Times Books - June 11th 2005

THE VISIONARY WORLD OF PAULO COELHO
The Zahir
by Paulo Coelho
HarperCollins
ISBN0-00-720416-7

He never begins a new book unless he finds a white feather, as a sign. A ‘Magus’ who used to write pop songs, he is now second only to John Grisham in international sales, and yet according to his many critics writes New Ageish, self-help tosh. He invites us to see the universe as a benevolent place full of omens which will lead towards happiness if only we will learn to see them, and at the same time he is a shrewd operator who requires his publishers all over the world to sell more of each title than they did last time, or else.

I had never read his work, and each day encounter those who haven’t heard of him, yet the interesting man tiling my conservatory floor was full of praise for ‘the Alchemist’ - the ‘symbolic book’ which has sold some 12 million copies to date.The Paulo Coelho phenomenon defies categorisation, as surely as it crosses international borders.

Originally uninitiated, but now with seven titles under my belt, the password into the Coelho cult still eludes me - although I confess my standpoint is that of one who believes Middlemarch to be the most profound self-help manual ever written. Yet to disparage his work for simplicity of style and somewhat obvious symbolic themes is far less interesting than to analyse its wide appeal. What’s more, to dismiss that appeal by use of the catch-all ‘New Age’ is to underestimate the power of fantasy and its perennial grip on the human imagination. Base metal Coelho’s work is not, although it has certainly turned itself into gold.
The new novel, The Zahir contains all the classic elements of a Coelho fable - which is the word he himself uses to describes these not-quite fictions. The Zahir is characteristically self-referential: the protagonist is a famous author who writes about spirituality and once made the pilgrimage to Santiago, as Coelho did himself. Nothing seems wrong with his marriage, and yet his wife (a war-correspondent) suddenly disappears, at which point his quest to find a reason becomes the Zahir of the title - an Arabic word which translates ‘visible, present and unable to go unnoticed’. The word is used as the title of a tale by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1949 collection The Aleph, and means a state of possession in which something or someone is the only thing we can think of: ‘either a state of holiness or of madness.’

The author meets a mysterious young man called Mikhail from Kazakhstan whom he suspects of being his wife’s lover and who is part of a strange sect or tribe of alternative young people who take part in ‘truth’ rituals or performances. Another key player is the actress Marie with whom he has an affair after Esther’s desertion, and whose philosophical conversations with him form a significant part of the text. All of the characters are as enigmatic as the novel’s resolution, and yet the whole structure works as another manifestation of that Quest which is a recurring element in Coelho’s work.

The Brazilian author’s own life is the stuff of fiction; no wonder he draws heavily on it to construct his literary narratives. As a normally rebellious teenage, he was confined to a mental institution three times by his highly-conventional parents and that formed the inspiration for Veronika Decides To Die. Later he was incarcerated and tortured by the Brazilian Secret Police, became a recording mogul, had an epiphany in Dachau, was inducted into an esoteric sect called RAM (Regnus Agnus Mundi), made a pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostella...and the rest is publishing history.

It is interesting that the success of his quasi-autobiographical style coincides with the growth of memoir as a genre (embracing even travel writing), as well as an apparently universal fashion for confession - the nadir of which is the Jerry Springer Show and the zenith examples like Hilary Mantel’s, Giving Up The Ghost , Blake Morrison’s Things My Mother Never Told Me and The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott.

The pared-down simplicity of Coelho’s prose must translate well - close as it is to the universal language of fairytale and myth - and this must surely contribute to his colossal international success. He is a best-seller in countries as diverse as Israel and Iran, and has explained, ‘My ideal is to share the symbolic language of humankind - like angels and devils, dark forests, high mountains and wolves, gold and buried treasure. There is a part of everyone, whatever their cultural background, that connects with symbols and omens...it is an alphabet you develop to talk to the soul of the world.’ Coelho’s unabashed use of phrases like ‘soul of the world’ must enrage and embarrass his critics - although he would have been understood by William Blake and W.B.Yeats.

I don’t think you can approach the Coehlo cult without first understanding his place within the tradition of Latin American fiction, and then assessing the extent to which certain crucial elements of this segue into the essence of so-called New Age philosophy.Two of Coelho’s heroes are Jorge Amado and Jorge Luis Borges. Although he does not share Amado’s overt political preoccupations, Coelho echoes his episodic framework, a gentle humour arising from the contemplation of human foibles, and a powerful sense that the world of the imagination, of fantasy is superior to mere reason.

The influence of Borges is more obvious. The collection of short fictions El Aleph marked an important step in the development of Borge’s style: the fiction disguised as another form, through which he plays his ‘games with infinity’.His playful yet challenging solipsism is nowhere better demonstrated than in the final sentence of ‘Borges and I’: ‘I do not know which of us has written this page.’ The fascinating ‘Anthology of Fantasy’ he (with Ocampo and Casares) collected in 1940 could be seen as a primer for the Magic Realism ‘movement’, and included writing by Swedenborg, Lewis Carroll and W.B.Yeats. Coelho would certainly fit in.

In 1987 Ursula Le Guin wrote an introduction to a new edition of that anthology, in which she linked the slow, almost unseen, growth of fantastic fiction as a reaction to the falling-off of ‘limited and rationally perceived societies’, explaining, ‘Our society - global, multilingual, enormously irrational - can perhaps describe itself only in the global, intuitive language of fantasy.’ Surely here we approach the success of Paulo Coelho. Critics rage that his seemingly simple best-sellers epitomise the narcissism which is the spirit of the age; Coelho points out that readers buy whatever reflects their own state of mind.

So what is that state? Certainly it admits of no national borders; and indeed manifests a profound disillusion with those political processes and fundamentalist certainties (including those of science and commerce) that are bringing the world to its knees. At its best the New Age is about the search for spiritual and philosophical perspectives that will help transform humanity and the world - and a fusion of East and West ( a constant in Coelho) is a key part of that quest. In Magical Realism the phenomenal world is crisply described, even to mud and misery, and yet lit always with the unearthly beams of the metaphysical, like a painting by Chirico. So it is that Coehlo’s readers readily embrace a universe in which all can be dwellers in houses of spirits, even those who inhabit a brothel or a mental institution, and in which the miraculous and magical exists the other side of the kitchen door. The message of The Alchemist - that each individual must listen to his/her personal calling /destiny /dream - is enshrined within a larger, more universal optimism that sooner or later the universe will act in your favour, even if not in an obvious way.

Personally, I find all this within the pages of my beloved George Eliot,where Silas Marner’s redemption through the love of a tiny child or Harriet Bulstrode’s acceptance of her sinning husband is more moving than anything written by the Brazilian wunderkind . No matter. The house of literature has many mansions, and I believe Coelho takes his place within an important tradition of fabulist writing, incorporating the kind of bold, questing aphoristic wisdom which Eliot saw as a way of ‘amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men...’. He will go on selling because the space between his words allows scope for the reader’s imagination and that offers both respect and hope. For whilst Reason estimates the universe by its own ability to measure the stars, Coelho asks his readers to gaze at a lake and see a whole alternative cosmos reflected in its waters.