I have to agree with you on this one. I had read this book and put it on the shelf a few weeks ago. Yesterday when I was looking for it, I realized I couldn't remember if I'd finished reading it, because I couldn't remember any of the conclusion. I don't think you can chalk all of that up to my failing memory, either...

Only yesterday Simon was defending this book to me on the grounds that he'd put a couple of cats in it. Even _I_ found this a slightly flimsy justification for several hundred pages of utter tedium.

Still, Chris doing his Doctor-imitation was quite fun, I suppose.

Okay, I can agree with that. The Chris as Doctor part, not the cat part.

Definitely a grind to get through. The problem with psi-powers is that everything happens in the mind and therefore has to be described in great detail. As a result the 'show don't tell' creed that is usually drummed into writers disappears into a morass of prose. Add in a dull plot and characters you don't care much for and there's a very good reason this one doesn't sell for daft amounts of money on eBay.

Of course, being boring as hell doesn't stop Lungbarrow from selling for daft amounts of money on eBay...

What exactly happens with the whole psi-powers arc, anyway? I mean, I have a hazy idea that a psi-obsessed Brotherhood pop up in So Vile a Sin and get their masterplan (something to do with making the whole human race psychic??) foiled as per usual, but how exactly do they tie in with the previous dozen (or whatever) books? Did the TARDIS keep steering the Doctor towards psi-related people (and computers) all the time as a 'hey, deal with the Brotherhood' hint, or were the Brotherhood manipulating him all along?

The DWM review announces that this is part of 'the category that might be called "Recent Historical Horror". Other examples of the form, such as The Man in the Velvet Mask or Christmas on a Rational Planet are typified by being set on Earth in the last few hundred years, having sadistic villains, and incorporating a generous amount of visceral body-horror....The Death of Art...flows well, and is the most palatable of the form so far' - how DARE you! Christmas WIPES THE FLOOR with this incomprehensible tedium, and even Velvet Mask is infinitely preferable, even though it has dead cats and this has live ones...

And if the DWM reviewer, who's actually PAID REAL LIVE MONEY to understand such things, is confused about 'who is affiliated to which, or indeed whether [The Brotherhood and The Family] are simply two names for the smae organisation', how the hell are us plebs supposed to work it out?

'Dickens had started looking for Henry as soon as he had recovered from his experience with the proofs' - what, he just started randomly SEARCHING LONDON for one boy? 'but it was afternoon before he found him' - and actually FOUND HIM?!

'Twenty years later he told some of the story to a drunken Wilkie Collins' - why the hell didn't he tell his creepy out-of-this-world experience to ECCY?

'Telepathy was not speech, and even when a thought was phrased as a sentence it travelled in a cloud of images and surrounding sub-thoughts' - since WHEN!

'The rift should have been the swirling blue-green oil-on-water colour of the Time Vortex' - what the hell makes you think that Time Vortex colouring remains consistent? Just take a look at the ever-shifting-even-into-stupid-clouds New Who opening credits.

'Of course, he did not exactly take house calls' - you'd think he'd've given his exes some way of contacting him, at least if they're GUARDING A TIME RIFT.

'She had read the 50-year diary that he had pressed into her hands in their clumsy, hurried goodbyes' - what the hell did he do THAT for!

'Earth, the perennial home away from home, it sometimes seemd, for any race with a bad temper, battleships and bad haircuts' - yes, but WHY!

'Just time for a snack and more sightseeing, then. There was a clockwork figure in Le Quartier de l'Horloge she wanted to show Jason' - but Jason isn't here!

'Chris thought it was a reaction to the cheerfulness of Bernice's reunion with her father, to the eviddent success of her marriage, as if the Doctor was the sad one on the stairs at the cosmic party' - but Benny's dad tried to use her to start a nuclear war! And her marriage is about to end in divorce! And why the hell should seeing an ex-Companion being happy be any skin off the Doctor's nose? And if he DOES feed on human misery, he's still got Chris and Roz, hasn't he?!

Why does Roz call the vase 'old' and then say 'it looks new'?

'The Doctor would start explaining in a minute. He could no more bear not to than a human could switch on a respiratory bypass system or regenerate' - on the other hand, this IS McCoy, the Doctor who's always using secrets to manipulate his Companions.

