A POST-HYPNOTIC ROMP
The Holland Suggestions – John Dunning
Time for a spot of hypno-fiction! I came across this decent if dated mystery novel published in 1975 by US author John Dunning in Robert A Baker’s book, They Call It Hypnosis.
Baker, writing in 1990, was discussing the fallacies and misconceptions that hypnosis-themed works of fiction propagate, and I was pleased to see some forgotten books amongst the usual suspects of Trilby and The Manchurian Candidate – including this one.
Dunning is best known for detective and non-fiction works, but The Holland Suggestions – his first novel – has hypnosis, and an impossibly complex web of post-hypnotic suggestions to rival even The Manchurian Candidate, at the heart of its mystery.
Our protagonist is Jim Ryan, a middle-aged single father to a teenaged daughter, whose memories, grudges, and secrets concerning his ex-wife and a hypnotist friend start to unravel on receipt of a mysterious package that arrives in the mail.
The contents – photos of an abandoned gold mine in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, together with a gold coin indicating its connection with the riches of the Spanish conquistadors of the 1500s – are strangely familiar and compelling.
Meanwhile, Jim’s daughter, Judy, is turning 16 and wants answers on her mother, Jim’s ex, the volatile, violent Vivian. Jim revisits notes and recordings of hypnosis sessions with his friend and hypnotist practitioner, Robert Holland, where he spoke of Vivian, in preparation for speaking to Judy of her mother.
Jim is unsettled by remembrances of this period; Holland and Vivian had an affair, after which she left Jim and baby Judy, and Jim then ruined Holland’s hypnosis career in revenge, losing an otherwise important friendship. His dalliance with the secretary at work he’s been banging has turned sour, and then he receives a second package in the mail of triggering gold-mine photos. His work goes to shit and so his boss orders him to take a sabbatical.
En route to New York, however, Jim is compelled to head instead to Colorado, picking up a suspicious hitchhiker called Amy [yes, I know this is all getting a bit surreal, isn’t it?] along the way. Soon he’s in the midst of a semi-conscious hunt for a legendary lost gold mine in a Wild West ghost town populated by a bunch of characters who know far more about Jim and his ‘mission’ than he does.
I won’t spoil the plot, but it hinges on post-hypnotic suggestions deployed by Holland 15 years prior, when he died a degenerate alcoholic, yet was seeking to restore his reputation as a genius of hypnosis research and experimentation.
In terms of hypnosis tropes, Dunning weaves in plenty of ‘deep’ self-hypnosis, a gold fob watch, and overblown imaginings of the glamour and import of Holland’s work as a hypnotist. Jim was, and is, a dream hypnotic subject for Holland as well as another character who brings the story to a conclusion – despite him otherwise being a pretty headstrong, macho, and sexist character; traits not often associated with being highly suggestible.
Dunning has written an introduction to this paperback edition, explaining his interest in hypnosis, which adds to our appreciation of how fiction influences perceptions of this field. He “dabbled” with self-hypnosis when young after being “seduced” by a rumour Swedish boxing champion Ingemar Johansson had been in a state of self-hypnosis when taking the heavyweight crown from Floyd Patterson in 1959.
He continued to dabble, and was particularly “captivated” by The Search for Bridey Murphy. He wanted to believe hypnosis could imbue him with the self-belief he needed to succeed as a novelist, but could never “get any deeper than a pleasantly hazy state of full awareness”, which “only heightened [his] sense of failure”.
He succeeded as a novelist without hypnosis, of course, but it is interesting to wonder if it is the ‘failure’ of those who write fictitiously about hypnosis to achieve it that has so potently shaped hypnosis as a meme.
I found Dunning’s denouement far-fetched, hurried, and unsatisfying. Jim’s apparent past life that he explored with Holland doesn’t have a pay-off but is mentioned in literally the final lines as if Dunning planned a follow-up book solving this secondary mystery. And, given no one gets the gold, he also somewhat declines to solve the first. But if you’re in the mood for a hypno-themed-mystery-romp then it’s enjoyable enough.
