From: Sean Gaffney Subject: The Shadows of Avalon: Review by the Happy Guy Date: 27 Feb 2000 00:00:00 GMT Message-ID: <89a0pq$ccl$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.1 x40.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 207.171.147.53 Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun Feb 27 02:05:48 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) Well, the arc is over, and it's not what people expected, but that's OK, because lots of stuff is tied up, and lots of characters act different than we've come to expect, but that's cool too, cause they're all finding themselves, and you watch the plot carefully as it goes around and around and it comes out here. I'm dizzy. O_o SPOILERS!!! If you are someone who, like me, reads the book threads on r.a.dw, you pretty much knew a lot of things about this book before you read it. The spoilers were all there, being debated by M.H. and Imran and William December and Jon and etc, and sometimes they were spoiled and sometimes not. So surprise turned out not to be much of an impact here. But does that make it a bad book? Well, no, it's an excellent book. Follow my lead... PLOT: Of necessity, there's a lot of tying up of loose ends here. Of the non-loose end stuff, it works pretty well. Avalon's a wonderful idea of bringing old myths into reality, complete with metaphors as kings and Silurians as villains. The war itself wasn't as successful for me, but I'm not really into big techie action sequences. THE DOCTOR: Absolutely brilliant from beginning to end. Just as Interference had the 3rd Doctor in an 8th Doctor situation and lost as to what to do, this has the 8th Doctor in a 3rd Doctor war, and his inability to cope marks a good 3/4 of the novel. Once he DOES figure it out, he's a whirling dervish of McGann energy, saving the day and laughing while doing it. You leave the book grinning like an idiot. FITZ: After being the focus of two books in a row, Fitz gets to be in the background for once. He does get some nice lines, though, and it's good to see that the Parallel 59 girl hasn't QUITE been forgotten yet - can I hold out hope he'll go back to Skale after Ancestor Cell? COMPASSION: Oddly enough, also gets little to do for the first 2/3 of the book. Odd in that the entire war is fought because of her. However, at least we have the beginning of her evolution, and she seems to have picked up some cool emotions on the side. I feel a certain relief that the Doctor apologized for trying to make her more human... his treating Compassion like a sociology project bothered me, and it was refreshing when he redeemed her identity as a person near the end. Glad we get a few more books with her in her new form. (She's a TARDIS, btw. Damn, there goes my chance of this review making Smith's page. ^_-) THE BRIGADIER: This was absolutely lovely. I know lots of people hate the portrayal, but I see it as Paul trying to wrap up his own previous plots. The Brig said it himself when he said that stories without endings aren't as satisfying. His rejuvenation in Happy Endings wasn't an ending, it had no closure. This does. And I feel reassured that he'll be OK. ROMANA: Whoo boy. Romana's gone all 7th Doctor on us. Ruthless, determined, a tad callous... and yet that small smile when she sees the Doctor has escaped reassures me somewhat. I wonder what she'll do next? VILLAINS: Suffering a bit perhaps from similarities to the Planet Five villains, these two manage to work mostly as they're totally gonzo insane throughout 90% of it. Gandar's redemption, oddly enough, felt a little rushed for me - which made it ring somewhat hollow. OTHERS: Mab is a wonderful character, and I love her relationship with the Brigadier. Margwyn was good also, but could have used a little more screen time to help us get into his head more. And Cronin was great! I was quite surprised and pleased to see he stayed on in Avalon. STYLE: Paul said this was a trad novel, and this is where you can see that. The style is very basic, descriptive, Dicksian prose - and works fine, IMO. There are enough metaphors dotting the landscape as it is without adding to them in the writing. OVERALL: Not perfect, though it would be hard-pressed to be considering all of Lawrence's backstory roiling through it. But a commendable job, with a noble Brigadier and a wonderful Doctor who discovers what drives him once more. Woo hoo! 8.5/10. --SG --Next: Tomb of Valdemar, based on Finn's recommendation... Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.