'Sometimes she thought that the only reason he kept her and Chris around was so that he might explain things' - close but no cigar. (Impossible Astronaut: 'I'm being extremely clever up here, and there's no-one to stand around looking impressed. What's the point in having you all?')

'The women, whose only hope lay in hooking a fashionable man and smashing his brains out on the fishmonger's slab of matrimony' - hmm. Anyone else getting the impression Simon's a bit soured on marriage? (And wouldn't becoming the mistresses of said men be the wrong way to go about this? In the 1880s?)

Roz drinks iced water whilst serving at a BAR? What the hell's wrong with all that lovely alcohol? And is the Paris water SAFE to drink in the 1880s?

'Roz knew when the Doctor was right. When his lips move, he thought' - REALLY? Isn't Roz the CYNICAL one? Why does she trust my Doctor more than I do? And if she really feels this way, how come she's defying him to go to her death in a couple of books' time?

And now CHRIS is thinking that 'If the Doctor was right, and he invariably was' - what's the MATTER with these people!

The (Seventh!) Doctor’s got one of Jo Grant’s old hairpins in his pocket? Did Jo even HAVE hairpins?

'Head aching with other people's secrets' – if other people’s secrets gave the Doctor headaches he'd've probably REGENERATED under the onslaught by now.

'It would be interesting to find out. Not all the dry philosophies of Gallifrey had ever solved the question of whether Fate or free will ruled the cosmos' – but surely the Doctor settled THAT question to his own satisfaction (if not ours) in Inferno?

'She still found it hard to believe [the paper] was made of pulverized trees. Flint-axe technology. Back to basics' – but she hung around with Benny for years and Benny was (until her MUCH more recent books n'audios) a big fan of the paper book and didn’t even seem to have HEARD of the electronic variety...

'Ordinarily the Time Lord gift that let her speak French or Ancient English did not extend to written translations' – that may fit in with Old Who and the rest of the novels, but it doesn't fit with New Who.

Roz has a 'delectable shape'? Don’t remember anyone ever mentioning THAT before.

'He remembered the young Belgian's eyes, shrewd above an incipient attempt at a moustache' – you didn't just sneak in a Hercule Poirot reference, did you?

Chris has some ultra-complicated way of contacting the TARDIS ('You talked at me for twenty minutes before I left, explaining this, and I still don’t know how the TARDIS is doing it') involving an electrical signal in a 1880s Paris phone line, which is picked up by the TARIDS sensors and mapped to a like-dimensioned area of the TARDIS’s interior. I've said it before and I'll say it again – MOBILE PHONES, PEOPLE!

To be continued...

Why does Roz call the vase 'old' and then say 'it looks new'?

She may be familiar with the style and know it to be antique, yet be surprised at how new it looks.

Roz drinks iced water whilst serving at a BAR? What the hell's wrong with all that lovely alcohol? And is the Paris water SAFE to drink in the 1880s?

If she were to drink alcohol on the job, she would soon be too drunk to perform said job. And a barmaid has to keep her wits about her or the patron would soon be all over her, literally.

As for the water, if it came from a well it would probably be safe enough, and if she's been drinking it for a while with no adverse effect, she could be reasonably sure of it.

She may be familiar with the style and know it to be antique, yet be surprised at how new it looks.

She's in THE TARDIS, she ought to be accustomed to such things by now.

If she were to drink alcohol on the job, she would soon be too drunk to perform said job. And a barmaid has to keep her wits about her or the patron would soon be all over her, literally.

Roz is an Adjudicator - she can control her alcohol intake and beat up French guys at the same time. And she WAS thinking of trying the absinthe earlier...

As for the water, if it came from a well it would probably be safe enough

Ah. I suspect I have an exaggerated belief in the filthiness of historical France and I know EXACTLY where I got it - the Reign of Terror novelisation.

'She was starting to regret never having had a timepiece chipped into her retina' even though 'not even a chipclock could cope with time-zones' - why would anyone have one if it can't even cope with time-zones?

'I called him Lucifer when I thought he might be as black as the old gentleman, if you'll pardon my frankness' - how did the blind man know Roz was black?

'Cross-hairs and a squint, what a way to aim a weapon. Twenty years' instinct expected it to self-correct in her hands' - if Roz grew up with self-correcting weaponry how come she's legendary as a lousy shot?

