Published: 1990

Edition read: Target first, 1990

Coolest Cover: I think Alistair Pearson’s cover is a bit too busy this time- an awful lot of elements crammed into the chessboard design.

Purple Prose: The parodies of Norse sagas and the Arabian Nights are particularly special.

Childhood Recollections: None- I didn’t have this until I was lucky enough to find a copy of this with the SFX special which came out a while back.

Ramblings: If there’s one particular pleasure which comes out of an ongoing project like this one, it comes when you discover that a story which you particularly enjoyed on transmission has turned itself into a very good book as well. It’s rarer than you might think, but equally when the story is as full of ideas and influences as ‘The Curse of Fenric’, the end result is frankly very special indeed. One of the reasons that I’ve become reconciled to Sylvester McCoy’s last season in particular over the years is because of that very combination of ideas, literary influences and the ability to conceal a very traditional Doctor Who story in unfamiliar trappings, but it’s as if in adapting his scripts for Target (and turning them in at nothing less than a very creditable 188 pages) if anything, Ian Briggs takes the four episodes which were transmitted on the BBC as his starting point for teasing away at the characters and their relationships and exploring the events behind throwaway lines. A great deal of what was only partially comprehensible or not rationalised at all in the cut-down version of the story as televised is explained in print, and it’s infinitely to Briggs’s credit that it’s a little bit like reading one of the books of The Lord of the Rings after reading one of the films in that with the book in hand, you suddenly realise exactly why a particular character is thinking or reading in that way.

Character is one of the book’s strong points, albeit far from being the only one. Given the freedom of the printed page, Briggs explores not only the tragic and destructive relationship between Millington and Judson, but hints at more going on between Jean and Phyllis than first meets the eye, touches on exactly why Miss Hardaker is so keen to be seen as respectable and so adamant about the nature of Maiden’s Point and illuminates the sadness of the Wainwright family tree. It’s one thing to explore the psychology of the more sympathetic characters or innocent victims, but it’s more of a challenge to answer the question of why Millington is the way he is, for example; like most of the wolves of Fenric, the key to his mindset is the loss of love or a loved one, in most cases a parent or child, but in Millington’s case all the darker because it’s of his own making. What comes out of the book particularly well is the sense of Fenric’s taint running through the generations- it’s made clearer through the names which pour from the Ultima machine right through to Ingiger (the significance of the name also being rather better explained here than in the televised episode) and the suggestion that the destiny of a few families over several hundred years have been building to the events of the story. There are a few bits of tinkering- Briggs must have been unhappy with the climax which sees Bates and Vershinin developing a homo-erotic subtext of their own, as neither of them survives Millington’s gunshots- but generally positive development of what was already there, and the revelation that the Russians were guided to shore by an agent taking orders from Moscow casts a different light on another character which isn’t even mentioned in the televised episodes.

If I haven’t mentioned the Doctor or Ace much yet, it’s because (curiously for a story which is pivotal in Ace’s development and growth) it’s because much of the pleasure in reading the book comes from the context and supporting characters. However it’s particularly clear from the way in which Briggs adapts the final scene that the intended significance of the story for the character is that this is the point where Ace effectively begins to become an adult and accept her conflicting emotions, reconciling rage and grief with joy, love and ultimately sexuality (the phrase "a whorehouse of enjoyment" deserves to be used more often, I think). His handle on the Doctor is less overt, however this is probably unsurprising as the story is structured around the Doctor meeting the various characters in turn and then allowing events to come to a head and Fenric to manifest itself. Then again, it’s also fair to say that the characters in Briggs’s adaptation do begin to take on a life of their own above and beyond being a representation of what was seen on television and becoming something more complex than the original scripts demanded. With its textual interpolations and darker characterisations, Briggs’s adaptation forms an interesting halfway house between the Target novels whose ambition was restrained by their television originals, and the more ambitious original fiction which was to follow- and indeed, by having to compress its content into a Target-sized page count, the overall effect is focused, intelligent and expansive.