The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

This book makes a boast on the front; ‘65 MILLION COPIES SOLD’. Inside, Coelho himself states that, since originally published in his native Brazil at the end of the ‘80s, it has since been translated into 74 languages. Impressive statistics by anyone’s standards, but what actually is this little book? 

          The story is very basic. A boy called Santiago – for the entirety of the novel known only as ‘the boy’ – is a shepherd in southern Spain. He suffers from recurring dreams (i.e. he’s had the same dream twice), about supposed treasure beneath the Pyramids of Giza, and wonders what to do about it. He is swiftly browbeaten, by a Gypsy soothsayer and a mysterious old man who claims to be a king, into finally upping sticks and embarking on the journey, and sets out to cross North Africa to get to the goal. Along the way he meets a number of other characters, a shopkeeper, an Englishman, and the alchemist who gave his title to the book, a couple of whom convince him to believe in their crackpot ideas about life, and he eventually achieves his dreams.

          It’s a book with the central theme of spirituality. The author is trying to pass on his ideas to the reader, and the story, the characters, the events, are all in service of that aim. I’m sure it’s all well and good if you want to convert to that way of thinking, but that should not detract from the fact that it’s a work of fiction, and thus it shall be reviewed as such. 

As a work of fiction, The Alchemist is terrible. The story is basic, the characters are un-engaging, and the prose is dull and flaccid. Its simplicity as a novel is surely designed to present as small a barrier as possible between the reader and the ideas held within, but it only ends up feeling demeaning. ‘Here are my ideas,’ says the book; ‘and here’s a parable so that people like you can understand them.’ That’s what it is; a parable, a simplified and unambiguous allegory designed to teach others, as seen many times in the Christian gospels. There is a serious problem with parables; they enforce a distinct divide between a speaker and a listener. The teacher, who claims to have higher knowledge about something, imparts their knowledge onto the student by deliberately simplifying it for them into a story. It’s a common technique for those who try to impart ideas relating to intangible concepts, because there’s nothing solid for them to actually use in order to convince an audience. While there’s nothing wrong with the method in itself, that it’s the most effective tool for imparting superstitions and unqualified ideas makes them naturally dubious in my eyes.

The ideas themselves are the meat of the story – the plot only being the potatoes – and so they therefore need a slightly closer inspection. In the first section of the book, the boy meets a man claiming to be a king, who reveals the truth of the world to him in a few key phrases, which the boy repeats to himself at pertinent moments throughout:

“That’s the way it always is,” said the old man. “It’s called the principle of favorability. When you play cards for the first time, you are almost sure to win. Beginner’s luck.” [...]

“In order to find the treasure, you will have to follow the omens. God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left for you.” [...]

“People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being,” said the old man, with a certain bitterness. “Maybe that’s why they give up on it so early, too. But that’s the way it is.” [Excerpts, pp. 20-31]

There is no ambiguity; no scepticism is allowed here. Here we have a character outlining his interpretation of life as though it were fact, which the boy – and by extension the reader – is supposed to hold as absolute truth for the rest of his life, without question. You will not have the chance of forgetting, as they are repeated throughout the story in repeated bite-sized phrases, squashing the concepts in even if you don’t want them – after all, why would you not want them, considering they’re all true! It’s ridiculous; abstract superstitions like beginner’s luck, destiny, and omens – both good and bad – are presented with all the certitude and reasonability as if they were the laws of physics.

And on that note, there’s a serious glaring problem with the whole premise of the story. The book is about freedom essentially; the freedom to follow your dreams, to ignore other people when they are denying you what you want – but in the book this only ends up being completely negated by the concept of ‘destiny;’ that is, what you’re ‘meant’ to be doing. In that case, the path is predetermined – someone or something else has already decided what you should be doing, and you should be following that rather than following what other humans are telling you to do. The protagonist is able to serve his own interests, but those interests are actually the interests of other characters – the old man/king person essentially forces him down this path, as too does the alchemist we meet later. They outline that there is a choice, but the incentives are definitely weighted in favour of a one ‘correct’ path – following the path will end in a reward, while failing to do so will result in punishment; the punishment of not being rewarded. To go against the more powerful beings would only result in failure, in the removal of their favour, and in that case there’s no real freedom; only the freedom to obey, the freedom to choose a different set of chains.

