New to the U.S. but first published in Europe in 1992, Coelho's latest (following the bestselling The Zahir)
is an old school parable of good and evil. When a stranger enters the
isolated mountain town of Viscos with the devil literally by his side,
the widow Berta knows (because her deceased husband, with whom she
communicates daily, tells her) that a battle for the town's souls has
begun. The stranger, a former arms dealer, calls himself Carlos and
proposes a wager to the town: if someone turns up murdered within a
week, he'll give the town enough gold to make everyone wealthy. Carlos
ensures people believe him by choosing the town bartender, the orphan
Chantal Prym, as his instrument: he shows her where the gold is,
confides that his wife and children have been executed by kidnapper
terrorists (remember: 1992), and that he is hoping his belief that
people are basically evil will be vindicated. Chantal would like nothing
better than to disappear with the gold herself and thus faces her own
dilemmas. Add in corrupt townspeople (including a priest), sometimes
biting social commentary and, distastefully, a very heavily stereotyped
recurring town legend about an Arab named Ahab, and you've got quite a
little Garden of Eden potboiler. But the unsatisfying ending lets
everyone off the hook and leaves questions hanging like ripe apples. (July 3)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
