tension for the dramatic reveal of Light before the Doctor deals with the madness that seems to consume everyone around him. In that way Platt uses the cliffhanger-centered nature of his scripts to his advantage here with the novelization being filled with perhaps more mystery and tension then its television counterpart.
Novelizations offer the opportunity to expand, if not improve upon, the original script that it is based on. From his expansion of elements of the story to rich characterizations and its pacing, Marc Platt's novelization of Ghost Light does all of that. In fact, it does more then that. It shows that, despite being a story originally written for another medium, Ghost Light is better served as novel.