"Timewyrm: Exodus"

The New Adventures
By Terrance Dicks
August 1991
Virgin Publishing

The pursuit of the Timewyrm leads the Doctor and Ace to London, 1951, and the Festival of Britain -- a celebration of the achievements of this small country, this insignificant corner of the glorious Thousand Year Reich.

Someone -- or something -- has been interfering with the time lines, and in order to investigate, the Doctor travels further back in time to the very dawn of the Nazi evil. In the heart of the Germany of the Third Reich, he finds that this little band of thugs and misfits did not take over half the world unaided.

History must be restored to its proper course, and in his attempt to repair the time lines, the Doctor faces the most terrible dilemma he has ever known...

If this blog continues long enough, I'm going to have many, many opportunities to say unflattering things about the writing of Terrance Dicks. This, however, is not such an occasion. Instead, I want to start by explaining why, no matter how many terrible novels he writes, he will always be something of a hero. It's not because he served as Script Editor for "Doctor Who" during the Jon Pertwee years. I'm not a big fan of the Jon Pertwee years. It's not because he wrote a bunch of "Doctor Who" scripts after leaving the Script Editor position. It's because he wrote dozens of novelizations of "Doctor Who" stories.

These were not great books by any means. They were slim, easy-to-read adaptations of previously televised "Doctor Who" stories, and they are credited (with some hyperbole, perhaps) with teaching a generation of British children to read. The most important thing about the novelizations was that they gave young fans a way to explore the history of the series before the days of home video and DVD. The novelizations were published by Target Books, which was bought out by Virgin Books prior to the launch of the New Adventures. I'd like to say that it was only natural for Terrance Dicks to be asked to contribute to a new range of original "Doctor Who" novels, but that's not nearly strong enough. It would have been unthinkable not to ask him.

And the result is this novel, a direct continuation of the Timewyrm saga introduced in "Timewyrm: Genesys", but also with its very own story to tell. From a simple and effective hook of Nazi Britain recovering from the hardships of the Second World War, this book launches into a frantically paced adventure through the history of the Nazi Party, and the psychologies of its most famous members.

This latter point doesn't get nearly enough credit. If you'd care to look around the internet, you'll find no shortage of praise for this novel (frankly, I think this goes too far, but I'm not here to quibble). But the one element of the book that seems to garner the least attention is what makes the novel so special, in my view. In the course of telling a straightforward adventure story about heroes and Nazis, Dicks also gives us a refreshingly candid look at Hitler's inner circle. The book goes beyond the simple platitudes to give us a detailed account of the personalities and drives of people like Goebbels, Himmler, Goering, and even Hitler himself. This is a dicey area, obviously, but Dicks is careful in how these characters are presented. He neither demonizes nor mythologizes them, instead allowing each to contribute in uncomfortably human ways to a rich depiction of the banality of human evil.

Another dicey area is the idea that Hitler was being aided and manipulated by alien powers. The book suggests that Hitler's meteoric rise to power was the result of two factors. First, the Timewyrm, who became psychically trapped within Hitler's powerful mind, and the War Lords, who were amplifying the effect of Hitler's oratory in an effort to restart the ridiculous plan for galactic conquest which the second Doctor foiled in "The War Games"¹.

Unfortunately, these two overlapping but largely unconnected stories tend to interfere with one another, which rather disturbs the pacing of the book. It's really a novel made up of several interrelated pieces, and the transitions can be somewhat abrupt. It's hard to shake the suspicion that the Timewyrm was uncomfortably shoehorned into a book that really just wants to be a sequel to "The War Games", but Dicks makes it work by dangling the Timewyrm as a red herring for much of the novel, before finally allowing her to take the stage.

All in all, this is a highly readable and breezily entertaining World War II adventure. While there isn't a great deal of depth, the historical detail fulfills much the same function, making the story far more fulfilling than a simple romp through the plot would otherwise be.

¹ "The War Games" was written by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. As we'll see in the fullness of time, Dicks has a strong propensity to use continuity from the TV series in his novels, and he seems particularly eager to use continuity from his own stories. I suppose that's natural enough, but I thought I'd mention it.