First published 21 November 1974*, which puts it between Planet of the Spiders and Robot

 *http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Abominable_Snowmen 

"Path of obedience, indeed. Victoria had her own ideas about that"

It’s book number one! It’s the first out-of-time Doctor in the novelisations (perhaps in any form), building up nicely to the TV show shedding the trappings of the last five years! And, disappointingly, there’s not a lot to be said about it. Dicks is as usual immaculately clear and pacy in his rendering but he doesn’t seem to be making any special effort for this special occasion.

One possible exception here emerges, based entirely on my reading of a line in Running Through Corridors, on how, where the TV serial throws suspicion around the monastery a bit about who is the Great Intelligence’s agent, the novelisation makes it clear from the start that Padmasambvha is the inside man and plays Khrisong’s attempts to solve the situation through this prism. This might be because Dicks feels there is greater tension in the reader being ahead of the characters but I feel there’s more evidence that he views the alternative as too complicated in the way that the book’s many Jackanory-style moments are employed to make sure the reader is definitely up to speed.

The sphere’s journey across the monastery in search of the deactivated Yeti gives the longest running example of this: it starts with an assurance that it will ‘get there in the end’; includes reminders, such as ‘“That sphere couldn’t have moved off on its own” […] the little silver sphere was doing exactly that’; and provides a final reinforcement after it’s happened - ‘the catastrophe they feared had already happened’. Hypnotism, however, seems to be the most complicated aspect of the story to Dicks’s mind, with strict reminders of how people have been influenced (‘Thomni believed he was speaking the truth—his visit to the Inner Sanctum had been wiped from his mind’) and exactly who’s influenced who and in what order: ‘The Abbot Songtsen was indeed busy about his preparations. Obeying the orders placed in his mind by Padmasambvha, who was himself performing the wishes of the Great Intelligence they both served’. It would appear that Dick’s special effort for this special occasion comprises of decluttering the stories of the past. Which meant I had to find something else to catch my eye while I read this.

What’s thrown into greatest relief, then, by this first step outside the Pertwee, and therefore the Letts/Dicks, era is Dicks himself. It’s easy on TV to pass over the way he has a very particular view of the Doctor, partly because of how the character is so filtered through the actors and other creative figures and partly because he won. It feels more obvious in the books, largely because he’s the only writer so far to not call him Doctor Who. In fact he stresses that the character’s ‘known only as the Doctor’, making him rather more ‘mysterious’ than the surname Who does (which manages to be simultaneously mundane and, well, just crap) and proving substantially less awkward when he is treated as a figure from legend: ‘I waited so long, Doctor. I knew you would come, and save me from myself...’.

Like Pertwee, this Doctor can carry himself with authority (when he chooses) and possesses a selection of abilities beyond those of a bog-standard human, sensing ‘the presence of some alien evil’, capable of ‘amazing strength’ and able ‘to tamper with the mind’ to similar effect as the Great Intelligence. There’s even a hint at the power to change history’s course, revealed to be in his reach but beyond humanity’s in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks: ‘Man cannot alter his destiny’. However, he’s less obviously heroic compared with the third Doctor – ‘he considered going straight back to the TARDIS’ – and more contradictory in his nature, one minute acting ‘like a small boy’ and another revealing ‘something of the serenity of the holy ones’. Speaking of which, his ‘space vicar’ aspect is no longer so didactic, influencing attitudes rather than teaching specific behaviours (‘Don’t give up, whatever you do […] It’s a splendid thing to have a dream’), and this less Anglican approach allows him to seem genuinely ‘amazed’ rather than just patronising when reacting to Jamie and Victoria’s ignorance of the ghanta.

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But more than the Doctor, Dicks creates the role of the companion as it stands for much of the 70s and 80s. This has some problems. The most obvious is that, as Phil Sandifer observes, ‘He’s crap with women’. And, just to make sure you don’t think he’s being harsh, here’s Terry himself: ‘Somewhat to my disgust, there was the onset of feminism’. Even as a joke, and it must be said he does look like he’s barely concealing a wry smile as he says it, it does suggest he’s not overly concerned with how female characters might translate as role models. There are many passages in Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen that make you think he wasn’t joking, from the Doctor’s unspoken collusion with Jamie to keep his fear of danger from Victoria at the beginning to the Doctor’s pronouncement of Victoria’s uselessness in his own head at the end (‘she was only being included in the expedition because she would find it even more frightening to be left on her own’). And Dicks definitely isn’t just setting the Doctor up as overbearing, what with Victoria’s expressions of fear, her seemingly physical reliance on Jamie when faced with danger, tugging at and clutching him, and her interior monologue at the Yeti cave which so closely mirrors the Doctor’s when approaching the Inner Sanctum: ‘Victoria decided that she was more frightened of being left outside than of going in’.