'The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a small hard red ball. "Cricket...It probably won't bounce very well. It's been in a vacuum"' - he saved THAT ball from Four to Doomsday? WHY? (And ARE cricket balls supposed to bounce? And how WOULD vacuum affect them?)

'The children they built were perfect and so beautiful that all clamoured to make their own children after that design. The perfection, however, was that of stasis, and the great Blight of stillness and beauty spread out over us until even normal young tortured themselves into the frozen immobility of the Beautiful Quoth' - hang on, you already KNOW what caused the Blight?! Whatever happened to 'the causes were unknown'?

'If only they knew they were building a model of the Universe' says the Doc, of Russian dolls. Uh?

Chris had a magician at his fifth birthday party? That stupid tradition endures till the thirtieth century?

Why don't Roz's super-rich aristocratic family terraform their family's ancestral-seat asteroid?

'Chris dug into the steak, secure in the knowledge that the earliest strain of BSE was almost a hundred years in the future' - they know about BSE in the thirtieth century?

'The Doctor was immune to nausea' - hmm. That's a point. I never noticed.

The Doctor looking up at Mondas: 'A billion souls wrapped in their machines, coming to Earth to die, if not at his hands then with his connivance. Less than a hundred years hence, a genocide written unchangeably into space-time blinked balefully at him. Perhaps he should start looking at the gutter' - oh come on, it's not like Hartnell DID anything. Or the loss of Mondas seemed to affect the Cybermen much. And were there really a billion of them? It was one city according to Spare Parts.

'Soon there would be no more excuses and the Oldest would demand reunification. They did not understand the horror that Truthseeker had discovered' - so explain it to them!

So when Emil is sobbing that his new body 'itches like harsh wool on the inside of its skin. When I move, its reach is wrong. The face in the mirror isn't mine' the Doctor responds 'Believe me. I do know. I'd like to tell you it gets easier, but...' - I thought he always loved his new bodies!

'Henri withdrew the needle from the agent's eye and licked its cold damp length' - ah yes, I was wondering when someone would lose an eyeball. This IS a Who novel, after all.

Adjudicators are trained to be pain-resistant? How? Do they torture them or something?

'Even the stuff the Doctor did sometimes, the hair-raising things Chris had read in the TARDIS logs, like taking a lighthouse and a couple of diamond cuff-links and making a laser cannon, seemed like a friendly burlesque of the sciences Chris took for granted' - the TARDIS keeps logs of the Doc's adventures since WHEN! And they weren't cufflinks. And are you saying Horror of Fang Rock is UNSCIENTIFIC in some way...?

Why would the thirtieth-century Earth Empire ban Lovecraft? If his work is half as boring as its Who-rip-offs no one'll be reading it by then ANYWAY.

'Trying to be the Doctor's fifth self was making him want to blow something up. Possibly the Doctor's sixth self had felt the same' - except, of course, that Sixie never tried to be Davisonish...

'Pierre clamped his hand over Lucifer's mouth and held his own breath' - would that really work to shut a dog up? Surely it'd just bite your hand off and start barking?

'They tell me he put out his own eyes with a table knife' - why have ONE eye-gouging when you can have two? That should totally be the NAs' slogan.

The Doctor 'realized he did not have enough peaceful memories' - the ONLY thing he can think of is helping Benton whitewash some huts? I think this is forgetting there's plenty of downtime between the adventures the BBC bother filming. Didn't Christmas on a Rational Planet claim he once spent twenty years rearranging the books in the TARDIS library, for example?

'Great Intelligence? No, I'd expect to find a band of obedient human zombies running around Paris paving the way' - what, and not Yeti?

'Twice students darting between bookshps almost collided with him, only to veer away at the last minute with pupils narrowed to pin-points. He was concentrating on not being seen' - the Doctor can do that?

'A bad joke occurred to him: why is a Time Lord like someone with a Viking ancestor? They've both got Berserkers in their blood. The nanobots in his bloodstream, part of his Time Lord heritage, could cure Emil of the Quoth...' - NANOBOTS? THAT'S the great Time Lord secret of regeneration?

