Alastair Campbell’s novel ‘robotic’

Alastair Campbell's foray into fiction – he has written a novel called All in the Mind - received a drubbing in yesterday's Sunday Times. The reviewer, Peter Kemp, made his feelings about Tony Blair's erstwhile spin-doctor and his book clear in the opening line: "Anyone for whom the name Alastair Campbell conjures up the image of a glowering bully professionally adept at manipulating words to suit his purposes will be confounded by it. For the personality emanating from his debut novel is that of a swimmy-eyed sentimentalist whose verbal and inventive powers are remarkably meagre."

And that was the nicest thing Kemp had to say. He wrote of Campbell's "slackly put-together sentences" and also singled out the book's "robotic dialogue" (Example: "You have lost your wife, though I am not convinced that cannot be salvaged at a later date".)  

To write the book, which centres on a psychiatrist and the lives of five of his patients, Campbell has said that he drew on his own experiences of depression and alcoholism. But this, says Kemp, did not make an even read. "After apathetically dragging its way through more than 200 dispiriting pages, the book suddenly erupts into near-manic euphoria. Miraculous-seeming recoveries of morale break out on all sides…. Near the novel's end, a Bible opened at the Book of Job is spot-lit - only too appropriately, perhaps, for any reader persevering to this point will have displayed superhuman patience." ·