NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but it might have been. Commissioned and then rejected as it wasn’t quite what they’d asked for (NB: was that really the case? Read to the end of the review…), Campaign has been published a few times over the years, generally by Jim Mortimore. I think it counts as part of the overall BBC Books story. I’ve taken the original publication date (and hence the marathon slot, May 2000) from the publication history in the book.
Right then. Book review. Yes. Review the book. Should be easy. Introduction — try to be a bit pithy about it, for God’s sake — and then set up your premise. Was the book something you basically enjoyed or wasn’t it? Oh for— Don’t give me “but it’s hard,” you’ve done this more times than either of us cares to remember. Good grief! Look, if you get stuck you can always go back to old faithful: summarise the book. The summary shall lead the way! Besides which, summarising the thing for posterity is to a large extent why you even bother reviewing these books. So. All sorted then? Good. Off you go.
What’s that? Sorry, didn’t quite catch that. It’s…? Oh. You’re on Campaign. Right. Well, that’s different isn’t it. Um. Probably a bit screwed in that case. Biscuit?
Campaign is famously odd, and — as very occasionally happens — its slightly bewildering reputation is earned. I don’t know exactly what BBC Books were expecting but you don’t need a world class imagination to surmise that whatever Campaign is is not what they asked for. It’s like Jim Mortimore read every confounded reaction to his books over the years, stored them all up and then came back with: “Oh YEEEEAAAAAHHH?!!?”
For what it’s worth, you can see traces of
Campaign in his earlier books. As far back as
Blood Heat he’s been interested in “What if?” alternate realities, not to mention casually-as-you-like killing off major characters within them. He played in similar sandpits for
The Sword Of Forever and, in typical Ouroboros fashion, he came back with an alternate version of his own alternate history for
Blood Heat Redux.
Also in his rap sheet: playing around with narrative convention. You’d mostly look to
Eye Of Heaven for this one, a story told from multiple perspectives. (And out of sequence, just to keep you on your toes.) It worked like gangbusters.
Campaign is like if the alternate reality thing and the chopped up narrative thing climbed into a blender at a nuclear test site. What if those ideas… but in all directions, and also forever?
Nominally this is a First Doctor story with Ian, Barbara and Susan. They discover (to their understandable surprise) that the universe outside the TARDIS has ceased to exist. (!) This is after we learn that Barbara has died. (!!) Then, she comes back somehow. (!!!) And from her perspective, it’s Ian who has died. (!!!!)
Something very odd is going on. And for some reason, the name of the ship keeps changing. It’s the TARDIS. Tardis. T.A.R.D.I.S. The Ship. This on some level must be disturbing to Cliff and Lola — sorry, Ian and Barbara, as well as Mandy. Biddy. Jill. Janet! God dammit, Susan. Susan English! FOREMAN! You know, it’s a wonder that Doctor Who can keep his head on straight. Er… the Doctor.
Chapter to chapter, it becomes creepingly apparent that we are shifting realities. At first there is a nerdish glee to identifying each one. There’s one that follows on from David Whitaker’s Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel, which gave the crew a very different meeting. There’s one where unproduced stories such as The Masters Of Luxor or Farewell, Great Macedon took place. There’s one that follows the unproduced pilot script Nothing At The End Of The Lane, which we can think for Cliff and co.
It soon becomes clear however that there are endless variations. Besides which, there are realities that skip a groove part way through. They begin to bleed through consciously from one to another, with characters remembering each other’s deaths — as well as their own. You’d be much harder pressed to keep track of all this than, for instance, the modest shell games in Eye Of Heaven, although I’m sure someone has done it. (I didn’t even try this time. It felt like it would defeat the point.)
The plot is surprisingly simple: the TARDIS crew knows that the universe has gone wrong, and they suspect it’s the result of their own actions. Could they have changed history? They think it has something to do with Alexander the Great. They met him in some unspecified capacity at a young age, and possibly changed the course of his destiny. The Doctor urges them all to search their memories and see if they can identify what they did, and/or who did it. Then maybe they can see what they can do to fix it.
But it’s not that easy. Not only are they — and for that matter, us along with them — flitting through different realities, but it seems that an attempt to set history back on course has already been made. Ian, for one, spent time with a grown Alexander “to get closer to [him], to gain his trust and to assess the damage [they] might have caused by interfering in his childhood.” By all accounts this went poorly: Ian (or Cliff, etc) either went on a murderous rampage for his beloved leader, or committed regicide for him, or was run down by a chariot, or killed in battle, or assassinated, or all of the above. Susan at various points bore Alexander’s child — little ’Xander, or little Philip — and in most versions anyway, she lived to raise him. TL;DR, of helping to set time back on track, Quantum Leap-style, no one recalls very much. And the fact of its obvious failure suggests that this is not going to be their salvation anyway.
