#26
Divided Loyalties
By Gary Russell
Oh boy, here we go. I was looking forward to this one in an admittedly morbid sort of way. Divided Loyalties is regarded as a bit of a stinker in some circles and there is a certain catharsis to reading that sort of book — or reviewing it, at least.
It would be refreshing to say that everyone’s just being mean and it’s brilliant actually, just as it would be rudely amusing to say that it’s as bad as the worst reviews make out. I’m going to be a pain and say that it’s neither of those things exactly — although Divided Loyalties still isn’t very good.
It’s on arguably shaky ground to begin with just by being a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker. This is all subjective, natch, but I find that story’s structure rather unsatisfying: the original Toymaker story is essentially ON, <however many random games you wish to include>, OFF, with little story or character progression in between. It could be four episodes long or forty. The same pattern was employed in another (unproduced) Brian Hayles script, The Queen Of Time, as well as in (to much stronger effect) The Mind Robber, which at least had the sense to mine storytelling itself for its random diversions, paying off quite spectacularly by mashing it all together at the end.
Gary Russell mostly avoids this problem. Divided Loyalties does the perilous if-you-lose-you-die thing, of course, but not until fairly late in the (ahem) game, at least where the TARDIS crew are concerned. We only see brief snatches of it beforehand, with an unassuming family kidnapped for the games and a man forced to play a giant form of Snakes & Ladders.
Rather than just play games all the time, most of the book is concerned with the characters playing them. Gary Russell is a past master at continuity links, which can be a slippery slope to just writing fan fiction, but if he’s going to put that list-friendly knowledge to practical use then I don’t really see an issue. He’s done it before: the strongest moments in The Scales Of Injustice are about where the Brigadier and Liz find themselves, and those ideas are genuinely informed by Russell’s fan card. A similarly concerted effort is made in Divided Loyalties to mine the lives of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric in order to Say Something about their place in the show, resulting in a sort of line being drawn under much of their Season 19 angst before setting off on the relatively low key Black Orchid. Kudos for trying, quite honestly.
Does the book still groan under the weight of continuity? Well, yes, but if you must mention Tegan’s aunt (Logopolis), uncle (The Awakening) and cousins (Arc Of Infinity) in order to make the point that she might miss the rest of her father’s life, and if you use that to put all her “Take me back to Heathrow!” histrionics into perspective, then I think that deserves a pass for character development.
Slightly less convincing is the repeated underlining of Nyssa’s trauma re the Master usurping her father’s body, and the Doctor failing to do anything about it. One of those opportunities for character development that’s missed by the original show and conspicuous by its absence when you put these characters into full length novels, it makes sense to address it, and effort is made so that it will be germane to the plot… but is it enough? I’d say not really. It’s enough trauma to fuel a novel, quite frankly, whereas here it’s only one item on the list; later on when we’re meekly told “Whatever did or didn’t happen between [Nyssa] and the Doctor regarding Tremas and the Master, it was dealt with”, it feels more like a “tell” than a “show” solution to the problem. Save it for a novel that has the Master in it, perhaps. (People who’ve read the book: hold that thought.)
Least convincing is what it does with Adric. As the book goes on and the mind games ramp up, with the three companions all seeing visions that somewhat displace their confidence in the Doctor, Adric is suggested to be trying his best to fit in and his intelligence is treated as unequivocal: the Toymaker himself is genuinely impressed. The early parts, however, include some of the most embarrassing fnar-fnar-nobody-likes-this-character takedowns I’ve ever seen in print. Adric is “someone who thought green and yellow pyjamas were the height of cool fashion”; he is “sarcastic, but unfunny … lazy and workshy and, above all, forgets to bathe regularly”; he is curious out of “an innate need to be nosy rather than because of any genuine intellectual advancement he might achieve”; he says things “pointlessly”, he “waddles”, he has a “snub nose”, he opens doors without thinking which causes the Doctor to roll his eyes (“[Adric] was all smiles, completely forgetting that it was his pathetic need to explore that had got them into this mess”), and he butts in “unhelpfully” with things like “‘I’m an orphan, too,’ said Adric, presumably noticing that he hadn’t yet become the centre of attention.”
