Song of the day: “Weapon of Choice” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The Witch of Portobello
Author: Paulo Coelho
Category: Fiction
The Witch of Portobello is the tale of a young woman that bucked the system and decided to break free from traditional thinking, opting instead to follow her heart in all matters spiritual. When early on in life she is betrayed by her own mother who puts her up for adoption, Athena – born Sharine Khalil – cements her stand-alone attitude, when the Catholic Church turns its back on her based on traditional principles. Distraught and finding herself with the responsibility of a new born son, Athena goes on to find her own meaning in life depending only on herself and the help of a handful of teachers who allow her to expand her horizons to something that seems to go beyond what is humanly possible.
The story is told by a series of interviews gathered by a man who claims to simply want to put all of these interviews together and keep his own bias out of it. Alternating through the narration of a former boyfriend, Athena’s step mother, her teacher, her priest, her student, her biological mother and her landlord among others, the tale is weaved and one is able to follow this path of self discovery that ultimately allows Athena to get in touch with what is within all humans which connects us to what she calls The Mother or the feminine side of God.
It is on the surface a relatively well told story, a fast read and straight forward enough to satisfy the reader that found the Da Vinci Code readable. But it also leaves the reader wanting for more substance and context. There is in this work two major flaws which I personally found distracting. The first is the claim by the ‘compiler’ to want to keep his hands off the interviews to allow the speakers themselves to tell the tale. However, by arranging them and cutting them up the way he did, so that they all weave neatly into each other (quite seamlessly) he has done exactly what he wanted to avoid. While it might have been more difficult (not to mention more demanding of the reader) to write a book where the interviews were not segmented and forced the reader to get bits at a time of Athena’s interesting life, it would have been far more interesting and fulfilling.
The second flaw I found with this book is the fact that for a tale being told by numerous people, they ALL sound remarkably the same. They are in fact so similar in voice that I found myself having to double check whose interview I was reading (something that my wife, who also read the book, confirmed having to do as well). Certain characters make an attempt to individualize themselves, but always with inconsistent results. Take for example the character of Vosho, a Romanian who claims to speak in constant present tense because to the gypsies, there is no time, only space. This character’s voice seems to be the first one to stand out as unique until it is paralleled by Liliana (Athena’s biological mother). Strangely enough, however, though Liliana claims to also speak only in present tense, halfway through her interviews she uses past tense. And Deidre, better known as Edda, who happens to be Athena’s ‘teacher’ and is not Romanian, speaks through her interviews in present tense as if it were. This all makes for a confusion of detail which ends up being distracting.
Because of its lack of dimension and the author’s inability to put the flair and flavor of different personalities into different characters, the book itself is rendered flat. Every character with the exception of Andrea (Athena’s student) seems to be under the same spell of enchantment and they all technically sound the same, which defeats the purpose of writing a story from the point of view of numerous people.
It is an interesting concept to be sure, a neat little tale that provides with a new point of view that is not often encountered and which is likely to be foreign to the majority of readers. It also holds a tremendous amount of potential at various points, the idea of reaching spiritual access through dance, the concept of finding spirituality in calligraphy, the suggestion that a person’s ultimate ability to achieve greatness is buried within and only needing to be awakened is appealing, but like many books that cater to a particular market, this book finds itself in a tight little niche. The way Atlas Shrugged will only appeal in philosophy to the like minded and those who subscribe to that point of view, this book will also only make sense to the people that agree with this philosophical point of view. To the rest of us it simply becomes an interesting story, with an intriguing concept which in deployment fails to capture or to convince; and unlike Ayn Rand, who truly believes in her philosophy Coehlo presents it only as a tool for a new angle from which to tell a story, effectively keeping this book from becoming a good book and leaving it just a notch above mediocrity. Thankfully, it is a lightning fast read.
Rating: 
