Timewyrm:Revelation

Summary: 8.5/10 In the final chapter in the Timewyrm tetralogy, the Doctor has his final face off with the Timewyrm. The battle starts in an English Village, with stops on the moon before it's final destination. And in Perivale, Chad Boyle smashes a young girl named Dorothy's head in. A very influencial New Adventure, with the same insight into the Doctor's character that would follow in Paul Cornell's other books.

To give my comments some context, I finished this book up last Friday while I was waiting for Steve Treylen to pick me up for our trip to meet Paul Cornell in Minneapolis for the weekend. I thought I might as well finish up all of Paul's books before I met him. So if you think I've been bribed...well, tough. :)

I've been extremely happy with Paul's books before, and while I have only read Timewyrm:Genesys so far in this arc, I thought I'd go ahead and read this one. I picked up Timewyrm:Exodus over the weekend, and I have no plans of purchasing Timewyrm:Apocolypse. However, except for one character from Exodus, Revelation doesn't require that you've already read the other books in the series.

The real virtue of this book is in characterization -- it's Paul's greatest strength, and he writes the Doctor and Ace perfectly. He might just be able to pull off a book with absolutely no plot and only characterization.

In Revelation, we literally get into the Doctor's head. Inside, there are five of the six other Doctors. "Five of them made it, I wonder what happened to the other?" It allowed for great scenes with the Doctor's dead companions and dead UNIT soldiers -- I particularly liked the burning Adric. The other Doctors were ok, even if I sometimes thought that the third and fifth Doctors were a little too close to a parody.

Ace was also delightful -- I'm not fond of what later NA's do to her, but she's great here, still the young woman of Ghost Light and Curse of Fenric. Her reaction to her own death was interesting, and her feelings (and obligation) towards the Doctor were well written.

The resolution of the plot wasn't quite to my taste -- while I liked seeing the fifth Doctor's release similar to dealing with the Doctor's guilt, the cosmic nature of the final battle with the Timewyrm was a bit too much for me; even if the battle with the Timewyrm must, by definition, take mythical proportions. I'm also not particularly fond of the Doctor "looking after the details in hindsight." -- and while this will later backfire on him in later books, I'm still not comfortable about it here.

I'm still viewing the New Adventures from the eyes of a Doctor Who fan now starting the New Adventures. As such, Timewyrm: Revelation is a good book to start with; I now want to get a chance to re-read Paul's books in order, and if you read them in order to begin with, all the better. Conceptually, all of his books tie together, all of them redefining the Doctor and his companions.

8.5/10