Reviews of Doctor Who novels: The Well-Mannered War and Divided Loyalties by Rob Langenderfer
Thoughts on The Well-Mannered War and Divided Loyalties
By Rob Langenderfer
Gareth Roberts’s Well-Mannered War is a book that manages to make a truly off-the-wall premise seem entertaining, fun and almost credible. Gareth uses his very well-known favorite team of the 4th Doctor, Lalla Ward’s Romana and K9 to great effect, and he even manages some good character development of K9 along the way. This is a story that is very much in tune with the TV series. This is not one of those stories that, unlike some of the other novels, you need to have read many prior books to understand. I had read Gareth’s first 4th Doctor/Romana/K9 book The Romance of Crime long ago, but I had completely forotten about the character of Stokes and who he was, and I had never read The English Way of Death, Gareth’s second 4th Doctor/Romana/K9 book. This book stands on its own very effectively.
Looking back at an old review that I had written of Romance of Crime, I find that I had commented of Stokes that he “is in some ways very similar to Spiggott (another character from that book who I had characterized as a pretty funny but somewhat irritating character, like an arrogant self-opinionated detective, a Doctoresque character who doesn’t quite make it) but he is less effective as a character, and I wondered why he really needed to be in as much of the novel as he was.” Stokes grates on my nerves at different points in this book as well. However, that is intentional as he is portrayed as cowardly and willing to abandon anyone to save his own skin. Yet one cannot help but feel some sympathy for Stokes, for he wishes so strongly to make it as an artist and to be appreciated and remembered. The Black Guardian is effective in his brief role, but I was expecting from I, Who that he would have a larger part to play in the story, and I was disappointed that his role was not larger. It certainly seemed appropriate that the ending of the book (and the ending of Virgin Books’ line) would finish out with a confrontation like the one that was played out in this book. It’s a truly classic moment. It’s not what the Doctor actually does that is important. It is the idea that he wants to do through the physical actions that he performs that is significant. That is the scene’s (and Gareth Roberts’s) genius. Don’t let yourself get bogged down in the technobabble of the moment. Andrew Vogel’s Terminus web site (http://users.erols.com/vogel1/) has a generally very perceptive review of the book that misses the mark on this point as he focuses on the technobabble of the scene rather than the Doctor’s larger aim. I would submit that this is one point where the larger aim should rightfully conquer all. Cheer with the Doctor as he makes the ultimate choice. Don’t miss it.
Dolne and Jafrid are both very good characters who are sympathetic and the reader can really understand but you also can’t help but chuckle at their antics at the book’s beginning.
However, I can’t help but strongly agree with the sentiment of Andrew Vogel’s review that their characters are inadvertantly weakened throughout most of the book because of the events going on around them. Harmock is a very humorous character and one can’t help but see a few actual policians’ behaviors and actions that could easily have inspired him. He is sort of a caricature of a politician, but sometimes the caricature turns out to be disturbingly close to reality. Fritchoff is simply irritating as he spouts Marxist rhetoric with no understanding of how it could be applied in a meaningful and effective way to society (just like some Marxists)! The story also suffers from the fact that there really isn’t a strong major antagonist throughout the story. The characters who we thought were antagonists (Galatea and her people) didn’t end up being antagonists at all. That does make for a bit of a different turn in the story, and the kind of sheer originality which is shown in how it is done is not something that I can condemn. Andrew Vogel considers that to be a truly wonderful element of the plot. However, I think that it does lower the dramatic content of the story because the false villains are in focus for so long and nothing effective replaces them for a while. The reader feels slightly emotionally cheated, and for a while the story lacks suspense. Andrew Vogel identified three major villains in the story. He talks about the second villain being very lame. I agree with him totally. I could never get a handle on the second villain’s motivation. It’s a true tragedy that Roberts threw the second villain in there because the Black Guardian could have handled that part of the plot perfectly. I was expecting that Viddeas’s militarism was being created by the Black Guardian. I was definitely disappointed when it did not turn out to be that way. Since the Black Guardian’s main objective was to create chaos throughout the universe, there would have been none better than him for the job of making a real war out of a false one. If the Black Guardian had been masterminding all of the events, then the fact that the original villains did not turn out to actually be villainous could have been pulled off even better in terms of the book’s quality as a whole.
Still, The Well-Mannered War is a book is a pretty good success, and it conveys an atmosphere of fun and light-heartedness, just like the original series. Another book that was truly wonderful that adhered to the charms of Doctor Who as we knew it on television was Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties. Yet Divided Loyalties is able to go into more emotional depth in certain areas than the TV series dared to travel. However, it is able to do it so seamlessly that the reader is held along for the ride. Perhaps part of the reason it works so well are that the situations that it uses to ask its deeper queries are things that directly connect with the TV series. It is able to develop the character of Nyssa especially well by probing an interesting question: could
the Doctor have done anything to free Tremas’s body from the Master? The implications of Tegan’s disappearance from Earth are also discussed in a page-turning manner. These concepts have more depth than much of what was dealt with in the television series yet they are written in a simple easy-to read and understand fashion. Many of Virgin’s New Adventure books got bogged down in technobabble and were very hard to comprehend. Divided Loyalties is a refreshing change from that type of book. A work like Divided Loyalties could have really made a credible Doctor Who story for the new millennium that would appeal to both children and adults. One would hope that the new Doctor Who audio adventures that Gary Russell’s Big Finish Productions make manage to capture the wonderful mix that is present in Divided Loyalties.
There are a couple of other brief comments I would like to add before I dive into the next major section of this review. Adric is handled reasonably well although his scenes did not stick in my mind to quite the same degree as those of the other companions. The emotions of the readers are very much engaged in this book, not just for the Doctor and his companions but for some of the other characters that the Celestial Toymaker abducts from their regular lives. In just a few brief pages Russell is able to build characters, like the nobleman we meet at the book’s beginning, with which the reader can really empathize. The Celestial Toymaker himself is handled well, and his scenes are always interesting to read. One of the major sections of the book covers an aspect of Doctor Who that fans have speculated about for years: the Doctor’s life on Gallifrey.
This is one of the sections of the book that was the most fun for me to read because it’s always been something about which I’ve been curious. We meet the Doctor and his friends from school (and careful readers will take note that Russell uses the real names of the Time-Meddling Monk, Mortimus, and the Master, Koschei that were originally coined in Virgin’s series of Doctor Who novels), and since there’s never been a story that focused on the Doctor when he was in school and since many Doctor Who fans got really “serious” about the program in college, this should be a part of the book that captures many people’s hearts. It is always engaging although as reviewer Vanessa Bishop notes in Doctor Who Magazine #283 notes, it might not be meant to be taken 100% seriously. I for one liked Paul Cornell’s introduction to Timewyrn: Revelation so much that dealt much more briefly but in much greater emotional depth with some of the same subject mattter that I wish its tone and continuity could fit with this book. Still, that’s just a quibble, and this book does such a good job of creating a story that is so much fun and is able to hit you on several levels at different points in the story that it should stand as a classic in the show’s history. Even the book cover catches your eye and is different from the norm, and the back cover blurb is written especially well.
Because of the different tone and depth that permeates the book at different points, this is really the perfect book with which to introduce a fan of the TV series to the novels. The book maintains the light-heartedness that was a fixture of much of the TV series and yet in its treatment of the companions and even of the Doctor himself (who is written very well throughout the book), it probes its characters in a way that the TV series rarely did. Many times the Doctor Who books will either skirt to one direction or the other in an almost exclusive fashion. This book shows that it is possible to combine them to great effect.
