PR in Fiction: But how does he know?
Although Mark Mills seems to present a credible picture of a British Information Officer working in 1942 Malta, how can the reader tell if it is in fact accurate? Here are a few excerpts from an apparently straightforward explanation of Max Chadwick's role. He is talking to Lilian, the half-Maltese, half-British newspaper deputy editor, trying to persuade her to run a picture of an old man who shot down an Italian plane with a rifle; it's a good story but it might be seen to promote illegal behaviour.
The Information office and the only Maltese-language newspaper... might make for natural bedfellows but Lilian's loyalties were not always served by the British policy which Max was bound to promote. This made for an uneasy collaboration, a tentative trade of services. Lilian advised Max on how best to pitch the tone of his publications and in return she received the kind of of information she could not get from anyone else.
(Max) crushed out his cigarette against the sole of his shoe, anything to avoid her eyes. "There are a lot of things I don't tell you - can't tell you - you know that."
Before the war, Max was an architect, with no inclination of his future role.
"...it was still strange to him that the task of manipulating minds came so naturally to him. He had always regarded himself as something of a loner.... yet here he was, deep in the minds of the masses, second guessing their reactions to events, guiding and enlightening them, a high priest at the altar of the great god Morale."
The question is, how does Mark Mills know that an information officer and a journalist would have had this kind of relationship? Conceivably, through careful research - the newspaper is real and there presumably was someone doing Chadwick's job. But how much comes from Mills own preconceptions of what the relationship was? Does Mills have direct experience of such a relationship?
These are questions that could be asked and possibly answered, but do they need to be asked? It is the author's task to persuade the reader that the setting for his fiction is credible, not to prove that it is accurate or true. In this case, Mills does not need to be accurate, rather he must create a situation that is believable, that resonates with the conception of such a relationship that shared by his readers.
In terms of the representation of PR, this resonance allows him to explicitly refer to Chadwick's work with the phrase 'manipulating minds'.
Maybe Mills has read Bernays...
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