The Death of Art (novel)

The Death of Art
Doctor:	Seventh Doctor
Companion(s):	Roz, Chris
Main enemy:	Montague
Main setting:	London, 1845 Paris, 1884, 1897 and 1995
Key crew
Publisher:	Virgin Books
Writer:	Simon Bucher-Jones
Release details
Release number:	54
Release date:	19 September 1996
Format:	Paperback Book; 27 Chapters, 256 Pages
ISBN:	ISBN 0-426-20481-6
Virgin New Adventures
← Previous	Return of the Living Dad
Next →	Damaged Goods

The Death of Art is the fifty-fourth Virgin New Adventures novel. It features the Seventh Doctor, Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester. It is another in the arc of stories featuring psychic powers.

Publisher's summary

He did not know if his powers could save him until the horses' hooves had crushed his ribs and his heart had stopped beating. After that, it was obvious.

1880's France: the corrupt world of the Third Republic. A clandestine brotherhood is engaged in a desperate internal power struggle; a race of beings seeks to free itself from perpetual oppression; and a rip in time threatens an entire city. The future of Europe is at stake, in a war fought with minds and bodies altered to the limits of human evolution.

Chris finds himself working undercover with a suspicious French gendarme; Roz follows a psychic artist whose talents are attracting the attention of mysterious forces; and the Doctor befriends a shape-shifting member of a terrifying family. And, at the heart of it all, a dark and disturbing injustice is being perpetrated. Only an end to the secret war, and the salvation of an entire race, can prevent Paris from being utterly destroyed.

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Seventh Doctor
• Roz Forrester
• Chris Cwej
• David Clayton
• Brother Tomas
• Montague
• August Mirakle
• Georges Picquart
• Anton Jarre
• Claudette Engadine
• Emil Montfalcon
• Dominic Montfalcon
• Jean Veber
• Marcel

References

Devices

• The ormolu clock is still within the TARDIS.

The Doctor

• The Doctor was once invited to the Rani's 94th birthday party.
• The Doctor is worried that he has very few harmless and peaceful memories.

The Doctor's items

• Ace has the Doctor's 500 Year Diary.

Biology

• The Doctor is prepared to destroy the Quoth with something in his blood, but as an agreement is made he swallows the blood.

Species

• The Quoth live 18,000 times faster than humans.
• The Time Lords' lives are linear, just in more dimensions.

Sports

• Roz practices archery.
• Chris doesn't know a lot about cricket.

Theories and concepts

• The Sensory Limitation Effect is a barrier of scale where events take place over timescales too vast to be meaningful.

Notes

• This novel is based on the historical events of the Dreyfus Affair.
• The novel makes references to the disappearance of the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid - i.e. Professor James Moriarty, last seen falling off a cliff in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Final Problem.
• Anton Jarre recalls meeting a Belgian police sergeant who is clearly intended to be a young Hercule Poirot, the detective created by Agatha Christie.
• The novel makes reference to the events of The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe.

Continuity

• The Doctor installs a copy of a cathedral into the TARDIS for future use — presumably this is the origin of the console room used in TV: Doctor Who.
• Chris pretends to be the Fifth Doctor, not very successfully, following the events of PROSE: Cold Fusion.

External links

• The Death of Art at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• The Discontinuity Guide to: The Death of Art at The Whoniverse