Read this on-line on bbc.com ... first Dr. Who novel I've read. This was pretty good; gives a lot of info on Gallifrey and background on the Doctor's "childhood" - his House and 44 cousins. ( )

"There are at least a dozen different versions of the story, but their interpretations depend on the social and spiritual needs of the times in which they were written."

A rather beautiful elegy to the New Adventures, one bursting with fairy tale imagery, dark secrets and bittersweet characters (I love Innocet). Now so much of the background it lays out for the Doctor has been thoroughly contradicted, you can enjoy it for the masterful piece of writing it is, rather than as a controversial retcon of Doctor Who's entire mythology. Marc Platt is a fine, fine writer who understands families and who understands Doctor Who. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2382137.html

I first read this way way back in the month that David Tennant took over, December 2005; it was only the third original Who book I had read after New Who began, and the only the second of the Seventh Doctor New Adventures - and I think I had seen precisely one Seventh Doctor TV story all the way through, and didn't much like it. Now, almost nine years on, I have seen all of the Seventh Doctor stories at least twice, read all 59 of the preceding New Adventures, and perhaps equally importantly listened to the Big Finish series of Gallifrey audio plays which take the Leela/Romana relationship which starts here - heck, I've even had my picture taken with Sylvester McCoy - and I have a much better sense of Lungbarrow as the capstone to one set of stories, and the foundation of another.

I have warmed to it (rather more than, say, Phil Sandifer). It's still a bit weird - the new information about how Time Lords come into being, by being "woven" on Looms, did not survive into other strands of continuity, and the Doctor's relatives here (other than Susan) were never seen again. But the book does what it has to do in winding up six years of stories (longer than any TV Doctor's reign bar Tom B) and tying the TV Movie (retrospectively) into the Virgin story arc.

I said in my previous review that I loved the scenery, and I loved it even more this time, the Doctor's home of Lungbarrow being pretty obviously Gormenghast on Gallifrey, and the internal struggles between President Romana and the other power centres in the Capitol suitably obscure and yet comprehensible. This time around, I very much appreciated the notion of Leela and Andred lifting the curse on Gallifrey, which obviously was lost on me previously when I had not read Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, and of course having now followed Chris Cwej through 21 previous books, rather than coming to him completely fresh, I appreciated what Platt did with him much more.

I read the version that was downloadable until 2010 from the BBC website, which has apparently some quite major surgery to the original text and also a decent set of notes by Platt on the process of composition and of where he drew his ideas from. He also has thoughts on Who as a whole, including this lovely tribute to another of its great writers:

"Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. [Robert] Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour."

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http://nhw.livejournal.com/548403.html

I felt very much in sympathy with Finn Clark's review, collected by the Doctor Who Reader's Guide: "Love the scenery, shame about the plot." (Downloaded from here.)

The scenery is indeed fantastic. I love the two K9s coming together as a team - and it occurred to me that the Fourth Doctor left a K9 to all three of his departing female companions, as we will be reminded next year. I liked Leela and Romana, I liked the Seventh and First Doctors, and I very much liked the back-plot of conservatives trying to launch a coup against the new progressive presidency. (Having missed most of Ace's appearances, and all the previous books with Chris, I wasn't so excited about them. And I thought that, especially in comparison with Bernice in Human Nature, Chris' reaction to losing his partner seemed rather minimal.) I even liked the Gormenghastly setting of the House of Lungbarrow itself, though from the architectural engineering point of view it was a bit over the top. (But the Doctor's robot companion was a bit too much.)

But the plot? Resolution? Meh, not really. If the Time Lords are being woven out of Looms these days (thanks to what sounds like a non-scientific magical curse), how come Andred has retained enough plumbing to reverse the curse and impregnate Leela? I felt none the wiser about where Susan came from; perhaps I missed the crucial passage. Fairly clear that the Doctor is the Other reincarnated; but, in a very real sense, so what? I didn't like the Hand of Omega in Remembrance of the Daleks, and didn't much like it here either. Anyway, entertaining enough. ( )