One last thing that annoys me about the book; the ambiguous time period. The book knows where it is all right; in Andalusia, southern Spain, embarking across North Africa towards Egypt. But as to when this is taking place, there is no real certainty. The whole book is sparse on actual details, so that the places only really end up as names in which the story takes place. We’ve got a shepherd, a country called Spain, and references to a Moorish invasion a long, long time ago, at first making me think it late Mediaeval or early Modern period, but then the concept of ‘tickets to Africa’ are introduced. No indication of how he actually crosses the Straits of Gibraltar; no indication of whether it’s a sailing ship, a steam-belching iron contraption or a modern petrol-glugging monster. Guns are certainly a thing, and then there’s a reference to Esperanto, a constructed language devised fairly recently. But, as the novel is painfully lacking in actual details, there’s no way to know for sure – it must be modern, but if so then the modern world has been almost totally banished from the narrative. People use ‘gold-pieces’ as currency, swords see frequent use in a world that has developed firearms, Esperanto is a language in a world without any sign of border security at international crossings, and yet a boy wishing to get from Spain to Egypt doesn’t think of just booking passage on a boat heading straight there?

It really, really bugs me.

Maybe I am being a bit unnecessarily harsh on The Alchemist, and what it’s trying to do. In the end it’s just a simple, unambiguous story about encouraging people to better themselves, to work through adversity, and to not have to give up what they truly want out of life. I don’t even mind that it’s just a reworked version of a classic folk tale; after all, the same story can be presented numerous times if new angles can be found – and The Alchemist does at least find a slightly different angle. All the same though, my rational mind found Coelho’s wishy-washy story a bit too violent a breach of reason, and hence it impaired my enjoyment of the thing. I would certainly not recommend it, but then it can easily just brandish its impressive statistics as a defence against my criticism, considering that that’s the only firm basis it has for purporting to tell the truth.

The Biblioist

Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. Harper Collins: St. Ives. (2012 [First published 1988])

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

          A well-known first line to a novel, if ever I saw one. And now, for the first time ever published in a review, here is the oft overlooked second line.

          “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

          And so begins one of the great pieces of classic English literature – or, as I prefer to call it, ‘A case-study of Georgian upper class courtship rituals.’ I could keep going with the following lines, but then we’d be here forever, and anyway, that’s plagiarism. So I’ll leave the excerpts at that.

          With all the books I read, I first like to consider where it appeared on the 2003 Big Read hierarchy of book-popularity, of which The Lord of the Rings placed at number one. Pride and Prejudice came in at number two, thus meaning it is undoubtedly a popular book – and in fact, when we stop to mull over the fact that this list came out shortly after the grand Peter Jackson films, which undoubtedly gave that book a significant boost in popularity as well, had the survey taken place a few years earlier then Pride and Prejudice might well have taken first place for itself. But then, how many film and TV adaptations have there been of this novel? How many modern re-imaginings have there been, and how many light-hearted parodies? It turns out that there have been numerous films based on this Jane Austen novel in particular, from the 1940s onwards, which means that it had upwards of sixty years more visual coverage than The Lord of the Rings ever had, and from before the Lord of the Rings had even been published. The prickly love affair between Miss Bennet and Mr Darcy has had considerable and long-lasting popularity, so it was inevitable that the old Artichoke here should come along and read the book for itself.

It’s about rich people. Landed people. The sort of people who’ll find themselves against the wall come the revolution. That Jane Austen lived at the time of the French Revolution is a tiny coincidence, in fact, and just a few chapters in I was beginning to feel a certain amount of sympathy for the angered working-class masses; there they were, struggling to survive under the boot of a decadent regime, while their social ‘superiors’ were mostly concerned about how vast the incomes were of their various prospective mates (of course, after a few moments of reflection I reminded myself that the French Revolution was primarily of benefit to the upper middle-classes – the very people that Austen is writing about here – who used the events of the Revolution to manoeuvre themselves into power. Ultimately it was still the working-classes who got the rough end of the stick, and found themselves slaughtered en masse fighting wars in far away lands for a megalomaniac emperor. They’re called ‘revolutions’ after all, not ‘inversions’). Anyway, having swallowed that nascent feeling of Marxism and re-righted my sense of perspective, I could begin to try to appreciate the lives of the Georgian elite.   

 The story is started by an event; a ball, at the beginning, where Mr and Mrs Bennet try to get their five daughters fobbed off on wealthy young men. The rest of the story involves the swanning about of the various Miss Bennets afterwards, dissecting each other’s love lives and marriage prospects in tedious detail, and trying to deal with the upsets caused along the way. It sounds like they lived a very boring existence – nothing to do but find a mate, and the rest of the time (and even in the course of finding a mate) they pass their existence by talking about any sort of inane stuff that comes to mind – the reading of novels being one resurfacing disposable subject. The most exciting thing to happen in the first quarter of the book is when one of the ladies gets a cold while visiting a friend’s house, and is left housebound away from home for a while – I think it was Jane Bennet, Elizabeth’s elder sister, though I can’t actually be bothered to reread it to make sure; it certainly was not Elizabeth, I can tell you that much.