The quest to figure it all out is a compelling one, and the fact that it’s infuriatingly slippery somehow only makes it more so; the constant shifting sands demand that you re-orient yourself. We never gain a clear understanding of the original incident, but somehow that’s okay, it just feels like we’re watching a sequel to a story that got wiped. The resolution however is much more abstract. As with The Sword Of Forever, it involves bloodshed and horror… but maybe everything will be hunky dory afterwards?
The journey to this point involves ever-switching narrators (Eye Of Heaven again, you old rascal!) which is then compounded by not knowing who’s speaking, even when ostensibly we know who is speaking. (There’s a great chapter that doesn’t tell us it’s Cliff and Lola, rather than Ian and Barbara, until the very end.) It’s a mostly linear path however in terms of “what’s the most recent thing that happened”, although it occasionally jumps overboard entirely for a chapter, such as when we turn away to look at an incident in the Great Fire Of London happening in different ways.
We often switch formats as well. Mostly it’s your common-or-garden book of course, wiv the words and everyfink, but sometimes it’s (faux) handwritten diary entries, or giant overlapping text for added emphasis, or a comic book, or a board game or diagrams. It does not sit still. Is Jim Mortimore just a kid in a candy store with all this? I don’t think it’s uncharitable to say yes, a bit: Campaign is obviously an experiment and, equally obviously, nothing is off limits. The kaleidoscopic style pays off though, even when it’s incomprehensible, because (in my case anyway) the urge to understand what the hell this is all about adds momentum. It was a quick read, which seems an insane thing to admit. I guess I just wanted to know badly enough to get on with it? (I have read other books recently that were incomprehensible to me, and they never seemed particularly interested in getting to the bottom of it, which is maybe why I didn’t enjoy them. But this is all subjective: one person’s “this is needlessly confusing” is another person’s “ah but that’s the point y’see.” Campaign, for me, was clearly the “good” version of what-the-hell-was-all-that-about.)
When describing Campaign, in all its narrator/reality/format ping-ponging glory/horror, it’s easy to forget that there are characters at the centre of it. The splintering realities allow Mortimore to explore extremes in characterisation. Susan gets to wear different guises to her usual upset schoolgirl who’s prone to odd moods; as a mother, or a particularly surly teen, or an equal debater with the Doctor on all things universal destruction, she feels like more. Then we have Ian and Barbara, who both must reckon with the deaths of one another. Feelings which aren’t always as straightforward as loss where Ian is concerned, with him apparently having gone murderously native on a few occasions. Barbara must contend with her romantic feelings for him — in some strands at least — although in more than a few cases his heart still belongs to a long dead queen instead. Sometimes he barely knows Barbara at all.
Ian is torn apart here. He knows he’s done terrible things for Alexander, at times being deliberately hazy about them. Before arriving at a horrifying realisation that might end the whole crisis, he remembers his various violent deaths in agonising detail; he also engineers the deaths of the TARDIS crew just to end their purgatory; and he murders the Doctor over and over again because he’s been stuck in the TARDIS for so long that he’s forgotten how doors work and has simply run out of patience. A generally heroic character, it feels significant to push and dismantle him in this way. The Doctor, for reasons that perhaps become obvious right at the end, mostly remains in the background, occasionally biting back at perceived disrespect to his Ship. But unsurprisingly Mortimore captures him ruthlessly as well.
Now back up a bit: oh, yes. This novel is also set
entirely within the TARDIS. With no universe to visit any more the TARDIS has no choice but to put them up, engineering animals, landscapes and whole worlds to support them while they work things out — or more likely, live out their lives and die. “Story set entirely within the TARDIS” is a bit of a white whale in fandom, even though there have been a few cracks at it. (
Time’s Crucible qualifies, and wouldn’t you know it, I found that one to be “bad” incomprehensible.)
Campaign is a compelling case for being careful what you wish for with this, very much showcasing the cabin fever and desolation that would come of being trapped in the TARDIS for decades, or even lifetimes. It’s an amazing and almost infinitely
possible place, but it isn’t as real as a world. On some level, you’d notice.
What does Campaign actually mean? Well, there’s a very clear conclusion, which in itself might come as a surprise. A rug pull straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror redefines the whole crisis, providing a solid case for reading it again. Has it answered my questions? Not entirely. The opening with Alexander, though beautifully written, still seems a bit of an anomaly. I’m not sure how the Great Fire Of London fits into it. And obviously, after a solid answer is given at the end, there’s still a crafty question mark over whether that’s really the answer after all. So who knows, as a curator once said.
You can tell early on that definitive answers are not what Campaign is going for, so I don’t mind that there’s some ambiguity left over. I think it’s one of those where the journey, or the experiment, is its own reward. This is summed up neatly in the midst of the characters struggling and beating themselves up about their different lives when they get a visual sense of all those crossed paths. “‘A symphony of time and space.’ Barbara’s voice was dreamy. ‘What a beautiful idea.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Even if we can’t fully appreciate the music.’ ‘My child, I think you misspeak yourself. Look at it. Look deep into its heart. You see it as a thing of beauty to be experienced. I say it is experience. The life experience of ourselves and an entire universe of others. I think you will find that we are the music!’”
It’s bold, bananas and baffling. I think Campaign stands as one of the stronger examples of what you can do with Doctor Who in novels. Although it’s completely fair that it got cancelled for the simple fact of not being what was commissioned (EDIT: see below), I wish they’d set up a new commission for it, as it’s really not so much more nuts than some of the EDAs of the time. Also, being a Past Doctor Adventure it’s more proof, if any were needed, that you can tell interesting stories at any point in the series and with any characters. Continuity is a nice place to visit, but you don’t have to live there.
8/10
***
Extras
In the hardback edition of Campaign the novel ends after 245 hair-raising pages. Then there’s 200 more pages. What’s all that about? (Foolish of me to ask really. I mean, this is Campaign we’re talking about.)
First there’s something called Me & My Monkey: An Author’s Confession — Part 1. This is a commentary from Mortimore covering almost every chapter. Yes, he’s going to breeze through the entire book again, bit by bit. You can’t say he didn’t try to help.
It’s largely interested in the anthropomorphised (writing) monkey on Mortimore’s back, and it reads like Martin Sheen’s diary in Apocalypse Now. Eventually this commentary becomes its own pseudo-fiction about how he’s awaiting execution for the murder of another, distinct muse/monkey. Look, I think if you leave Jim Mortimore alone for long enough these things just happen.
As well as being characteristically bonzo there’s a lot of insight here, which shows you that Campaign contains much that is either autobiographical or inspired by his life or inspired by his other work or accidentally (and then deliberately) purloined from someone else’s. He confirms that he tried to write Susan in more dimensions than she typically received (“not quite the groovy teenager after all”) and he underlines a few plot specifics, such as how the Alexander prologue and Aristotle fit into things, which all helped my understanding. That said, Mortimore acknowledges that this isn’t a “plot novel”, since “a good book, like any good idea, is one whose contextual interpretation is forever open to change.” Perhaps for that reason he’s, IMO, a bit harsh on his choice of ending, calling it cliche, torpid and unsatisfactory. I’d say no to all of that: it is a little bit pat, the sort of ending that allows you to quickly tidy everything away… but I found that it so grossly undercut the emotion of what had come before that it added a fresh layer of discomfort and reflection. And anyway, it doesn’t even stick.
Mortimore offers hints about why the book fell through (this is mostly the purview of the next bit…), admitting that “Campaign never hit the minimum word count. Never even got close.” Then we un-redact history a little further: “Though he didn’t mind the prose-experiments and the wilder flights of fancy at all, Justin Richards felt unable to recommend Ben Dunn accept the manuscript for Campaign until I’d either a) removed the TARDIS scenes and replaced them with ‘proper’ historical scenes or b) removed the historical scenes and replaced them with TARDIS scenes. Either would do. He felt the story was ‘unbalanced’ as it was.”
Intriguing stuff then, and another wild journey into what a peculiar duck Jim Mortimore can be. I think it’s a valuable companion to the book.
Next there’s Getting Your Head Stuck In The Tar-Baby: An Author’s Confession — Part 2. This is everything you could possibly want to know about the publishing woes of Campaign, and a good deal more besides.
To be clear, this is fascinating. I always want to know how a book came about and there’s never enough information available — especially for the oft-neglected Past Doctor books. And all of a sudden, there’s this: not so much a peek behind the curtain as full access to the wizard’s private bathroom.
