We pick a Paulo Coelho book with a certain amount of expectation. The riveting reads that were The Alchemist or Aleph or By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, keep our hopes raised of another heartwarming reading experience whenever a new book by the celebrated author is published. It is with the same hope that I picked his latest, The Spy.
A fictionalised account of the life of Mata Hari, the Dutch dancer and courtesan who was accused and executed for treason during the First World War, The Spy is told in the protagonist’s voice through the final letter she wrote in prison to her lawyer one week before her execution. Her life, narrated in brief, right from her semi-privileged upbringing in ‘conservative, Calvinist Holland’, to her unhappy, abusive marriage to an army officer in the Dutch East Indies, to her penniless escape to Paris where she carves an identity for herself as ‘the’ enchantress, almost reads like a movie script.
And her unconventional life in Paris as a bold dancer who’s very comfortable with her body shocks the world to no end, carrying her name far and wide. She’s supremely popular in her chosen art. The rich and the famous are bewitched by her beauty.
She is the most celebrated woman of Paris. But then, it has its downside too. In the form of unwanted attention from the authorities. It’s war time. And she is enlisted as a spy owing to her ‘powerful’ connections with the rich and famous. The rest is history. It is known to all that she was accused of espionage, arrested, and shot by the firing squad in 1917, almost a century ago.
At this point, let me confess. I was terribly disappointed with the book. In the first place, it is not at all Paulo Coelho-esque. In addition, the treatment the author has given to the short life of Mata Hari is, to say the least, sketchy.
The story begins well, but somewhere along the way it loses momentum, as if the author was in a rush to finish the book. If you are looking for all the answers concerning Mata Hari’s life, then you’ll be left even more disappointed. For, Paulo Coelho seems to have just skimmed over the details, as if they are inconsequential — how or when did the idea of becoming a dancer occur to her? What happened to her daughter when she left for Paris? What was going on in her mind through the experience of it all?
Agreed it is a work of fiction and not a biography, but any story ends up being incomplete without the necessary details therein. Somewhere along the line, through all her inner struggles, we feel a tinge of sympathy for her. But we are left wondering if the feeling is justified.
There’s action, mystery, drama, romance, and above all, wartime politics. All the ingredients that can shape a good spy thriller. But, the book isn’t as unputdownable or breath-holding as it could have been.
According to the author’s own admission, The Spy was based on the Mata Hari files released by Germany, Holland and UK’s M15 over the last two decades. “I ended up with a mountain of documents,” Coelho has said in an interview, “but also with a question: what did Mata Hari write in those letters? And how was she caught in so many traps, set by both friends and enemies?”
But, did he manage to find answers to all these questions? Well, it is for you to read the book and decide...
The Spy
Paulo Coelho
Penguin
2016, pp 208
Rs 135