All in the Mindby Alastair Campbell
FICTION:AS TONY BLAIR'S media guru for many years, Alastair Campbell was a highly controversial figure writes DEAGLÁN DE BRÉADÚN.Not for nothing was he known as "The Real Deputy Prime Minister". Campbell's performance during the build-up to the Iraq invasion was sharply questioned by critics of the war and to this day mentioning his name is a sure way to provoke ire in certain quarters.
One leaves that aside in reading this fairly accomplished first novel, a largely non-political account of a successful London psychiatrist, Prof Martin Sturrock, and his wide variety of patients. Campbell can draw on personal experience, having suffered from alcohol problems and depression, as well as a breakdown 22 years ago.
Given Campbell's status as a big barracuda in the shark-infested pool of British politics and media, the sensitivity of the writing may come as a surprise.
He gets inside the troubled minds of Dr Sturrock's patients, including a near-automaton depressive, a rape victim and a teacher scarred by facial burns from a house-fire.
There's a little bit of politics in the person of Ralph Hall, secretary of state for health, whose rampant alcoholism makes him easy prey for a fake sex scandal set up by an unscrupulous tabloid. Campbell knows more than most about the human weaknesses behind the ministerial facade.
The professor's most intense encounters are with David, a fairly charmless depressive whom he finds, for some reason, inspiring; Emily, a burns victim who is successfully encouraged to get rid of inhibitions about her appearance; and Arta, a Kosovan refugee who escaped the traumas of war only to be raped by a masked stranger in her London home.
It's not as sombre as it sounds and, thanks no doubt to his journalistic background with the Daily Mirror, Campbell has an easy, readable writing style, which keeps the story clipping along. There is a level of intimate, if rather clinical, detail in the occasional sex scenes that may be too much for some readers.
Prof Sturrock is portrayed as a highly effective psychotherapist who lifts many of his patients from the Slough of Despond, but, ironically, suffers from severe depression himself, although he conceals the fact from everyone, including his colleagues.
Not alone that, but at the same time as he is counselling a woman from Sierra Leone about her nightmare experiences as a prostitute, he is himself frequenting a brothel on a regular basis. His family life is a cold-case disaster: his wife an afterthought and his children severely alienated from their father. Many workaholics must be in a similar position - it could be said that the professor's real family are his patients and that he is very good at getting in touch with everyone's feelings except his own.
There must be lots of manuscripts based on psychiatric counselling floating about these days and one cannot help wondering if the author's name was "Bloggs, J", would this one have seen the light of day? Having said that, it's a good read and one suspects anyone suffering from depression will find it therapeutic or at least consoling.
The ambivalence in the central character's personality is never resolved, however. Here is a great man, almost a saint, who transforms his patients' lives, yet he has feet of clay and is effectively living a lie: how can you counsel an ex-prostitute one minute and queue up as a "john" the next? A dramatic ending to the story leaves this question unanswered, unless Campbell is suggesting everyone is a whited sepulchre.
The story is London-based and the succession of vignettes involving different characters is reminiscent of the (rather more cheerful) film, Love Actually, from 2003. If this book makes it to the screen, they should call it Depression Actually, with, perhaps, a cameo appearance by Tony Blair.
• All in the Mind,by Alastair Campbell Hutchinson, 297pp. £17.99
• Deaglán de Bréadún is Political Correspondent ofThe Irish Times