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Luckily, that Dicks quote from the Time Warrior DVD can be extended - his disgust at feminism is apparently due to not being able to get away with just strapping the heroine to circular saws and railway tracks any more. In other words, he’s just annoyed at having to do more with the female companion than simply use her as ‘a plot device’, a tendency seldom more obvious than when Victoria escapes her cell and then is ‘uncertain what to do with herself once she was free’. Yes, she’s a peril-monkey who does things simply because the plot needs them to happen (an idea inserted into the series’ DNA by Sydney Newman before it had even started) but, importantly, she does things rather than just having them done to her – even the most transparent example of her lack of agency, where she gets hypnotised by the Great Intelligence to keep begging to leave the monastery happens because she’s conspired to be ‘the first in many hundred years to look upon the face of Padmasambvha’.

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She is in fact a character motivated by curiosity, thrill-seeking (she actually jumps up and down with excitement) and such a sense of ‘mischief’ that the monks dub her a ‘devil-girl’. Ideally she would tread a constant tightrope, ‘half-fearful, half-fascinated’; sadly, she manically bounces between the extremes. However, this is a massive improvement on both Hulke and Letts, both of whom have featured strong female characters in their books (Miss Dawson got an improved presence as did Miss Travis in Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters and Doctor Who and the Dæmons made Miss Hawthorne the alter-Doctor; Dicks, meanwhile, managed a slight neutering of Anat) but obliterated the female companion (completely in Hulke’s case; Letts, meanwhile, simply reduced Jo to a simpering flesh-lump of loyalty).

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Phil Sandifer’s defence of Dicks is that, despite the issues in his worldview, his ‘tendency to shy away from the definitive’ allows a ‘pragmatic ambivalence’ that ‘lets him change his mind and move forward’, which I interpret as his basically saying that Dicks’s instinct is to always keep his options open, never committing to fully to projecting his own attitudes and able to adjust to his audience (I say interpret; I mean rephrase). I’d go further. Dicks won’t allow anything to compromise a story and here, stepping outside the Pertwee era for the first time and finding himself confronted with a female companion who must act of her own accord in ways which drive the plot forwards, he accepts that and embraces it as fully as he did the Controller’s change of mind in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks. If Victoria’s going to do adventurous things, she’s going to be an adventurous character.

And so, despite a pair of opening descriptions which very much get the companions the wrong way round, Dicks can’t help but make Victoria a contrast Jamie; it’s Jamie who loyally hunts for the ghanta as the Doctor instructed but it’s Victoria who actually allows the story to move forwards by finding it and it’s Victoria who’s ‘entranced’ to find herself in the Himalayas whilst Jamie parochially asserts the patent untruth that ‘there were bigger and better mountains at home in Scotland’. Yes, Jamie gets his moment to shine, leading a group of monks in capturing a Yeti, but he only does it because the Doctor requests it, never actually engaging in the situation except at his friends’ prompting. Victoria, meanwhile, can’t help but keep engaging with her surroundings just to keep at bay the seemingly constant threat of encroaching boredom that comes from within her.

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This isn’t such a surprise if we consider Dicks’s view of the companion as opposed to his of the heroine: ‘the companions have a practical use in that it enables you to split the story from time to time’. This makes the companion a second protagonist when they are separated from the Doctor and it is Victoria, not Jamie (who I don’t think ever leaves his side), who enjoys that privilege. Accordingly, since she is performing the same function as the Doctor in her plot-strand, she has moments which mirror him: playing on Jamie’s wish to not appear afraid when she wants to explore, much as the Doctor later does with the Great Intelligence when he wishes to confront it; or needing to be talked into a more sensible course of action when her enthusiasm inclines another way.

Whatever Dicks may say (and, indeed, whatever he might do, as there are some horrible bits around Victoria in here), by making the leap that the second protagonist should be a mini-Doctor (one that shares his characteristics just not his knowledge and experience) he rewrites Newman’s ‘kid’ into the most frequently reoccurring future companion-type, a bit low in the mix with Sarah and Leela, a bit high in the mix with K9 and Romana and then an actual character arc for Ace (as possibly intended), Rose and Clara.