Thorsons
Pp. 201
Leo Tolstoy is said to have said, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” This is the latter of those two options, and its claim to great literature is subjective, but the author has sold over 175 million of his books worldwide. One day a stranger comes to the town of Viscos (spoiler alert: he is the devil of the title) with a backpack containing twelve bars of gold. He offers one of them to Chantal (the Miss Prym of the title) on the condition that she communicates to the villagers that they will receive the other eleven if they commit a murder.
In essence it is a very simple
morality tale; are people intrinsically good or evil? The basic prose may be a
matter of translation from the original Portuguese (Coelho is Brazilian) but it
suits the elements of fable, incorporating many parables. As it is a
philosophical conceit, the narrator is omniscient, the characters are ciphers,
and the events are unrealistic. It is cerebral rather than emotional; designed
to make the reader think rather than feel.
The village of Viscos is remote
and irrelevant, chosen deliberately by the stranger for his experiment. He
wants to pit the villagers against each other, knowing that they are all in
desperate financial straits and would welcome a windfall. It does not matter to
the stranger whom the villagers choose to murder, only that they commit the
act, and therefore, this is also an exploration of the conflict between the
individual and society. “The story of one man is the story of all men. I need
to know if we are good or evil.” Most cultures and religions have tales of the
eternal struggle between good and evil. A Native American myth posits that we
all contain two wolves; a kind and gentle one and a fierce and vicious one. The
one that survives is the one we feed. This is incorporated into the metaphor of
the rogue wolf which stalks the forest and terrorises the villagers, keeping
them afraid. Many religions also have “a place of punishment, where the
immortal soul goes after committing certain crimes against society (everything
seemed to be in terms of society, rather than of the individual).”
The fundamental question is
whether we are intrinsically good or bad, and what makes us this way. Coelho
suggests that we are only good due to the fear of consequences. The stranger says,
“I am a man who walks the earth with a devil at his side; in order to drive him
away or accept him for once and for all, I need to know the answers to certain
questions.” He chose Chantal because she is orphaned and searching for a way to
escape her dull life in the village, but she wants someone to rescue her rather
than acting for herself. She has several meetings with the stranger – as a
single woman these may cause consternation but she has no one to protect her
morality and can do as she please. She realises, however, that she too is bound
by the fear of the future.
