Book review: 'The Hypnotist'

Book: The Hypnotist
Author: Lars Keplar
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 503
Price: Rs299

Lars Kepler does not exist. At least, not in physical form. One might say he is a fictional character — a narrator and writer. In real life, he corresponds to Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril — two Swedish authors who wrote The Hypnotist together as Lars Kepler. In keeping with the Swedish trend of producing page-turners, this one hooks the reader from the opening pages.

As with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, it seems a little tame to call this novel a ‘thriller’. It belongs among the greater crime fiction of our time — with the works of authors such as PD James and Minette Walters. As these writers did, it gives us fleshed out characters with human vulnerabilities and flaws. It also compels us to interrogate our notions of family, love, childhood and trust.

There is action aplenty; the plot twists and turns around two events — a gruesome set of murders and a kidnapping — sometimes linking them together and at other times drawing them apart. It is all held together by Eric Maria Bark, a psychiatrist who is also a specialist in hypnosis. His work in this field ten years previous to the events at the centre of the novel form the background to the action. The other protagonist is Joona Linna, a policeman who works by his own rules. But thankfully, there is no swashbuckling heroism at work here; his is not a role-model figure on the force.

Two themes running through the novel make it more than just about its plot. One is the portrayal of a dysfunctional set of individuals, each of whom is living out some real or imagined trauma. The desire to cope does not appear in these individuals; some remain in their parallel worlds, and some choose to wreak vengeance on the real world. The changing dynamic among a bunch of such people compels one to think of psychiatric problems far more seriously, and less condescendingly.

These individual worlds are brought together because the hypnotist (Bark) believes that the security of community enables each person to heal more completely. Unfortunately, a group hypnosis session goes wrong, and a decade later, a plea to use hypnosis again triggers off a series of difficult events in the life of the hypnotist.

The second thematic is the representation of a series of different childhoods. They debunk several western notions of what a child is/should be like. Perhaps even more interesting than the bizarre world of Josef Ek — who dominates the first few chapters of the novel — is the world of the five children who live out various Pokemon characters. The worlds of play and reality appear seamless; so the sudden revelation of the children’s vulnerable world once they’re stripped of their Pokemon roles makes for dramatic reading.

The other side of this taking on of roles is revealed when Bark’s wife tries explaining it to her father. ‘“I’ve just realised that’s exactly the point: adults are to be excluded,” she says. “The kids are ignored, left to their own devices, because we can’t understand. We dismiss it, call it stupid, but really the Pokemon world is too big, too complex for us.”’ It is this refusal to lapse into cliche or reinforce a stereotype of children and their worlds that makes this book far more than a thriller.

Comfortingly, novels in the crime fiction genre always end with a resolution. If not for that, The Hypnotist might make for a more disturbing read. Yet, within this form, characters guilty of betrayal need not be bad, children need not be pure and innocent, therapy need not be constructive or indeed, always destructive, and the world in the mind can be far more powerful that the world outside.

Guns don’t figure prominently in this novel, the mind does.