HOW ARE YOU feeling today? Good, bad or indifferent, you're likely to be hit by a basic human emotion - envy - when you find out that a 26-year-old not long out of university was paid GBP130,000 (HK$1.5 million) for this, his first book. A second must follow as part of the deal, but in the meantime Hector Macdonald can also enjoy the sweetener of seeing the American publication rights sold for US$400,000 (HK$3.1 million) and the knowledge that The Mind Game is to be translated from English into 14 other languages, including Japanese and Catalan. Oh, and the film rights have already been bought for an undisclosed sum, meaning that fame will certainly follow fortune. That touch of green-eye you just felt may now be giving way to indignation; perhaps you're already mentally challenging Macdonald to prove he's worth the big bucks. It may be inadvertent, but that almost makes you part of this novel, which is ultimately a disconcerting assessment of the scientific manipulation of emotions - and what that could mean for the masses. So Macdonald may have seen the future, and it may not be pretty - but is the book any good? Actually, it is . . . with qualifications. Emotions, it would have us believe, are the key to our existence, 'electrochemical impulses . . . that have led man to achieve his most sublime triumphs and commit his foulest acts'. We are what we feel, says Macdonald, so imagine the power on tap for a company or government that can make employees happily work themselves to death, or die cheerfully on the battlefield, on its behalf. Not much new there: this is territory visited in 1984 and Brave New World, where human drones do their masters' bidding. But Macdonald gives the old thesis a glossy new twist by making his central character the subject of an exotic experiment that at first seems merely part of a dashing, arrogant professor's research into the brainwaves that produce love, anger, fear, loathing and the rest. It slowly dawns on the hapless hero - bewildered Ben the Oxford University student - that the 'game' he's in is but one move in a global strategy to develop an emotion sensor, attachable to the back of the head, which will dictate the wearer's feelings. Behind all this stands the predictable god of commerce, the idea being that those not already enslaved will hand over cash for the gadget, which will give them the power to tweak their own impulses to generate a happy buzz whenever they feel like it. 'Packaged happiness, boxed amusement', Macdonald calls it, which is what we already have . . . labelled Philips, Toshiba and Sony. And, surprise surprise, his demon behind the mind manipulation is an evil Japanese corporation. Apparently. But now comes the clever part: the corporation doesn't exist. It stands at the end of a long trail of deceptions and baffling twists that Ben is led along by his puppeteers as they race to develop the device. Ben is on to them and wants to blow the whole gaff to the press . . . which is only fair, considering he's been humiliated, duped, dumped by the love of his life, chucked in a Kenyan jail, tortured, tormented and made to look a cad - all for the sake of playing guinea pig. The plot twists, at first startling, soon fall over themselves in trying to be too clever . . . and paradoxically become predictable; the Michael Douglas movie The Game could have been a blueprint for the novel's overall thrust. And readers shouldn't expect any great intellectual treatment of feelings of terror, exploitation, stupidity or anything else: big moral questions are simplistically, possibly immaturely, handled, meaning Macdonald may have fooled himself into thinking he has dealt smartly with the ethical angles of his tale while inadvertently suggesting an inability to deal subtly with philosophical conundrums. Or is he simply smarter than we think? The Mind Game is essentially an airport novel, but it has more substance than most, plus characters to make you seethe with outrage and desperate with desire. It is also an engaging read, and the author clearly understands that you don't have to be a literary giant to be a hit in Hollywood. And as a neat parting shot, he leaves half of us feeling smug and the other half bamboozled by demonstrating the emotion-proof truism that women are smarter than men. Game over. The Mind Game by Hector Macdonald Michael Joseph $136