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.

The final book in the Timewyrm tetralogy is unlike any other Doctor Who story I've yet experienced. For starters, one of the characters is a sentient church, there's an English village on the moon, and much of the story takes place inside the Doctor's mind. That may sound gimmicky but this a complex and ambitious novel that examines the Doctor's grief and anguish through the previous incarnations who live in his mind. This is a challenging book to read as it has a lot of characters and facets and leaps from one to the other rather quickly, but a very satisfying story that pushes the bounds of a Doctor Who adventure. It's also very influential as the the revived television series has clearly mined this novel for ideas (and the author Cornell has also written screenplays for the show). ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/781202.html

Cornell's first novel, I think, and pretty good stuff, winding up the Timewyrm tetralogy that kicked off the Virgin series of New Adventures of Doctor Who. A decent effort, certainly on a par with the first and second books of the series for quality (the third being pretty dire). The Doctor has to confront his enemy, the Timewyrm, by hunting through the nooks and crannies of his own mind with help from his own past incarnations (and I liked the Doctor/Doctor interactions, not usually done this well). Many of the characters spend much of the book taking sanctuary in a church which is their only protection against a bizarrely hostile environment outside - a setting Cornell of course used again in the Ninth Doctor TV story, "Father's Day". ( )