Customer Reviews

Lungbarrow (Doctor Who: The New Adventures)

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4 star:		(1)
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This is the third time I've read LUNGBARROW, and I think it's the first time that I've actually understood most of it. Yes, this is one of the most complicated, detailed and multi-layered books that the New Adventures produced, but ultimately one of the most rewarding. The more one thinks about it, the more there is to appreciate. It's remembered now mostly for the sections set during the Old Time on the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey and for the return of the Doctor to his ancestral seat, the House of Lungbarrow in the Southern Mountains of Gallifrey (after a mere six hundred seventy-three year absence). Platt continues on with the story that began life in the so-called Cartmel Masterplan and which was further fleshed out in Platt's own TIME'S CRUCIBLE. But LUNGBARROW is far superior to that previous NA. On a second (or third or fourth) reading, we already know what the great "revelations" will be, so we can focus more on how we arrive at them. And that's the most interesting part of this journey.

First, as for answering all of the questions about Who the Doctor is... In that respect, all the important speeches go to Leela, who simply argues that the Doctor is a mystery, full stop. Of course, the novel itself does go a little farther than that. We see some critical moments in the Doctor's life before he initially left Gallifrey. But the details are sketchy. Some things we see, other things are left to our imagination. The audience is constantly kept a layer away from the action. The most important questions are merely suggested, and not answered. Why does the Doctor do this? Why does he pick one course of action and not another? What is his motivation? We never get anything like a full picture, which leaves the Doctor with a few secrets still intact. The book sits comfortably, balancing between tying up some loose ends from the past, while offering some hints about what will be coming up in the Doctor's future (namely the Paul McGann movie which had aired about a year before the publication of this novel and contained revelations of its own). To be honest, on paper, I'm not thrilled about some of the answers Platt provides ("Grandfather indeed! I've never seen you before in my life!" Ttpppth!). But I can't fault the book for its imagination or its scope. It's to the book's credit that the things that should have annoyed the daylights out of me didn't really bother me much at all.

And now that I've addressed the point that most discussion concerning this book revolves around I'm going to move on to more interesting topics. Don't get me wrong; the tantalizing "secrets" about the Doctor, the Other and their history are all very interesting, but what I take from this book is mostly its range of storytelling, its superb setting, and its memorable characters. The Doctor's cousins are fascinating. Most Time Lords have forty-four cousins, but we only really encounter six of them, which makes the book much easier to follow than it would have been otherwise.

In fact, I'm having difficulty separating the characters from their setting in my mind. I cannot imagine the House of Lungbarrow without the cousins, and the cousins themselves simply wouldn't work without the overarching support of the House. I'm not quite sure whether to describe the House as another character, or the characters as parts of the House. I suppose I'll have to be boring at this junction and just say that it's a bit of both. Certainly they play off each other; the stranger the cousins appear, the more sinister the house becomes.

Platt's characterization is a gift. Not only for his own creations, but also for the established characters that he's writing for. His Leela is deadly accurate, taking what was a fairly hokey idea (Leela choosing to stay behind with Bland Character #3) and actually exploring it in an interesting way. At times, the number of previous characters he's writing for can feel as though it's about to get out of hand. But Platt manages the Doctor, Chris, Ace/ Dorothee, Romana, Andred and two K9s (plus a few Special Guest Villains) in style, although poor Chris spends his last story as a regular having someone else's dreams and flashbacks. No one new to Doctor Who would be able to make heads or tails out of any of this, but then no one new to Doctor Who has any business starting here.

I get the feeling that world-building is something that Platt enjoys doing in his fiction. He's certainly very good at it. The passages involving the workings of the Houses, the Looms, the Gallifreyan rituals, and so on are completely engrossing. Although he's populating Gallifrey with different item, he's using a similar method to the great Robert Holmes, who had an uncanny ability to build up an entire universe by tossing out a few details, painting in some specifics while leaving others to the imagination. It's a rare talent -- one that has served both of these writers well. Platt's prose drew me in utterly, driving up the tension with each passing page, while juggling several items at once while building a fascinating world, and intriguing people.

For me, a good rule of thumb is that if I needed a long time to finish a novel, then it generally means that I was bored or I plain loathed it. But I took my time with this reading of LUNGBARROW, happy to drink in the atmosphere and deliberate over the details. I didn't feel a need to read quickly, because I was in no hurry to finish. I knew what questions would be asked, I knew what answers would be offered. I had much more fun stopping to smell the roses. Good-bye, Seventh Doctor; you'll be missed.

I really, really loved this book. I never really got on with the NAs when they were being produced [but then I was about 7 when they started so forgive me]. Recently though [well over the past year or so] I have been tracking them down and enjoying almost all of them.

