Slim pickings with Mata Hari
Some of Paulo Coelho’s prose should be entered in the Bulwer-Lyttons.
In 1917, a French court sentenced Margaretha Geertruida Zelle to death by firing squad on charges of spying for the enemy. In the ensuing century, the woman who became famous as Mata Hari has become so encrusted with layers of sin, sex and scandal that it’s hard to
know where the real personality ends and the fabrication begins. All of this, one suspects, would have appealed to a woman whose entire life was a tissue of lies, deceit and conceit.
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has now applied another thick layer of quasi-historical barnacles to the life and times of Margaretha Zelle. Armed with his well-polished philosophy that we all possess the inner strength to find our own destiny, Coelho embarks on his 189-page fictional voyage “based on the actual events of Mata Hari’s life”.
However well-grounded in fact his novella might be, Coelho ultimately provides us with slim literary pickings in a book that gives the impression of having been dashed off in an afternoon.
He is a prolific writer, columnist and blogger – a novel appears every couple of years and he has published 30 books, including Adultery, The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage, most of which can be classed as discourses based on his reputation as a
New Age philosopher. For the record, they are also immensely popular.
Naturally, that’s no indication that they are outstanding literature. I’d place them in the category of books you read to fill the tedium of a 29-hour flight – which is exactly what I did with The Spy, merely to discover that it bore an uncanny resemblance to airline meals – mushy, bland, badly arranged in a small tray and ultimately unsatisfying.
There’s always a risk that translations can muffle a book’s authentic voice. Perhaps The Spy reads better in the original Portuguese, but somehow I doubt it. There’s a contrived quality to Coelho’s prose that creates rigor mortis. I winced at much of the stilted and trite dialogue, and many passages, especially during moments of charged eroticism, are unintentionally funny for all the wrong reasons. Indeed, some should be entered
into the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
The annoying habit of tossing in familiar historic names, such as Freud or Picasso, and a tendency to become bogged down in trivia (do we really need several pages devoted to a carefully itemised account of the contents of Mata Hari’s suitcases?), makes for a book that creaks arthritically along an entirely predictable course.
We know this story won’t end happily (especially as Coelho helpfully reveals Mata Hari’s demise in his prologue), but surely it’s one that demands writing as highly perfumed, charged and evocative as its setting. Instead, we are served tediousness and more than a dash of self-regard.
Unlike the Mata Hari found in other books, notably Pat Shipman’s 2007 biography, Coelho’s is a sociopathic siren greeted by a yawn rather than a gasp of shocked surprise. THE SPY, by Paulo Coelho (Hamish Hamilton, $37)