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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!
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