This book is a very good end to the NA series, and although the links to the TV movie seem a bit contrived, they work better than a lot of the series' more fragile inter-book links. At times it's difficult to tell whether what you're reading is really good, imaginate metaphoric prose, or actual occurances; once you get the hang of Platt's style though the book is greatly entertaining. It's true that not a lot actually happens [what does, though, is big] but the book is mostly concentrated on exploration of character - the Doctor's especially - and there are some interesting turns. The Cousins are all well crafted and really stick [I found myself fighting tears when Innocet "folds her thoughts away in the dark"], and some moments are truly surprising.

the connections to Ghost Light are obvious, given that Lungbarrow was the script they felt gave too much away for season 26 of the TV series, turning into Ghost Light instead. It's also really interesting to compare what happens in the book with what would have happened on TV - check out the author's commentary on the BBC Doctor Who website, in the E-Book section. Also, if you can't get hold of a hard copy, the whole book is available from this e-book section, complete with a few revised/extended/additional scenes.

Well it's about time the mystery of The Other has been revealed. A plot thread set up in the tv series in Rememberance of the Daleks. Actualy you had to read the Target novel of Rememberance to catch all the Gallifrey flashbacks with Rassilon, Omega and the Other.
It's always nice to see Gallifrey in the Doctor Who books. With no finacial restraints, writers can pretty much make what they want as far as the Doctor's homeworld goes.
Seeing the almost undefeatable Seventh Doctor cower before his family was different. Knowing finally that our favorite Time Lord comes from somewhere is a nice refreshing character development.
The character of President Ramona has come a rather long way since his appearance in Happy Endings. Here we see that it is the Gallifreyan Politico that corrupts a person.
I wasn't a big fan of Marc Platt's refrence that Leela and Andred may be the Doctor's parents. -bleh-
Seeing Gallifrey's past and the Doctor's connection was also an interesting spin and hearing the First Doctor reference Gallifrey as a planet full of Valeyards and Vampires was a catching phrase.
Also finally seeing as a fan, The Caretmel Masterplan come full circle, it may have well have been a good thing that the Fox movie hit when it did and the rights revoked. I think as far as the Seventh Doctor goes with Virgin, his life had been played out. Even Lungbarrow establishes he is due for a regeneration. However I always wondered where the series would have gone without the TV movie.
The Dying Days was proof that they could have taken the Eighth Doctor many, many miles beyond the scope of Seventh Doctor stories. But without the movie I think the New Adventures would have died and vanished...
I agree with some of the other reviews here, "Farewell Seventh Doctor", you will be missed. Doctor Who is dead... Long live Doctor Who!

Back in the day (and by "day" I mean late eighties) a fellow in charge of Doctor Who the TV show, Andrew Cartmel, came up with an idea of eventually revealing more of the Doctor's past. The last two seasons had spent a lot of time showing that the Doctor was quite a bit more mysterious than he had seemed at first glance and this "Masterplan", as it were, was going to slowly peel back the layers and show us some of this. But then the show got cancelled and those who had heard of this plan couldn't see the ultimate results of it until almost eight years later, when this book came out. And whoa, did it reveal. If you were a regular viewer of the show or buy the DVDs, you may remember a tale called "Ghost Light". Remember how awfully complicated and dense that one was, and how you felt stupid upon watching it because you were pretty sure ninety percent of it had gone over your head? Yeah, this is written by the same guy. Apparently the initial plans were that this was going to be an episode in the last season (replaced with "Ghost Light"), although for the life of me I cannot see how they could have made this into a TV story with the kind of budget they had at the time. It would have looked terrible, probably. However, the nice thing about the print medium is that the imagination needs no budget and thus the results are near-glorious. There's two things going on in this book but only one of them is really important, the secondary plot about the CIA (not the Earth one, bear with me) and the High Council fighting it out yet again really only exists to give the other characters something to do in between revelations. The meat of the story resides in Lungbarrow. The TARDIS drops the Doctor back at his old house, which doesn't seem to really exist anymore, and we meet his Cousins, who have been festering in there for nigh on six hundred years, waiting for him to come back. Needless to say, things get a bit awkward. The concepts that Platt sketches out here are nothing short of fascinating, he weaves bits of Gallifreyean history, myths and whatever else he can grab into the mix and what you get is this heady concoction. The House of Lungbarrow becomes a character in the novel, the Cousins scrambling around underneath it are pathetic and contemptable, pitiful and mad, a dozen different things. His characterization are fantastic, he makes everything readable and yet alien at the same time, the Doctor switching between caught off-guard and in masterful control of the situation. In it, we're treated to scenes of a young Doctor, his leaving of Gallifrey, and flashbacks to the beginning of Gallifrey's history, with glimpses of Rassilon and the mysterious Other, who is connected to the events more than you'd think. The ideas are fascinating enough that you don't want those portions of the book to end, on some level it's like they condensed Gorminghast down to three hundred pages. There's a mystery afoot and the Doctor solves it but at the same time the Big Mystery (Who is the Doctor?) is left with pieces still uncovered, so we're not told the whole story. But what are told tells us more than anything we've seen before and it was definitely worth the wait. You don't even realize how huge the cast is, so skillfully does Platt juggle them. Sadly, this is the last Seventh Doctor novel (he regenerated in the TV movie the year before) and nearly the last New Adventure before the BBC took over. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure where else Virgin could have gone from here, this seems both a natural extension and a natural conclusion to everything they had been working towards. An essential story for fans, I left it sitting on a shelf for ten years before I read it but I'm certainly glad I got to it. Good luck finding it though, since it went out of print, although I think the BBC did put it online. The New Adventures at their best.

