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. In pornography human anatomy is enough to differentiate the characters, and all you have to do is set in motion the sparse/luxuriant pubic hair, the long/stubby nipples, and the rest of it.
But this isn’t pornography, and here he is really up against it, since he has a cast list as big as in any of the great Russian novels. For each one of these has to be equipped, not just with patterns of behaviour, but with families, lovers, secretaries, colleagues. And however highly coloured his cast, the Cabinet piss-artist, the Kosovan rape- victim, the Sierra Leone girl forced into prostitution (there is a whiff of yesterday’s headlines about these characters) have to be dramatised.
Here is Campbell describing one of them, a friend of the psychiatrist’s son:
Charlie was always very well-dressed, and groomed. He had immaculate short hair, wore jewellery that was fashionable without being gaudy and overly expensive, and he had quite a feminine way of walking and moving. Sturrock was sure he was gay.
All right, this Charlie is a very minor figure and makes just the one appearance, so why does Campbell bother with this check-list? If he is going to feature Charlie, why doesn’t he make him say or do something? The hand on the son’s arm, the approval of curtains, anything.
Again, the detail is leaden when it comes to clinical experience. This from the next paragraph:
[Sturrock] was sure he wouldn’t mind if his son was gay. He’d had many homosexual patients over the years and his emphasis with them had always been that there should be no stigma attached to it. Some were absolutely tortured by their sexuality, their fear of discovery and what their family might think. Yet mostly, once they discussed the issue with their family, they found acceptance.
Think how he could have dealt with this. It is the liberal professional talking. But what if Campbell had introduced a twist, had suggested a private horror when the liberal professional encounters someone like this in his own family? That way he could lead into the crack-up as the man begins to doubt the advice and balance he has given others.
The crack-up has moments of what Dr Leavis called the concrete, and what others might call the sense of something actually happening: the London traffic, the faces looming up out of the night, and especially the banality of the tiny texted sentences, which is all the man’s family will have to ponder on after his suicide. E mails, reducing human experience to sludge, hit the authentic tragic note of the 21st century.
But, whatever the book’s merits as a study of depression, I found it difficult to distinguish between the characters for all the supplied detail, and in the end this was fatal. And it was such a good idea.