'What would be better, the end of Earth - and the collapse of the established timeline - or the genocide of a race of aliens who had never meant any harm' - I can't believe the Doctor is even thinking about this! For one thing cos a non-genocidal solution is pretty simple and for another thing, OF COURSE you save Earth! It's your favourite planet and everything!

'The eyes of the little head burst in red balls of froth' - yup, you just can't have too much eyeball-popping, can you. But hey, at least no oochies were harmed in the writing of this book...

...Oh.

'A wail arose. A sound like cats being tortured' - that's a horrible thing to say about a) cats and b) the sacred TARDIS dematerialisation sound.

'The Doctor said a rude word in ancient Betelgeusian' - well, it makes a change from Old High Gallifreyan but still, the books' repeated claims that the Doctor swears a lot is rather odd.

Yes, guys, the Dreyfus affair was totally due to aliens meddling in our affairs! Gods forbid humanity should be forced to take credit for ANYTHING it has ever done...

'Gravity, the softest force in the universe, a force so weak that a hand-held magnet could overpower the amount of it generated by the whole Earth' - is that TRUE? How does it work?

There are different controls for the outer and inner TARDIS doors? Since when?

Just like the first-time-round, Chris's attempts at a gnomic inscrutability are fun but the rest of it is a dull incomprehensible mess.

And ARE cricket balls supposed to bounce? And how WOULD vacuum affect them?

I looked up what cricket balls are made of, a cork core, a layer of tightly wound twine and a leather skin. In principle they should bounce as well as a baseball. Vacuum should not affect them too much, although all these materials are quite porous and contain lots of air that a vacuum would remove, changing their textures and elastic properties.

'Gravity, the softest force in the universe, a force so weak that a hand-held magnet could overpower the amount of it generated by the whole Earth' - is that TRUE? How does it work?

It's quite easy to demonstrate. Get yourself a paper clip and a small magnet. Put the paper clip on a table. The entire mass of the Earth is generating the gravity that's holding it down. Now use the magnet to pick up the paper clip. That little insignificant magnet produces enough magnetic force to lift the clip against the gravitational pull of a whole planet.

OK, so how come it's so hard for spaceships to get out of planets' gravity wells?

Why don't THEY use a magnet or something?

Because gravity acts on the magnet also. It has to be supported in some way or it will just lie uselessly on the ground.

There is something called a space elevator that could completely change the way we go into space. Basically, it's a cable anchored to a massive geostationary satellite serving as a counterweight at one end and to the Earth's surface at the other. Motorized modules could then climb up and down that cable, making access to space much easier and affordable. The main obstacle to overcome is finding a material strong enough to withstand the great tension such a cable would be be subjected to. Such materials are now being invented and interest in building a space elevator is rising.

Here is the link to the Wikipedia page on the subject if you fancy some light reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

There is something called a space elevator that could completely change the way we go into space. Basically, it's a cable anchored to a massive geostationary satellite serving as a counterweight at one end and to the Earth's surface at the other.

Oh, I know all about THAT.

Well, I've listened to the Great Space Elevator Companion Chronicle, anyway.

Bookwyrm:

'The book is called The Death of Art, so what exactly is it that kills art? Answer: photography. Which is profound and everything but, given that photography is never mentioned again, that's a very thin strand to draw your title from' - tee hee.

'Bucher-Jones habit of interchanging characters' first names and surnames randomly when the scene changes without reminding you that they're actually the same person...[is] made worse by the fact that Chris is going under [a] pseudonym...whilst simultaneously pretending to be the Doctor and then is worsened again by a sequence of body-swaps that transfer one character to another's body. The Grandmaster...eventually ends up being no less than four of the characters in the book, some of them at the same time. With all that going on, dropping a character called "Doctor Tardieu" into the novel and not having it be the Doctor in disguise seems not so much like poor planning as deliberate maliciousness' - Yes. This.

'What on earth is up with the Roz torture porn?...Not since Deceit have we had such puerile lesbian kink for the male gaze' - ah. I hadn't realised it was Deceit levels of bad but...fair point.

'Scenes happen, then further scenes happen with almost no connective tissue. It's as though the author didn't want to be bogged down in the tedium of actually leading us through the plot but instead just wanted to get back to writing more continuity jokes in the nineteenth century' - ah. THAT would explain a lot.