This is turning into a bit of a book blog at the moment, isn’t it? Well, more news about that in a few days, perhaps. In the meantime I seem to be reading faster than I ever have before, and I’m clearing my to-read pile at a rate of a book a week. It feels good to be doing that. I’ve spent far too much time with the hand-out London papers.
I do have plenty of books not written by Paulo Coelho, but a couple of months back I bought a stack of 10 of his works for £9.99, and I’m steadily working my way through them, which brings me to The Devil and Miss Prym
I could picture the scenes in this one very clearly indeed. Coelho set it in Viscos, but it read like it was in Brasov, Romania, although on a much smaller scale. Like all of his books, it sets out to explore one simple idea: in this case, what could induce a murder.
A stranger arrives in Viscos with eleven bars of gold. He shows them to a local girl, tempting her to steal one from the spot where he’s buried it on the mountain behind the village and telling her that if the people of the town would murder someone by the end of the week, they can share the remaining ten between them.
Those ten bars, when sold, would be enough to revitalise the whole town, and free them from ever worrying about earning a living again.
So, in essence, does she want to be responsible for tempting the village to kill one of its own?
But there’s a twist. To force her hand one way or the other, the stranger tells her that if she doesn’t reveal his offer to the rest of the inhabitants within a week, he will tell them himself, and then if they decide to do the deed the chances are they’ll do it to her. She, after all, risked letting them lose everything, and they probably wouldn’t take kindly to that.
It’s a book that keeps you wondering what you would do in her situation. If he’s going to tell the whole village anyway, what harm is there in telling them yourself just a few days earlier? Or perhaps you would be able to talk him out of it? Or should you run away?
I won’t reveal what she does, of course, or it would spoil the story, but it is resolved in a believable manner… one way or the other.
Price £7.99 (£5.99 from Amazon
ISBN 0007116055
Author Paulo Coelho
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