I have to say that this is the best N/A, no matter what anyone says. One of the hardest things to do with this series is to think of an original plot. Marc Platt always seems to do it though. I realize that this is hard to get a hold of, so if anyone would like to buy my copy, e-mail me at Efurch26@msn.com. I would be glad to share it with other fans.

If you haven't read most of the NAs (and especially Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible), you will be lost with this book. Still, Marc Platt paints his normal elegant landscapes and writes a very entertaining plot. The novel doesn't slow down in the middle as Time's Crucible did and the details were much clearer (except for the big flashback sequences which were vague and hard to follow by design). I found some of the revelations a little disappointing and the links to "Enemy Within" were very tacked on. Still, it was a fun read

How good would it be if Virgin were able to reprint this book so that more than a handful of readers around the world were able to read this penultimate NA (and one of the top 4 in the entire series)? It would be very good. This book is impossible to obtain. I have only (hastily) read a friend's copy, and I am waiting on a search from the people here at amazon.

Lungbarrow: The last of Virgin's New Adventures to feature the seventh Doctor that is perhaps the rarest Doctor Who novel ever and deservedly so! Lungbarrow is an epic conclusion not only to the New Adventures of the 90's but to the seventh Doctor era in general. It is an epic journey into the question at the heart of the series: just who is the Doctor?

Like Marc Platt's TV story Ghost Light which was an alien invasion story wrapped up in a ghost story, Lungbarrow is a "who is the Doctor really?" wrapped up in a murder mystery / conspiracy thriller. In fact Ghost Light evolved from what would have been the TV version of this story which is interesting to note because of some of the similarities between the two. Both stories find a central character (Ace in Ghost Light, the Doctor here) to a house that hides of the darker aspects of their past. Here though the Doctor is accused of not only causing the house of Lungbarrow to fall into chaos but accused of killing its leader as well in his first incarnation (the Hartnell one). While it is a murder mystery with the Doctor and his companion Chris seeking to prove the Doctor's innocence, there is also a conspiracy story unfolding on Gallifrey with Romama, Leela, and Ace as the Celestial Intervention Agency puts some plans into motion of their own which also include the Doctor's past. Yet while all this is going on there is a running question throughout: who is Doctor and where did he really come from? By the end of the novel there are plenty of answers and a few more questions raised as well. It's a complex story that means that unless you have a very good knowledge of the series (or a good reference work like Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe (Second Edition) near by) you may get a little lost But don't let that deter you.

Platt seamlessly, and epically, brings together elements from the entire history of the series up to that point. There are appearances or references to companions from throughout the New Adventures run plus plenty of references to the books and TV stories as well. Here we finally get to see the background of the first Doctor's "granddaughter" Susan and discover how she fits into the entire equation of the series as well. Platt is dead on in his characterization of each of the TV characters which helps to make Lungbarrow one of the truest to screen Doctor Who novels of all time.

One of the true highlights of Lungbarrow is Platt also gives some much needed back story to the Time Lords, their home world Gallifrey and to the Doctor himself. Platt takes back to the founding of Time Lord society to reveal few surprises. We get to see the much fabled "dark times" of Gallifrey's past and finally meet the mysterious co-founder of Time Lord society known simply as the Other. The Other in fact has a strong connection to the Doctor's past which is only revealed as the novel is coming to its climax in one of the best pieces of Doctor Who writing ever. Plus Lungbarrow makes a nice intro for the 1996 TV movie as well making this the last true story for the seventh Doctor. While it is loaded with enough connately references to make any new fan scratch their heads this is novel that any serious Doctor Who fan should enjoy

It is the broad range of things brought together that makes Lungbarrow is the true epic that it is. It is the culmination of the (nearly) first thirty-fve years of the series in all its forms. With its answers to some of the show's fundamental questions, to the reappearance of old characters, to the "dark times", the revealing of the Other and the lead in into the TV movie Lungbarrow covers a lot of ground and covers it brilliantly. Lungbarrow is an epic story that only a handful of other Doctor Who stories can come close to matching its scope, characters, and (for lack of a better word) brilliantness.

Sadly it is (and almost certainly will remain) out of print, a hard copy of this will cost you a chunk of money. Is it worth that chunk of your money? Well worth the price of buying it in my opinion because if you love the series then this is a must-have.