Some of this is perhaps meant to indicate Tegan’s particular distaste for him, although to be honest that reflects almost as nastily on her as it does on him. And an effort is arguably made to walk it back by highlighting what Adric is trying to do. Either way, it’s loathsome to read. I remember starting Divided Loyalties years ago as a teen and giving up shortly after the author made an honest to god effort to canonise Adric having noticeable BO. I mean, what are we doing here? This is fan fiction of the worst kind: the sort of “you know it’s true!” convention banter that engages with the perception of characters and not with the substance. Matthew Waterhouse would probably like a word. The editor certainly should have.
None of this, however, is likely to top the proverbial Things People Don’t Like About Divided Loyalties list. For this, we must turn to the middle of the book, where the TARDIS crew still don’t consciously know about the Toymaker — he has appeared to them in visions but, for some reason, blanked their memories of it afterwards. A sleep-inducing drug is used and the Doctor remembers something that helpfully informs the rest of the plot. Specifically his youth on Gallifrey, which we then enjoy for 60 pages. You thought the companions’ back stories were a bit heavy on the continuity? Oh, sweet summer child.
The important bit is that as a young man on Gallifrey the Doctor made an ill-considered trip to the Toymaker’s realm which cost him two of his friends, one of whom in a way that influenced the Toymaker over centuries. This is the problem that now needs to be resolved.
I’m not a fan of hastily-introduced prequel facts because you can’t fake the mileage — it’s all very well him saying “I think about that fateful mistake every single day!” now but he never mentioned it on telly, did he? (You would think it might come up in, say, The Celestial Toymaker.) In its defence, this does set up the book’s plot… but then that’s a bit of a bootstrap defence, since the plot’s reliance on it is entirely the author’s choice.
But oh, the rest of it. The Doctor doesn’t just decide to go there: first he hangs around with his friends, the Deca, a group of 10 mildly insufferable Oxbridge-in-space students that includes the Doctor, Koschei (the Master), Mortimus (the Monk), Ushas (the Rani), Magnus (the War Chief) and Drax (he isn’t cool enough to have two names). So not only did all of the renegade Time Lords boringly already know each other at school — they were all in the same friend group. Most of their heroic-or-villainous attributes are handily already more or less on record, with the Doctor in particular having such rampant wanderlust that he gets thrown out of the Academy for it. Again, this is a pitfall of prequels, and it’s pure fan-brain in action: you take a sequence of events and make it destiny, actually, because everything must fit into a sequence. (See also an embarrassing in-universe reference to “Tremas” being an anagram of “Master,” and that apparently being a sign of inevitability.) You just don’t need this stuff.
The rest of the Gallifrey section runs the gamut from things that probably need to be there for world-building (there’s lashings of Lungbarrow material including Badger) to things crowbarred in because somebody mentioned them once (the hermit who showed the Doctor “the daisiest daisy”) to things that arguably break the show if they show up too soon (the Doctor and friends learn about Daleks and Cybermen). Certainly the feel of a book like Lungbarrow is nowhere to be found here, as we are far more invested in cameoing characters like Azmael than delving into the atmosphere of the place. I’m only amazed that when Russell makes a point of saying the Toymaker’s features “reminded the Doctor of one of the lecturers back at Prydon Academy” he somehow stops short of saying it’s the one played by the same actor. About the only thing we’re not being abjectly fanwankerish about here is the TV story this is a sequel to, which is mostly present in iconography only; I don’t know if that’s Gary Russell showing restraint or just a case of there not being anything useful to draw from — see, perhaps, my objection to its arbitrary ON-OFF games.
