Hypnotizing Maria (2009)
Richard Bach (1936-)
154 pages
In Hypnotizing Maria, Richard Bach returns to the themes of several of his earlier books: the joy of flying and the need to overcome our self-imposed limitations. Bach has flown planes all his life, from his time in the air force, to commercial flights and even barn storming, and his central character in this book is a pilot who has a similar background as Bach, and who spends most of the story flying his renovated military trainer on a cross-country trip. During the trip the pilot goes through a process of self-discovery, as Bach describes through him the view that we all box ourselves in with our expectations and assumptions of how the world is, and that actually the world we perceive is, to borrow from one of Bach’s most famous titles, an Illusion of our own creation.
The story opens with the pilot in flight, hearing a radio call from a woman in nearby Cessna; her husband has collapsed. She has never flown a plane and is calling out for help. He manages to calm her down and talk her through to a safe landing at a nearby airport before continuing on his way. The next morning he reads a news report, in which the woman says she was only able to land the plane because her unknown helper ‘hypnotized’ her into believing she could fly it. Her comment recalls for him a dramatic experience he had had when he was younger, of being hypnotized on stage by a traveling showman. The sudden recollection of that event, combined with a chance meeting at his next stop, leads the pilot to consider how apparent coincidences can change the direction of our lives, and how what we tell ourselves --- the suggestions we make to ourselves in everything we think and say --- can often lead us to create a world around ourselves that constrains our lives.
Although I very much enjoyed Illusions when I read it, so many years ago now, and also several other of Bach’s books that I read in the years that followed, I found this one a little too forced in terms of the presentation of his philosophy. In Illusions, the plot involves a pilot who meets a messiah who’s decided to ‘drop out of the messiah business’, and the philosophy that Bach proposes through the story develops slowly, in incremental steps like building blocks, as the ex-messiah talks to the pilot. In Hypnotizing Maria, I found the basic ideas intriguing --- the power of coincidences to change our lives and the limitations we can talk ourselves into --- but the story, for me, makes an abrupt leap to a larger philosophy that says that the entire world around us is in fact just a construct of our minds that we find so convincing that we no longer realize that we can simply step back outside of it any time we wish. We follow the pilot to this discovery through his thoughts and words, but it is not motivated so much as laid out for us on a platter.
Nonetheless, the opening pages of the book, in which the pilot guides the woman to safety, and the subsequent descriptions of flying and handling surprises in the air such as weather and malfunctions are told with a sure hand and make for a good story. And there is at least a kernel, and maybe more, of important truth to realize or remember in the ideas Bach presents here, as in his earlier work.
Other reviews / information: An interview with Richard Bach on KBOO radio.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION
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