Boundaries Dissolve as Viewers Become Absorbed in Art

The distinguished literary critic John Bayley makes his first foray into fiction with “The Red Hat,” a book whose cunningly indeterminate genre befits a narrative in which people are never quite what they seem to be or say they are. In his critical writing, Bayley has addressed the work of a range of canonical authors, among them Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Pushkin and James; here the mysterious works of Vermeer set the tone and launch a noirish caper while at the same time enabling the author to demonstrate the power of art--graphic and written--to open up closed or hidebound lives.

“The Red Hat” is told in two parts by two different first-person narrators. In Part 1, the narrator is Nance, a figure whose gender, the dust jacket copy contends, is deliberately obscured. While it is true that Nance wears trousers, is called variously “Nancy-boy” and “a good lad” and likens herself-himself to an androgynous portrait by Vermeer, her sex--her sex--is never convincingly hidden. Nance’s gender circumlocutions begin provocatively but never seem to lead to a larger point.

More interesting is Nance’s guileless voice, which Bayley calibrates successfully, and the strange situation in which she finds herself when, traveling to the Hague with her friends Charles and Cloe, she visits an exhibit of paintings by Vermeer. At the exhibit, Nance notes her remarkable resemblance to the “Girl With the Red Hat,” a picture whose subject wears long earrings yet has a bluish chin, as though from stubble. This figure “has a future,” unlike Vermeer’s other subjects, who “have become their pictures.” In contrast to Charles and Cloe, Nance, too, has a future. Meditating on her connection to the painting, she says: “I rather enjoyed imagining I now had other selves.”

“Girl With the Red Hat” is the image printed on the exhibit’s ticket stub, a fact Nance repeats several times. This interplay between a portrait and a living person who sees herself reflected in it, a person who is perhaps freed (given “other selves”) by a special tie to a work of art, becomes Nance’s de facto ticket to new and unanticipated experiences. These include attending a wild costume dance with Charles and Cloe where each of them dresses as a figure out of Vermeer (Nance, of course, as the girl with the red hat); encountering a tall dark stranger in her hotel elevator and falling into bed with him; and becoming embroiled in a piece of dubious espionage that her stranger engineers.

Though never named, this man identifies himself as a policeman, a member of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, who is in the Hague to assassinate a Palestinian diplomat. Nance rather naively (and calmly) takes him at his word and, after a series of intricate plot developments, allows herself to be enlisted in his service. Nance is motivated in part by her desire to find Cloe, who borrowed the red hat she wore to the dance (come in touch with Vermeer, with art, it is implied, and anything can happen) and went missing or was kidnapped.

Nance allows the policeman to wire her, but she soon discovers that the wire is a fake. She is beaten and locked up, escapes by jumping into a cold canal and returns to her hotel to find that Cloe has miraculously reappeared. Also suddenly resurfacing is her policeman, who tells her she has done good work, goes to bed with her and then tries to strangle her. In the grip of a “lethal obsession,” Nance decides to stay with her policeman rather than return to England.

Part 2 is narrated by Roland, a former suitor of Cloe’s, whom Cloe asks to travel to Provence, where Nance--or Nancy, as she is now called--is living and find out what has happened to her. Roland reads Nancy’s letter, which constitutes Part 1 of the novel and which Cloe calls “this dotty document,” and, paralleling Nancy’s experience of the Vermeer, feels his own inner life opening up in response. “What gave me pleasure,” he observes, “was the idea of her story and mine getting together in some way.”

Eventually they do, and the plot turns as elaborately noirish as in the first part (complete with a handful of mirrorings that include a sudden attack, a plunge into water and a hospital recovery). All the while, Roland alternates between believing Nancy is telling the truth and fabricating extravagant lies; he even activates his own imagination, realizing that “making things up did give me a thrill, I own.”

Like Roland, the reader remains uncertain as to what in Nancy’s story is fantasy, what fact. And Roland--or rather Bayley--circles around obvious questions. The reader grows impatient in places from such teasing, yet remains compelled, aware that, as in certain dreams, adventures, once begun, can seize hold of one in unexpected and illogical ways. “Nothing written is ever really true,” Roland asserts; truth, it would seem, is less important than the “imaginary excitements” certain pictures--and certain stories--can introduce into ordinary lives.