The mannikins don’t walk

All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell

It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very good idea.

Still there must have been some nervousness on the part of the publishers, for they felt obliged to insist on the dust-jacket, ‘A Novel’. But then this is yet another materialisation for the spin doctor and political bully who, if you have forgotten, they remind you, also on the dust-jacket, is ‘the best-selling author of The Blair Years’, surely an experience likely to depress anyone. And, if you are still unconvinced of his credentials, they add a quote from a national treasure known to have suffered from this terrible condition: ‘I have rarely read a book where the agonies and insecurities of mental trauma have been so well chronicled’ (Stephen Fry). So Mr Campbell knows his stuff.

But is it a novel? In other words do the little mannikins come alive enough for them to walk and talk for the reader, or are they just paraded with placards, with an accompanying tick-list? Alcoholic Cabinet Minister: what does he drink, where does he hide the stuff, how does he hide its effect, how much does he get through? The point is, do we believe there actually was an alcoholic Cabinet Minister? This presumably is not a problem Mr Campbell had to face when, in an earlier materialisation, he was writing for Forum magazine or whatever it was called.