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** spoiler alert ** SPOILERS AHEAD
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This novel, the climax of the Faction Paradox and future war story arc, is epic but enormously sadistic. It makes the original series Doctor Who episode "Resurrection of the Daleks" look gentle. This is actually my second reading, but I evidently didn't read it closely enough the first time.

Comments, or aspects that interested me most:

The current incarnation of Romana, now president of Gallifrey, has no redeeming qualities. She is vain and arrogant (like the original played by Mary Tamm), but a cold, calculating politician. Her interaction with the Doctor in the story is actually fairly limited; but she feels no affection whatsoever toward him.

I believe many reviewers have noted this--the hero of the story is the TARDIS. Prefiguring the new series episode "The Doctor's Wife" but actually taking its theme further (while not presenting the TARDIS as a woman), the novel suggests the TARDIS intelligence loves the Doctor and would put itself to a great deal of suffering to save him.

The novel is poorly edited, with a few embarrassing typos; and the writing is just okay. For one thing, the book is full of not gratuitous pop-culture references (only a few, thankfully) but gratuitous restatements of famous lines from the original series.

Gallifrey faces not one but two enemies: Faction Paradox, and an unidentified "Enemy" the Time Lords have been preparing for with the handicap of knowing nothing about. The Enemy are revealed to be a race of extremely powerful alien organisms from outside the universe, believed to be the ancestors of all life therein.

Gallifrey's defeat is indirectly caused by what is essentially an accident. The Time Lords have a miniature universe in a bottle, which they had apparently stolen from someone else (in some previous novel) intending to use the miniature universe as an emergency bolthole from their unidentified Enemy. The bottle gets broken, and the energy released from it disturbs the Enemy (I have no idea why), who release an unstoppable energy wave that brutally destroys large numbers of people, crippling Gallifrey (already under siege by a fifth column of Faction Paradox-allied Gallifreyans) and allowing Faction Paradox to win the war.

Different authors have interpreted the Time Lords in different ways, but these authors' depiction of Gallifrey is implausible and inappropriate. In order to shoehorn their social criticism into a story it doesn't naturally belong in, the authors depict Gallifrey as having a highly pollutive industrial sector and rampant poverty and homelessness. That's absurd unless viewed as one of the time distortions caused by the Edifice: a society so advanced as to control time travel can't fulfill material needs and can't function without heavy industry?

This story very obviously influenced the Time War of the new series; some aspects of the Time War's conclusion are identical. The Doctor destroys Gallifrey in order to prevent Faction Paradox from taking over it and ruling time and space. But what happens in this book is much too violent to be be shown on television in its original form, only a massively sanitized version. The Time War replaced the Faction with the Daleks, for essentially commercial reasons.

There has probably never been a materially nastier, more graphically horrifying Doctor Who novel than this. I actually found Lawrence Miles' Alien Bodies even more unpleasant, but in a creepy and ineffable way I never understood. (I never finished it, and made no serious attempt to read Miles' postmodern filth Interference.)

Whovian readers have wondered why the editors chose to reset the novel's continuity with this book, purging it of the elements introduced by Lawrence Miles. The likely reason is obvious enough to me. It's almost certainly because Miles had made the series too postmodern; the editors' purge of the Miles elements was an attempt to pull it back in a somewhat more traditional direction while preserving the result they established in The Ancestor Cell: Gallifrey is gone, as it was in the modern television series until late 2013.

The novel may be disgusting, but I like doomsday stories, and got what I expected in this novel.