The Death of Art by: Simon Bucher-Jones: Oh Right, A Story Arc

I’ve failed to mention that since Warchild, the Virgin New Adventures have been dropping hints as to a larger story arc involving the mysterious Brotherhood and an overarching threat of psychic powers going througkh the novels.  I would have mentioned it if it hadn’t been just a background note in several of the books, being interrupted by the trilogy of novels (Death and Diplomacy, Happy Endings, and GodEngine) dealing with the departure of Bernice Summerfield as companion, and only just being mentioned in Christmas on a Rational Planet and Return of the Living Dad.  It’s an arc that really isn’t well defined in terms of story, but today’s novel, The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones, brings the arc to the forefront so it can go towards a conclusion in two novels time.

 

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.