Hector MacDonald: The mind game

By MONIQUE REDMOND

This novel is a bit like Temptation Island, one of those real-life TV programmes where everyone drives each other mad and we sit there watching their emotional responses. Fortunately, The Mind Game is much more riveting, and once you enter the mind of the significant character you find you can't let go.

When renowned Oxford professor James Fieldhead says, "Let's have a little look at mind games in the context of game theory," he sets up a complicated set of rules which take his student Ben on a journey without choice or reason.

Ben is a straightforward, clear-thinking type who agrees to play a major part in Fieldhead's scientific experiment, exploring the unknown territory of emotion control. It all appears simple and rather attractive: all Ben has to do is go on a beach holiday with his girlfriend Cara to Watama, on Kenya's coast.

Kenya thus sets the scene for an apparently rapturous event, the familiar romantic holiday, full of gorgeous food, sweltering heat, warm waters, outdoor adventures and long, lazy days. But at some point, an invisible conductor takes charge, ruining everything and sending the fledgling couple on a roller-coaster ride of fear and mayhem ritualised by the energy of crazy love.

Ben finds himself in a mental place he never thought existed, and is ultimately driven to a vengefulness in which he is willing to take down anyone and anything to regain some sort of sanity.

After the experiment, on his return to Oxford, Ben is feeling safe again when suddenly his world and the people in it change. Friends become strangers, compounding his confusion between reality and truth. Carried along a road of turmoil and distress, Ben discovers he is just a pawn in someone else's plan - game plan, that is. MacDonald's dialogue pulls us along, too, feeding us titbits of information that we remember in parallel with Ben's dawning realisation that things are perhaps not as real as first thought. Friends and loved ones become strangers, players in a cast determined to push Ben to his limits.

The Mind Game is a good read. By the end of it, you'll be wondering if you really knew the rules at all, or if in reading this book you too were a pawn in yet another mind game.

Penguin

$34.95

* Monique Redmond is a sculptor and lectures in visual arts at AUT.