Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist and The Valkyries

Paulo Coelho is something of a strange entity. He is without a doubt a publishing phenomenon: a multimillion-selling writer whose books have been translated for consumption the world over. However, the first thing that strikes me as strange is that he, as a Brazilian who writes in Portuguese, is arguably the most read writer in translation. Yet it’s unclear how many people reading his books realise this. The other odd thing about Coelho, and the one I want to focus on, is his personal philosophy, a philosophy which permeates his works. He makes no secret of the fact that he believes in magic, though he doesn’t seem to practice any of the trendy neo-pagan religions which have cropped up over recent years. Coelho is certainly a Christian and yet perhaps not a monotheist; it remains unclear how he marries these two seemingly incompatible belief systems. As a staunch atheist, this is all a little far-fetched for me. Even as someone with an interest in religion and belief systems, I find it a baffling combination. Coelho has seemingly chosen the best bits of various religions and put them together in some sort of middle-aged Me-ism (http://www.scn.org/~jonny/genx.html). This is not, however, just indiscriminate musings. All this does have quite a profound effect on his writing.

Let’s begin with The Alchemist, undoubtedly his best-known novel. I’m going to leave aside the notions that this is a fictionalised self-help book because while those elements are certainly present and many readers probably view it as such, I’m not so insecure that I need to take life advice from some book. When I read the book, it wasn’t as some life-changing text, but rather as an adventure story. In fact, it would have made an excellent installment of one of the various Indiana Jones incarnations.

The book is about Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who has a dream about some buried treasure near the Pyramids and after a meeting with a mysterious old man decides to go look for it. This takes him to the north of Africa, where he heads east toward Egypt as part of a caravan, but gets held up at an oasis while there’s a war between local barbarians. At the oasis he meets an alchemist who trains him as his apprentice and, despite the war, they head out to the Pyramids. They runs into some barbarians who say they will let them go free if both men can turn themselves into the wind. Santiago has his doubts but he manages it. He gets to the Pyramids, and gets beaten up by a thief who inadvertently tells him that the treasure is actually back in Spain. He goes back home and claims his reward.

Now, all this is notably far-fetched. But within the confines of an adventure story, it works. After all, there’s nothing here that’s any more out of place than some of the weirder moments of Indy films (the obstacle course to get to the Holy Grail, the guy who tries to pull out his heart). Within the confines of a genre whose very conventions already ask you to suspend your disbelief to an often ridiculous degree, the mystical elements that Coelho readily and clearly believes in as real-life forces are simply another element in a ludicrous-yet-entertaining yarn. In brief, his beliefs become fictionalised and we the readers therefore don’t have to except them as anything other than plot devices or general background clutter to the exotic setting of the book.

The Valkyries, though, is another kettle of fish. This is Coelho’s second attempt at autobiographical writing (his first being The Pilgrimage). It’s the story of him realising his marriage is doomed unless he does something soon and heading off to the Mojave dessert on a 40-day (yes, I know…) quest to sort it all out. He’s told by some other magus that he needs to listen to his guardian angel and becomes obsessed with not only listening to it, but seeing it. So this leads to him meeting up with a group of evangelist biker women (the Valkyries of the title) and he follows them around as they go from town to town performing bizarre rituals to a baffled crowd of onlookers who clearly regard them as ranting derelicts. Coelho, it turns out, is cursed owing to some devil worship back in the 60s, and he needs to forgive himself. Cue another bizarre ritual to cure him. And Coelho also falls in love with their leader, and her with him, which means Chris, his wife, and the leader have to take part in yet another ritual. Paulo and Chris go home. The end.

Where to start… Firstly, remember that this is apparently the story of how Coelho saves his marriage, though it’s never clear how his poncing around in the dessert achieves this. There is no resolution to the story, just another ritual and a return home. He never sees his angel either. It’s never sufficiently clear what’s been achieved in the book’s 240 pages. There’s little to no plot here, and the characters – despite what Coelho seems to think – aren’t strong enough to distract from it.

But aside from structural problems, there’s a more fundamental difficulty here: we have to buy into Coelho’s pick-and-mix faith. While in The Alchemist, it was subsumed by the genre, here it stands in stark contrast to the real-world setting, and within that setting I find it incredibly difficult to suspend my disbelief and go with the flow of the book. This is, for a major part, because I’m an atheist, but also because I don’t understand Coelho’s belief system. Perhaps if I had some sort of framework to put his faith into, the story would resonate with me more – I’d understand what was at stake and perhaps even what was achieved. But instead the characters just come across as deluded fools who spend time in the dessert as part of some nebulously defined faith.

Moreover, the rituals which crop up several times over the course of the novel wouldn’t seem like the actions of a band of converted acid victims, but some kind of meaningful (to the characters in the book, at least) ceremony. Instead, I have no idea what the ceremonies symbolise, nor what its affects on the participants will be. Coelho has a wonderful talent for nonsensical philosophising – writing whole paragraphs about how ‘the gates of heaven are open’ which, rather than clearing up gaps in the narrative, just leave more questions to be answered. Ultimately, writing 400 words and saying absolutely nothing. The key problem seems to be that Coelho isn’t allowed to talk about his life as a magus, which is perfectly honourable, but sadly doesn’t make for interesting reading.

Simply, this is the writing equivalent of a damn good wank – I’m sure Coelho enjoyed the hell out of it, but I don’t want to see him pleasuring himself, and I certainly don’t want to pay for the privilege. The book is often turgid and meandering. As he has shown in The Alchemist, Coelho is a good adventure writer, but he is undoubtedly a dull, perplexing, rambling and self-absorbed autobiographer.