The arc is supposed to be
a dark closure of cataclysmic, The Death
of Art, while implying that if the Doctor doesn’t succeed will cause
disaster, doesn’t really have the gravitas required to pull this off. The novel is a pseudo historical taking place
in Napoleon’s France where a race of artists called the Quoth are endangered by
the Brotherhood, a nefarious organization of psychics who want to harness the
Quoth’s psychic powers. The plot is
really what lets the novel down as it’s got some great ideas. The Quoth are a decent alien and the
Brotherhood is plenty mysterious for an entity, but the plot just sort of
happens without any real notion of prelude or anything to build up. Ace apparently has some sort of interference
that allows the plot to get rolling, but once it is rolling it just feels like
standard Doctor Who fare that comes across as extremely boring and complex,
without really having anything profound to say.
Simon Bucher-Jones writes
a story that is too complex to be understood, much like a lot of my complaints
with Time and the Rani, having the
Doctor not take part in the narrative which does work in the novels favor. There are too many characters with not enough
character identity to do much of anything of note. The villains are interesting, but they don’t
come across as intimidating in the slightest while the heroes suffer the same
problem. This is a book where nothing
really happens and we have no idea of what to do. The Doctor barely features which is fine if
Bucher-Jones let the companions take the forefront of the narrative push. Chris gets to run around pretending to be the
Fifth Doctor as future Missing Adventure, Cold
Fusion takes place just before this and Roz has things to do. Not sure what exactly half of these things
really were, but she was there. They at
least get to profess their love for each other once again which is well
written, but leaves the reader wanting more.
That’s really how you can describe this novel as making the reader
wanting more and therefore there really isn’t much else for me to do for this
write up. Bucher-Jones doesn’t get
Doctor Who and the novel is simply boring and bad. 20/100.
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