fiction

EXUBERANT PARANOIA

Phillipa Hawker

Bernard Cohen
The Blindman's Hat
Allen and Unwin $14.95pb, 188pp, 1 86448 316 4

 THE BLINDMAN'S HAT (winner of the 1996 Vogel Award) has two narrators, one human, one canine. The human voice in the novel is that of Vernon, an expatriate Australian living in New York. For several years he has worked for a New York newspaper which for legal reasons he can refer to only as [Newspaper]. The canine consciousness belongs to Muffy, a small, fluffy white dog. They complement each other well: Vernon is impulsive, anxious, playful and paranoid, while Muffy's philosophical reflections, scattered through the novel, reveal a much darker, more complex sensibility. They are both, in their own ways, looking for connections.

Vernon is learning how to be American, and pondering what it is to be Australian:

In Australia my problem had been that it felt wrong to take things. Everything had already been taken, and all that remained was to give it back. For me, Australia had no further material depth, no sense of glut, of available immoral surfeit.
The novel is almost compulsively full of these intriguing, self-conscious observations.

Vernon falls in love with Dida, a freelance telecommunications engineer he meets in Central Park. Soon, he gives up his senior sub-editor's job at [Newspaper] to spend his time with her. Their relationship is an exuberant collaboration of bodies and minds. But it is transformed by a conspiracy and a quest. A conspiracy involving a hat, a missing blind man, a bow tie, a swag of tabloid newspaper stories, a kidnapping, a five-letter word and a magazine called *, a quest to find out what on earth (and in New York) it all means. Or, as Vernon puts it, 'We have a hat (Australian) and a bow-tie (distinctly, uniquely Steve's). The guy is missing and underdressed. We strongly suspect a crime may have been committed.' Like Antonioni's film, Blow-Up, the mystery involves establishing what the mystery is.

Vernon has a way with hypotheses, a fondness for the widest available range of possibilities. 'I map out alternative meanings for facial expressions,' he says to himself:

The icecream seller wasn't bored stupid, he was remembering the face of 'Texas' Harado, backslammed onto the mat by Big Joe Atlas to end the bout after only twenty-five seconds. The little girl on the bus was surely thinking about the steam above the vents on Avenue of the Americas at 33rd: does it taste? how quickly can it absorb the sugary scent of a nearby candy store?

There are times when this playfulness gets a bit tiresome: for example, when Vernon goes to see a hypnotist called Jane Streeton, whose office is on Jane Street. Speculations about the reasons for this 'coincidence' spill from one page to the next. Vernon asks himself,

Did she purposefully lease a room there or was it the only suitable room on the entire island? Was the room the only one available at that quality or suitability? Did she consider some slightly worse rooms and wish there was an equally good room and she wouldn't have the name thing; or were there rooms only very slightly better, so she took the name thing into account, giving it a certain but not overwhelming weight in coming to the decision to lease this room.
And so on. Et cetera.

Incomplete:

Philippa Hawker teaches in the School of Studies in Creative Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Return to September 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW