| Date: 11 April 2011, 03:02
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Bulis was never my favorite of the stable of writers when he was doing the Missing Adventures back for Virgin, his work was readable and showed some sparks of imagination but it also came across as oddly flat and joyless, professional without being exciting. Thus I wasn't exactly expecting great miracles and wonders from this novel, and in all honesty I basically got what I expected. The Fifth Doctor and Peri get caught up in a search for a mythical treasure that was hidden on a planet thousands of years before and is supposed to be massively impressive. But it's not just them involved, you have an entire cast of characters broken up into teams all hunting for the same proported treasure. How they get to it and what they endure and how it ends up is what the book is about. And it's interesting but not terribly exciting, it's more workmanlike than anything else and more than once it seemed like Bulis was just going through the Doctor Who motions to get to the ending, without bothering to put any kind of spark into it. The Doctor and Peri come off well enough, I guess, the latter a sort of generic cheery curious companion, while the Doctor gets the broad stroke of the Quiet Doctor, without really bringing across the manic energy he would unexpectedly bring to the role, especially when he realized he was onto something. For the most part he just sort of hangs out and lets the plot go by. Thus the focus of the book is more on the other treasure seekers, none of whom are really that fascinating on their own. You have the gents with ulterior motives who get more and more obsessed as time goes on, the seeker who isn't so keen on getting the treasure by the end because the real treasure can only be found in the heart, the greedy criminals who eventually get what's coming to them and so on and so forth. Oh, and an inspector, just to keep things interesting. But with so many characters the nuances are just sort of glossed over, even with long stretches devoted to showing how they get through the traps and stuff. The traps themselves are not that amazing and the solutions woefully easy (they have to be, as the criminal portion of the search isn't exactly a brain trust, although they do have the Doctor along for part of it). The final revelation of the treasure is kind of what you'd expect is that the actual treasure is warm and fuzzy and something we all share in this great world. Even the supposed big side mystery, who the heck is the guy pretending to be Falstaff gets an explanation that boils down to "He wasn't hugged enough as a child". So while the novel isn't necessarily bad, it's not especially good either, it will kill a few hours of your time but won't really excite or engage you in any meaningful way. You'll just keep turning pages until it's done and never think of it again.
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