Miracle Worker

Late in life, Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked his notebook: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! And what then?” Coleridge’s wonder stops us short, because like us, the poet dreads to discover that for the sign of his dream, he could offer only the prettiest instance of botany and, with that, the dream of the mind is confused with the facts of the living. There is some disappointment in this. But if we bend the world to fit our idea of it, we diminish it.

Sometimes, however, the world usefully harasses the imagination and modifies our conception of what it is like. Such harassments--unexpected trauma, secluded beauty on rare occasions--include miracles. We may, and usually do, decline miracles a place in our picture of the world because if we are to include them, we must also include the demons and nightmares that figure in less miraculous phenomena.

Yet the miracle can be an exhilarating mercy. Exhilarating because it suggests that what we have seen in the world so far is not all that there is; merciful because it forgives our failure to fully comprehend that world. The credible miracle absolves us of our crippled appreciations.

In his wonderful second novel, “Perlman’s Ordeal,” Brooks Hansen draws a stunning portrait of a credible miracle and reaffirms his trademark as a writer of spiritual concerns, dreamlike visions that, when framed by familiar circumstance, become human or even universal, experiences. Dr. August Perlman is a Viennese-born Jew living in 1906 London who specializes in “suggestive therapy,” or hypnotism. His psychiatric doctrine is rather brutal--find the source of pain, isolate it, cut it off--and his healing is limited to fixing symptoms, until of course he meets Sylvie Blum, 13, weak, dehydrated, manifesting multiple personalities and filled with wonder about a world lost beneath the sea.

During their first interview, Perlman discovers he is no longer speaking with Sylvie Blum but to Nina, a healthy, bright girl who eats and drinks and draws wonderful pictures that illustrate a fantastic story. Nina claims she is the bodily spokesperson for Oona, her invisible friend. After Perlman identifies Nina as an artifact of Sylvie’s mind, one of two competing personalities, he begins his standard treatment for closing Nina out. He discovers, however, that without Nina, Sylvie will painfully waste away, forcing him to listen to Nina urgently spin her tale. Oona, he learns, is missing and must be found.

It is a course of treatment that he is not completely certain how to follow, yet for all his austere methods, Perlman is not without a soul: His longing, his passion for beautiful provocation, finds expression in music, particularly in the innovative music ripening in the Europe of his time.

“[W]e keep exposing ourselves to the difficult pieces,” Perlman argues at a reception, “in hopes that maybe we’ll get to know these things, and that when we do, perhaps we’ll hear the music, too. And then we’ll have expanded along with it.” This is not only an excellent anthem for art and for the treatment of Sylvie, it is also Perlman’s image of the mind, a vision in which music serves to archive the soul.

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The archetypal musical artist, to Perlman’s imagination, is Alexander Barrett, a little-known genius who recently died young and whose scattered legacy he follows with an amateur’s enthusiasm, going to Alexander’s home and starting a budding friendship with the prodigy’s sister. Madame Helena Barrett, a Russian aristocrat, is visiting London, but when Perlman and she meet and discover their mutual passion for music, they become friends.

Madame Helena is also a student of mythology and unconventional spirituality. When she meets Sylvie during a visit to Perlman’s office, she suspects Nina’s fantastic tale concerns the mythical city of Atlantis, and Nina, sensing Helena’s interest, tells Perlman that Oona can be found in madame’s home.

Perlman is highly doubtful as to the entire affair until he happens upon dozens of relics in Helena’s home, not from Atlantis, of course, but from the credible and mysterious life of Helena’s deceased brother, Alexander. Chief among these are a life model of his hands, clasped in prayer, and a set of wax scrolls designed to be played by a mechanical piano.

These are of course Coleridge’s flowers, and in them Perlman sees tangible signs of Alexander’s lost, brilliant world of music, a world and an association no less vivid to him than Nina’s Atlantis is to her. Perlman patiently listens to Nina’s tale as it unfolds over the next days, even participating in a seance to interpret its meanings. From these spirit gatherings, a lavish tale unfolds that takes place metaphorically, vividly but not quite explicitly in Atlantis, from which Oona has been forced to flee. It is something of a fairy tale, involving catastrophes and celebrations, the forces of dark, light and mystery and a final bittersweet flight from home, and it is something of a prison for Nina, who cannot release Sylvie until Oona’s story is told to its conclusion. In describing the process in which Sylvie is recovered, Hansen executes a remarkable narrative performance.

These dazzling, and potentially disorienting, events are written with lucid, crisply efficient and smart prose. Hansen’s rhythms are measured and calm, similar in their simplicity to those of Borges and even Kafka, in whose work fantastic things happen that, in thrilling, oblique ways bear profound likeness to the world in which we live.

It is no news that in the face of life’s greatest mysteries, we may end up embracing the queerest truths to disarm them, particularly when they cause us to suffer. But as Perlman discovers, the difficult mysteries may prompt us to expand along with them. In Oona’s hypnotic tale and in “Perlman’s Ordeal,” Hansen deftly balances the facts of such anguish with the mechanisms we embrace to keep, or perhaps grow, ourselves whole. It is a stunning accomplishment.*