Divided Loyalties by: Gary Russell

 

Divided Loyalties is not a good book.  Gary Russell went into writing it with an interesting idea: a story about the Doctor’s first meeting with the Celestial Toymaker while in the Academy on Gallifrey, but then did not write that book.  Instead, he took that idea, could get about 50 pages out of it, and then stuck it in the middle of a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker and prequel to Graham Williams’ novelization of The Nightmare Fair.  Which makes sense, at this time The Celestial Toymaker was hailed as an absolute classic, despite what the actual soundtrack revealed, and The Nightmare Fair was from the mythic lost season of the show during the cancellation.  And the actual setup of the book is not bad, and the plot could actually work (even with the novella flashback that makes up the center), but Gary Russell fails where much of the story matters.  The idea starts with the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Adric all getting dreams about a mysterious planet that the Doctor didn’t even know existed, and a space station from the Earth Empire meant to keep the peace is under attack.  The Celestial Toymaker is in control of this planet with several human toys for the ridiculous games he plays.

 

This premise would be fine, but the characterization of the regulars is abhorrent.  Now, the Season 19 TARDIS Team has never been a well-liked team and even on television antagonism between them, but nothing on the scale present in Divided Loyalties.  The Fifth Doctor is no longer the soft spoken, instead being characterized by dry sarcasm going against his companions which just doesn’t work.  There’s also this cruelty near the end of the novel with the Doctor initially questioning if he wants to try and save an apparently old and close friend from his millennia length capture from the Celestial Toymaker.  When he isn’t being sarcastic, or morally questionable, he is barely in the story.  This characterization just doesn’t ring true and part of me would like to think that Russell understands that.  Nyssa doesn’t fair much better.  Russell attempts to make her the intelligent one of the crew, having the Toymaker comment on how she is truly a match for him, but she easily falls under her spell and spends much of the last third of the novel in a daze.  There is also the revelation that she is apparently only a child even though Sarah Sutton never played the role as a particularly young child, but closer to a mature teenager.  She had to be at least older than Adric, but Russell is adamant that she’s the youngest member of the TARDIS Team.  Speaking of Adric, he is the one to far the worst by Russell’s pen.  Yes, Adric is meant to be an annoying character, but Russell portrays him as a rather stereotypical nerd, complete with bad hygiene (some of the worst lines of the book come from this fact).  It feels like the pot is calling the kettle black here as making “Adric” a nerd not only dates the book incredibly poorly to the late 1990s, but also just feels disrespectful to an already disliked character.

 

Tegan is somehow setup as the book’s hero because she’s a human and is somehow able to catch on to the illusory nature of the Toymaker, but she’s written so inconsistently: one moment she’s incredibly loud and abrasive, and the next she is trying to be kind.  It’s clear that Russell has issues with this team which really begs the question of why he would make this a Fifth Doctor story and not any other Doctor.  The supporting characters fair slightly better under Russell as the crew are meant to be the Eric Saward style crew, and the humans who were turned into toys are over the top enough to be interesting.  It’s at least better than the original toys in The Celestial Toymaker.  The Toymaker himself is given an incredibly deep backstory and that’s where a lot of the story is dragged down.  The Toymaker is connected as one of the Guardians, the Guardian of Dreams, in something that feels like Russell was invoking Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.  He honestly is fine, and is serviceable as a villain, but it is Russell’s obsession with continuity that simply doesn’t work.  The flashback to Gallifrey (and the novel itself) has enough continuity references to make Craig Hinton blush.  On Gallifrey in the Doctor’s close circle of friends are the Master, the Monk, the Rani, the War Chief, Drax (from The Armageddon Factor), and Coordinator Vansell (from The Sirens of Time, The Apocalypse Element, and Neverland).  There are references to Lungbarrow and the end of the VNAs; The Deadly Assassin and The Arc of Infinity, and honestly a lot of it is simply dragged down.  The actual story with the Toymaker is the easiest section to read, and the most compelling with a pair of Time Lords losing their lives to his game.

 

Overall, Divided Loyalties is a mess of a novel that is bogged down by gratuitous continuity references and some truly awful characters.  Gary Russell’s prose, while easy to read, does not do much to help things and Russell has done better books coming from the need to fill in a gap that isn’t there.  This is one of those books that should be avoided at all costs unless you want something that’s so bad it’s good.  2/10.