Paulo Coelho: The Devil And Miss Prym

By DAVID HILL

Don't be misled by the title. This isn't a thriller set in a chintzy Cotswold village. It's a riddle set in a remote, unspecified mountain village. A stranger comes, carrying 11 gold bars. He's ready to give them to the people of Viscos - provided those people murder one of their number within a week.

Yes, the Brazilian author has read Durrenmatt's The Visit. He even quotes it. So we're straight into a parable of good and evil, guilt and free will. As in several of Coelho's other novels, the lives of ordinary people are tested and transformed by something extraordinary in a claustrophobically short time.

The stranger first confronts young Chantal, who dreams of a wider world beyond her snug, stifling home. She has to decide whether to tell the rest of Viscos. She does so, after a neat moral re-routing.

A slow, spooky tension grows as villagers begin to imagine the unimaginable. Ethical and economic justifications are manufactured on all sides. Every action involves a moral decision or renunciation. The priest and publican are no better, and little worse, than anyone else.

Viscos is already a place out of time, idyllic but unsettling. There are no children, its cosiness and carefulness have made it barren.

Coelho fashions it and its people into an arena for sacrifice and redemption. Angels and devils slag each other in devious debate. A white-eared wolf flits by. An old woman, with a presence beside her to her left, watches and gets ready to die.

Chantal and the stranger are less individuals than emblems. Like everyone else in the book, they have a soliloquy, a vision or a mini-sermon ready for every event. "Each of us carries a gallows inside him." "Man [this is a Latin-American novel] needs what's worst in him to achieve what's best in him."

Wince not. The grand utterances are counterpointed by a shrewd worldliness. In a translation which conveys the meaning while keeping the mystery, the plot unfolds like a flower in time-lapse.

The villagers' choice stays hidden till the end. The book becomes a splendid suspense story driven forward by human conflict and moral anguish.

I can imagine Coelho being all the literary rage in the US and Britain. A pity, really. He deserves more than that.

* HarperCollins $29.95

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.