The key issue for me is its hyping up the specialness of the Doctor and his desire to leave Gallifrey, rather than letting it be a gradual resistance to his people’s principles. It feels like flatlining a character arc to say, he was always this. But let’s be honest, the whole thing is a massive indulgence. And really, what’s it doing slap bang in the middle of a novel? It doesn’t do the pace any favours: the Toymaker’s mostly been dropping unnecessarily cryptic hints up to this point (if he wants the Doctor so badly then why not just get on with it?), and then we take a whole fifth of the book out just to back-fill continuity. By the time we arrive at the actual plot with all the characters apprised of the facts it’s nearly home time.
I haven’t yet mentioned the plot particulars, but to be honest they’re not very arresting. The reclusive planet Dymok has gone radio silent; the orbiting station Little Boy II (a somewhat crass allusion to Nagasaki) is where the Doctor and co turn up, and they’re only too happy to help investigate. The crew, in defiance of Gary Russell’s usual writing style, don’t spend every waking hour sniping at each other, but there’s not much else to say about them. (There’s plenty of names, but that just gives us some useful losers for the games later on.) When some of them arrive on Dymok they find a people perpetually asleep; their dreams fuel the Toymaker, who we learn (in part during the Gallifrey continuity dump) is the Guardian of Dreams. The Doctor’s intrusion all those years ago is finally wearing off and the Toymaker needs his help to survive. And/or a new host, which naturally will be the Doctor. Cue the games, at long last.
Despite taking all that time out to set it up, there is a lot of explaining still to do around the Toymaker and his schemes. There’s also a lot of explaining to do around the Observer, a tangential figure with his own stake in events, and his schemes. The mind games affecting the companions are due in part to both of these figures, and the goalposts for what they’re actually trying to achieve move as all the explainifying goes on. To be honest, I just started nodding along by the end. The games — surreal exercises where people turn into giant chess pieces etc — ultimately feel like a minor concern, and certainly they don’t come alive as much in print as they would do on screen. The stakes, as far as the Doctor’s old friends are concerned, feel inevitably rushed since we only just met them. (Millennia, in particular, barely features.) The conclusion is rather hazy on this front.
There is some good use of the Toymaker here — I’m thinking of his mind-reading, which basically means picking up on the third-person prose happening all around him — but I did wonder if Russell could have gone further with a metaphysical character like that in a book setting. (Should this one be more like Conundrum?) I don’t know if I’d really call it a strong use of the Toymaker character overall, but then there isn’t much to go on. Making him the “Guardian of Dreams” seems like a reach? I don’t remember dreams featuring heavily in his one TV appearance. Nor in The Nightmare Fair, the cancelled 80s sequel that Gary Russell nevertheless bothers to segue into at the end of this.
It is, surprisingly, quite a good one for the Doctor, or at least for the incarnation we’re seeing here. The Fifth Doctor tends to be about as imposing as the celery he insists on wearing, but he’s pleasingly no-nonsense here, at one point pushing down an antagonist’s gun with a finger. Russell works in some authentically Davison-y “hmmm!”s, as well as incorporating the half-moon glasses from Frontios; perhaps they’re a talisman of Good Davison Doctoring. Russell is a bit less successful writing the “prequel” Doctor; obviously I’ve got my objections to his character arc and goodness knows to all that fanwank as well, but the actual character isn’t really distinct from the Davison one we’re seeing elsewhere. (Both do “hmmm!” and “my dear” at points.) It definitely feels like a stretch to put William Hartnell on the cover, even if canonically that is who it would be.
It might be less frustrating if Divided Loyalties had been a complete write-off, but there’s some real intent here to make something of the continuity (where the companions are concerned) and to do something slightly different (where the Toymaker is concerned). The choice to spend a lot of pages tying up plot points both pertinent and pointless is a millstone, however, weighing down any goodwill to the rest of it and effectively removing any sense of momentum. In the end, Divided Loyalties plays itself.
4/10
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