20 February 2018

Review: Doctor Who: Revelation by Paul Cornell

Acquired March 2010
Read May 2017
The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Revelation
by Paul Cornell

The last Timewyrm novel is not only the best of the Timewyrm novels, but one of the best Doctor Who books full stop: Paul Cornell's debut is a thoughtful examination of the characters of the Doctor and Ace, especially the way the Doctor is sometimes forced to sacrifice those around him, a theme Russell T Davies would draw from throughout his television tenure, especially in "The Parting of the Ways" and "Journey's End." There's so so much going on in this book-- for a lesser writer, a sentient church would be the whole point of their novel, but for Cornell it's just one of many elements-- which means it captures in prose what the television programme was doing before it was cancelled. This is the novelistic equivalent of overloaded, ideas-and-character-driven stories like Ghost-Light, Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival, and The Curse of Fenric, and yet it's undeniably a novel; there's no attempt to structure this story like it could have been broadcast on tv, thank God. Cornell captures the voices of the seventh Doctor and Ace with perfection, the other characters feel like real people caught up in extraordinary events (another harbinger of the RTD era), and the climax especially is a thing of beauty. I didn't always understand what was going on, but I didn't mind.

Next Week: The Doctor and Ace encounter vampires plotting a Blood Harvest!

No comments:

Post a Comment