Our characters here are generally referred to by their surnames, being a strictly formal world. The protagonist, when she can eventually be identified as such, is Miss Elizabeth Bennet, sometimes called Lizzy or Eliza just to make things marginally more interesting. We also have the two parents, Mr Bennet and Mrs Bennet, both sans first-name, her elder sister Jane, and three younger sisters, Mary, Kitty and Lydia. We also have an uncle and aunt (Mr and Mrs Gardiner), and the various male prospective husband characters, Mr Bingley, Mr Darcy, Mr Wickham and Mr Collins. Of the various other minor characters who occasionally pop up, the only one of any interest is the aristocrat Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is likely to wipe out her family by inbreeding before the revolution can dispose of them. The almost exclusive use of surnames can be a little confusing, and it is why Mr Darcy is and always has been known as Mr Darcy (though, considering that his first name apparently is Fitzwilliam, in this case it is somewhat of a blessing). 

Unfortunately what gives the characters their main drawback is that they all sound exactly the same while they talk. They all speak in the same flaunting high-end English, which the narrator also writes in, essentially giving them all the same voice; this often causes a little confusion in who is actually speaking at the time. Austen writes in a very 18^th century sort of way – if something needs to be said, then it’s worth using about five times as much language in order to say it. On occasion, though, we can see the faint glimmering of a character through all the language; Mr Collins for instance is a massive windbag, whose English is, if anything, even more pretentiously formal than that of the other characters. Mr Bennet, the father, has a certain dry wit to him that makes him just about worth paying attention to, while his wife as a contrast is a bit of a worrying, interfering woman whose only goal in life is to see her various daughters married off and resettled within visiting distance of home. Lydia’s character, as the self-obsessed teenager, emerges later on in the story, while Mary Bennet is completely absent throughout – seriously, I could remember that there were five Miss Bennets, and while the other four were in evidence throughout, Mary was a complete non-entity until the epilogue reminded me that she still existed. Maybe I was just asleep during the bits she featured, which is entirely possible. 

Elizabeth herself is tolerable enough, but Mr Darcy, one of the most important characters in the book, is just dull and lifeless. I understand that he’s meant to come across as aloof and prideful in the first part of the book, but he never really leaps off the page as you would expect a romantic icon to do so. Maybe this is a blessing actually; while he’s never really engaging, at least he is never irritating or slimy, or unrealistic. As far as male romantic leads go, not driving me mad with hatred is always a plus; it’s just that I can’t really see much else to him besides the one good turn he does, and the size of his wallet of course.

Because that’s what’s at the heart of this novel. Money. It is ‘A Case-Study of the Courtship Rituals of the Georgian Upper Classes’ after all. Mrs Bennet, the mother, is always eager to point out precisely how large a man’s income is, and to not follow the correct social conventions when choosing a mate is considered a despicable failure. The best episode in the story occurs at around chapter 46 when Lydia, at just sixteen years old, making her the youngest of the Miss Bennets, elopes with a male prospective husband. This sends shockwaves through the Bennet family home, for this is “Not The Done Thing”, one which will have quite tangible negative effects on the entire family, and the ladies are left quite indolent and hopeless for the next few chapters while Mr Bennet and the uncle Mr Gardiner go off in an attempt to track down Lydia and her scumbag lover. This is where the novel really shows its true colours; Lydia has disappeared due to the impulsive love of a teenager. Whereas a soft-minded modern audience might be completely taken in by that idea if it were dressed up any other way, considering that it’s the essential plot of a certain series of young-adult vampire books*, Jane Austen’s sympathy is entirely with the family Lydia abandons. We see the other four sisters whose lives have been shaken by Lydia’s impulsiveness, and the pain and anguish of the parents whose carefully managed existence has been thrown into turmoil as a result. 
‘But then,’ as the modern audience might reply, ‘what’s the collective loss of a tiny bit of social status when the bright and beautiful young Lydia, in the prime of her life, is following her heart and her dreams?’ I’ll tell you what, you whimsical modern audience, it’s the fact that she’s just so bloody thoughtless about it all – thinking only of herself at that moment, without any thought to anyone around her. It’s selfishness, quite simply. She cannot see beyond her tiny little world or her so called ‘love’, and has not an ounce of remorse about the whole affair, an affair which at one point her mother fears might end in a ‘pistols at dawn’ scenario between her daddy and her husband-to-be. You just want to grab and shake her by the shoulders and scream “Lydia, you stupid, careless little girl!” But she still wouldn’t take notice. Oh well; Jane Austen did her job well, to make such a point.

