Terrance Dicks: Timewyrm: Exodus

I can still remember my surprise when I first discovered what Terrance Dicks looked like. Target Doctor Who novels had been one of the staples of my youth, allowing us in those pre-video and UK Gold days to read those stories that had been transmitted before we were aware of Who or even before we were born in the case of many of them, and Terrance Dicks was the God of the Target novelisation. There were other authors, of course, and that prompted many playground arguments/discussions over whether the Ian Marter who wrote the books really was the same one who played Harry Sullivan. But Terrance was the name everyone knew, his name on the cover a promise that inside there would be 12 chapters of pure escapist fun, with a cliffhanger every three chapters (or sometimes two, if he was adapting a 6-episode story) and everything wrapped up in around 150 pages.

All I knew of Terrance Dicks was a name and that he had a few staple phrases for describing the Doctors - Peter Davision was always a 'young man with a pleasant open face' is the one that sticks - but my image of him was as some distinguished old man, probably a retired schoolteacher with a resemblance to Jon Pertwee, a pleasant, avuncular English gentleman. So, when BBC 2's Doctor Who Night revealed him to be an East Ender who looked as though he'd stepped out of The Sweeney rather than Goodbye, Mister Chips, it was rather a surprise. It was somewhat akin to the surprise I felt when Exodus turned out to be a surprisingly good book.

Exodus is proof that Who can be adult, but still keep all its old sensibilities. This is the same Doctor and Ace we know, but this time the adventure they're in isn't confronting some tinpot dictator on a barren colony world, this is them plunged into one of the darkest spots of Earth's history and dealing with it head on, not just being confined to some small scale action while the big history goes on unheeded in the background.

It's interesting that one of TV's most well-known series about time travel should have a paradox at its heart. We see the Doctor roaming across the universe, overthrowing tyrants here, helping revolutions there but all the time we're told he can't interfere with Earth's established history - we can see the Daleks thwarted in 2150, but their role models, the Nazis, have to remain in power. Dicks manages to find a way to square this circle, in a similar way to how Quantum Leap - another series cursed with a similar paradox - managed it. The Doctor might not be able to change our history, but he can make sure it stays on course and prevent something worse from happening.

It's this worse history we're presented with at the start of the book, as the Doctor and Ace arrive in a rather squalid London of 1951, witnessing a Nazified Festival of Britain and then finding the pressures of the time getting in the way of their attempts to discover what went wrong and put it right. We get to see the Seventh Doctor that had begin to appear on TV, ready to face evils head on, plunge into the heart of them and destory them from within. This is a Doctor who's not afraid to disguise himself as a Nazi and later even become a friend of Hitler himself to try and get time on the right course.

And from there, the scenes that follow within 30s Germany are superbly written. Dicks has clearly done his research into the nature of Nazi society and captures the all-pervading sense of fear and paranoia that surrounded the Nazi upper echelons, with the Doctor the perfect figure to throw into the mix, throwing off the careful weave of plot and counter-plot, while to find out just who's behind it all. What's more, the villain's a convincing one and an interesting trip into the past of the TV series, a chance to see what happens to those left behind when the stories finish. The real nature of Kriegsleiter's body is a particularly effective section of the book, and helps to give us a deeper insight into just what risks a Time Lord takes when they regenerate.

This is proof that the New Adventures could be properly adult books. To use an analaogy from American TV, Genesys was Cinemax adult - never mind the plot, look the breasts - while Exodus is HBO adult, the situation meeting the demands of the plot and not vice versa. It's a clear step up from Genesys, and a credit to Terrance Dicks.