From: Sean Gaffney Subject: The Banquo Legacy: Review by the Happy Guy Date: 07 Jul 2000 00:00:00 GMT Message-ID: <8k5o6f$bhp$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.1 x57.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 207.171.147.61 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Fri Jul 07 23:13:27 2000 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDhotaru_chan Newsgroups: rec.arts.drwho X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 95; DigExt) Another day, another fill-time-until-Ancestor-Cell Who novel. And a last-minute replacement, too. Would it still hold up? Well, it holds up wonderfully as a novel. And as a murder mystery in the Maigret-ish style, it's first-rate. It's only when it feels the need to be Doctor Who that things go a bit pear-shaped... SPOILERS!!! If Justin and Andy were trying to pretend this wasn't an original novel of Andy's quickly rushed into production with the Doctor and company added, they didn't do it very well. The joints show all over the book, and every time Gallifrey is mentioned or Romana's name gets dropped, you almost wince. Luckily, there's the rest of the book, as I said. PLOT: Let's ignore the whole "Gallifrey's agent has caught up with the Doctor/Compassion dying" arc. It's not a large part of the book, and doesn't mesh very well. The rest, the murder mystery and gothic horror, is a treat, with suspicions jumping from person to person, the Doctor managing to avoid being arrested by simply virtue of being dead, and oodles of repressed Victorian passions. It's only towards the end, when the whole thing feels a need to become action-driven, that it loses interest. THE DOCTOR: Surprisingly, very well written. Manages to avoid being silly or embarrassing through the entire book, yet still shows the boundless enthusiasm and need to be a hero of classic McGann. Very nice. FITZ: Also well done, even if he spends much of the book in a pout. His pathetic attempts to appear as a German forensics expert are amusing rather than irritating, and his genuine emotion at the Doctor's supposed death is quite touching. COMPASSION: Interesting way to work her into the book without adding to the female cast. Obviously she doesn't really get a lot of room to grow here, and her 'appearances' seem to be confined to the occasional cool aloofness of early Compassion. Didn't quite work like the authors wanted, but a valiant effort. OTHERS: Hopkinson and Stratford co-narrate this book, and they are perhaps its best part. With such a character-driven book as this, it's absolutely necessary to have good, sympathetic, strong reader identification. These two fulfill it wonderfully, with totally different styles of writing and reaction, yet drawn to the same woman. The others fulfill nice Victorian mystery roles, except for Simpson, who was a tad incredibly obvious, especially for a Justin book. VILLAIN: Creepy, over-the-top, and overblown. Wonderful, too. Every Who book needs a touch of Soldeed now and again. Oh, and Richard was good too. Odd that we grew to know the rotting corpse better than the man. STYLE: As I mentioned above, it's a sort of dual-first-person narration between the two protagonists, except for brief prologue and epilogues. Makes sense considering the rushed need for the book and the co-authorship. And it works quite nicely, as I said, though the fact that neither narrator is in the Doctor's party makes the Gallifrey plot read even more out of place. OVERALL: The first, oh, 2/3 of this book is absolutely riveting, a wonderful Had-I-But-Known gothic mystery romance horror novel. The ending then falls apart a bit, with lots and lots of running back and forth, and tacking on Gallifrey just to tie into the books around it. Still recommended. 7/10. --SG --who, if keeping to his schedule, would be reading Prime Time next, but --hopes you'll understand who he's putting that off till The Ancestor --Cell is devoured...^_- Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.