Elizabeth on the other hand does carefully think and consider things. She follows the necessary convention, but is by no means a mere subservient tool of her parents; this being the subject of one of the most interesting plot threads in the earlier part of the book. Mr Bennet having no sons to inherit his property, announces that due to the stupidity of the law, on the event of his death his closest male relative will inherit the house – that relative being his nephew, Mr Collins the windbag vicar. This is when something vaguely interesting happens; Mr Collins makes a rather ridiculous proposal to Elizabeth, in the most windbaggy way possible, in a sort of verbal essay. Naturally Elizabeth refuses him, definitively proving that there is at least the characters have more personality than meets the eye, though Mr Collins - being the windbag that he is - can’t seem to understand being refused. He thinks he presented his case well, and the fact that he does not appeal to Elizabeth on any level – intellectual or emotional – he remains completely oblivious of. While Mrs Bennet urges her daughter to reconsider his proposal, Elizabeth sticks to her guns – a good thing too, as Mr Collins is her cousin.

That’s something that might strike the modern reader as a bit weird; at the period it’s set, there seems not to be as strict a set of incest laws. Mr Collins claims to want to marry one of his uncle’s daughters so as to take the sting out of inheriting all his property after he dies, while the Lady Catherine de Bourgh, an aunt of Mr Darcy, intends him to be married to her own daughter under claims that ‘they were intended for one another from birth’, or some such piece of claptrap. Aristocratic inbreeding is not considered shameful by Lady Catherine, though her nephew’s marriage to an arbitrary social ‘inferior’ is. Like I say, if the revolution doesn’t get these people, then they’ll wipe themselves out like the Habsburgs did. 

One of the main barriers to a modern audience might be the alien nature of upper class Georgian life and courtship. To this end there have been numerous attempts to bring the story back ‘up to date’, by setting it in the modern world. While it might be admirable for writers to try to find modern parallels, the very essence of Pride and Prejudice is in its setting; the complex interconnected personal relationships of people who have to live under this quite stifling regime, when viewed in hindsight. Whichever way we look at it, modern western society is very different to those days – and something that must be stressed, though this is quite clearly a piece of romantic fiction, sex has no place in this book. In a world where you generally only get one chance to find love, you really do need to chose carefully – that is, in choosing a long-term partner, not just someone to have sex with. Hence the upset caused by Lydia. Hence Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr Collins’ proposal. Hence her rejection of Mr Darcy, even. As much as it may disgust you, neither money, status nor character can afford to be ignored in these considerations – and in today’s world, I don’t see how any of these factors can find a parallel. All romance nowadays is to do exclusively with copulation.

So then, to wind up. Did I enjoy this book?

Hmmmmmmmm...

I admit as I got deeper into the story, and realised that there was in fact a story to get in to, that it slowly began to grow on me. Very slowly, mind. There is a lot of tedious meandering about, I largely found it dull and uninteresting, but sometimes I was woken up by the events going on. Would I recommend you read it? Statistically you’ve already read it, and I’m aware that the Cult of Jane Austen is still extant in this day and age, so you’ll either end up reading it, or you won’t. What it is, though, according to my own interpretation, is a romantic story about reason and rationality, and that is a rare – nay extinct – thing nowadays, what with the romantic genre’s domination by primal passions and feelings. It’s a look back in time to the attitudes and lives of a vanished people, and if you can deal with the slight language barrier presented by upper-class Georgian prose, then go right ahead. I can attest that it grows on you, albeit slowly. I pretty much hated it for the first half of the story, it having bored me to tears, but, like the walls of Constantinople when faced by the rampaging armies who sought to overcome them, it wore down my convictions to maintain the offensive, until at last I agreed to a compromise peace.

         

* Post scriptum. I tried to hard not to mention those God-awful vampire teen romance bookshit during this review, but I was undone in the end. In many ways Pride and Prejudice and those other books are two opposite ends of the spectrum; one is about rational and considered love, while the other is about throwing oneself at the first man-shaped thing you notice and calling it ‘True Love’. I know now which one I’d rather see at the top of a bestseller list.

 Bride and Bibliojuice

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Collins. (1952 [First Published 1813])