Mind over matter

For Jamie Forbes,the protagonist of American writer Richard Bach’s latest book,Hypnotizing Maria,published by Jaico Publishers,it was the latter when he volunteered to be hypnotised during a show by the hypnotist,Blacksmyth the Great. And that is the basic premise of Bach’s book-that the walls are all in your mind. You are a prisoner of your beliefs. “Don’t assume belief’s some limp-wrist pansy,” he writes. “It’s the steel vise of the game and clamps us to it every second till we die.”

Like his previous 19 books,Hypnotizing Maria too includes many autobiographical threads. It’s difficult to determine where Jamie Forbes ends and Richard Bach begins. “Like Jamie Forbes,I dropped out of school to learn to fly airplanes. My wife Sabryna and I have our own T-34 just as in the story. There’s a whole wall of mirrors in this book,” says the 73-year-old writer,who currently resides in Oak Park,Illinois,with his third wife,Sabryna Nelson-Alexopoulos.

From Jonathan Livingston Seagull,a story about a seagull who flew for the love of flying rather than merely to catch food,which broke all hardcover sales records since Gone with the Wind and sold more than 10,00,000 copies,and throughout all his later work,Bach has consistently used flight as a philosophical metaphor and continues to do so in Hypnotizing Maria.

He describes the first time he flew an airplane as the one incident that played a pivotal role in shaping his character. “The ground fell away below and all at once I was home again. I’ve been dealing with the joy of homecoming ever since.”

Many years after Jonathan Livingston Seagull,Bach has retained a dedicated fan-base. Although Hypnotizing Maria is his first novel in 10 years,Bach has written a series of books and stories in the interregnum. “In the last 10 years,I’ve written Out of My Mind,five books of The Ferret Chronicles (gathered together recently in one volume called Curious Lives) and The Messiah’s Handbook. I like being a lazy indolent,but once in a while certain worlds and certain characters come alive and force me to splash their colours on paper,” says the writer.

About being compared to writers like Paulo Coelho and Rhonda Byrne in the similarity of the themes addressed,Bach says,“Readers can compare me with anyone they wish. I’m just happy they’ve spent time with any of my books.”

Bach spins out his thesis,written in the form of an almost cathartic upheaval in the protagonist’s life,with zero didacticism. Almost with a scientific detachment he offers a glittering world underscored by one beguiling possibility: There are no walls.