There’s an article from the time giving the scuttlebutt version of the book’s demise. There are several pitches for Burning Artemis, later retitled Campaign, and having just read the finished novel these tell us everything we missed about Alexander and Aristotle. It turns out that Campaign, as in the novel anyone has actually read, is not merely an evolution of an original idea but one that incorporates it literally. (I said it felt like a sequel to a lost story. AHEM.) This is like what Kurt Vonnegut did with Timequake: take an aborted story and write something new around it, and also about it. The pitches also give a window into the editing process, with at least one Steve Cole change — paring back a reveal of Alexander’s history changing/not changing to just one instance, reducing repetition — suggesting itself to me when I read the first version. Good change! They do happen.
I might as well say that Burning Artemis/Campaign 1.0 also sounds brilliant. It’s an entirely different beast, a full-blooded historical with tons of well-researched ideas and a fresh take on the “changing history” conundrum. I wish Mortimore had written it somehow, but since I also liked Campaign 2.0, and since neither book would work if the other had also been published, I guess we can only have one or the other. It’s like the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question being mutually exclusive in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Again, it’s fascinating to track the progress of the story. But that’s not all. Mortimore provides heaps of correspondence with Steve Cole and Justin Richards (editors passing in the night) to explain the process of the book’s commission, then delay(s), then cancellation(s). And nothing is held back. The word you’re looking for is “unexpurgated”. It could only have appeared in an unofficial publication. I went bright red reading some of it; I cringed, involuntarily uttered “oh god” on several occasions. It’s still fascinating — I can’t help it! — because we never normally get this kind of tea about why a book happened or didn’t happen. But the level of awkwardness as these conversations blossom into full-on arguments is like listening to your parents fight. It’s seriously toe-curling, bridge-toasting stuff.
It’s worth saying that the key point of contention is
not that the finished novel didn’t resemble the one they commissioned — although that is certainly true. The death knell is a series of requests for edits from Richards which generally revolve around his not “getting” the book, and feeling therefore that readers wouldn’t. To which I would say, well horses for courses and everything, but you guys published
The Blue Angel — which is arguably just as odd as
Campaign but with an added heaping of whimsy and
no ending. I didn’t get it! Even the people who liked it didn’t get it, going by most reviews. But you still had Paul Magrs back, so it can’t have done any harm, surely? Some books are weird. With the release schedule of BBC Books at the time, it’s not as if another “normal” one wouldn’t be along shortly. It seems a curious hill to let a book die on when the range was so consciously getting a bit weird around now. But that might be a sign of what’s to come with Richards as editor.
It’s difficult to describe the rest of these conversations without feeling like I’m just contributing to gossip (it really is that personal, like a work spat that has somehow CCed the entire company), so suffice to say it gets a bit ugly and I’m not surprised it ended badly. By the end you’ve gone behind the curtain, into the wizard’s bathroom and spent what feels like several lifetimes at the bottom of his laundry basket. I think everyone involved had some semblance of a valid point, everyone involved was also a flawed human being, and BBC Books should probably pay people on time.
Anyway! That’s what happened. Book publishing, eh. Who’d do it?
Lastly we have Born in the Briar Patch: An Author’s Confession — Part 3. This is a collection of reviews for Campaign. And look, I’m not gonna review reviews, but they raise some interesting points. There’s a general feeling that people didn’t get The Sword Of Forever, perhaps lending some support to Justin Richards’s thesis. (I didn’t get it either, FWIW.) There’s an oft repeated refrain of “you’ll need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Who ephemera to understand this book,” which I don’t agree with — you don’t need to know where Cliff and Lola originated, you just need to know that they are alternate versions of Ian and Barbara. There’s the surprising breadth of reviews which includes negativity, either around the ending (contentious) or the book as a whole (didn’t get it). I think my favourite thing though is the reference to something said in Part 2, a Richards criticism that Mortimore won’t be available to write back to every reader with explanations if they need them — because in the first chunk of the book’s extras, that’s exactly what he does. I like to think this means he sees the sense in (some) criticism once he gets past the initial outrage — and really, what creative hasn’t felt that way? (See also, the book’s ending. Jim defends it passionately in his comms to Justin. Yet years later in this edition’s extras, he thinks it’s “torpid.” Clearly people change — a major thesis of Campaign, as it happens.)
The book’s final, definite, this-time-we’re-serious ending is Jim acknowledging his flaws, which then perhaps recontextualises the agonising dirty laundry on display. Perhaps this edition of Campaign is, among infinite other things, an attempt by a complicated guy to recognise when he might get in his own way. But anyway. The book’s still good.
This, for realsies, is the end of the review. Only now you’re reading an entirely different review of another book altogether, and my name by this point is, oh, let’s say Bert.
Rhubarb/10
