Signed, Mata Hari: A Novel [Hardcover]

 

 

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This sad but quite beautiful story recounts the life of a deeply misunderstood and much maligned woman who traveled from her childhood home in the wintry Netherlands to the hot and sweaty jungles of Java, and then on to Paris where she was finally imprisoned in the prison of Saint-Lazare, accused of sedition, a traitor to her country, forced to look at the stone on the floor of her cell as she ponders her trip across the darkness of life.

The woman is of course, the famous dancer Mata Hari, a name that has become synonymous with spying, espionage, intrigue, and sensuality. She was born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden, but Mata was only thirteen when disaster unexpectedly struck her family. Her father Adam Zelle went bankrupt as a result of a series of misguided speculations on the stock market and then deserted the family when he left to try and recapture his fortune in Amsterdam.

It his here in Yannick Murphy's gorgeously written novel that the bulk of Mata's story really comes alive as Mata's mother Antje, deeply depressed, becomes physically ill, and then dies when Mata is fifteen years old. Farmed out to relatives, she ends up in a school for future teachers run by the fat, old Heer Wybrandus Haanstra who becomes infatuated with this exotic looking girl who possesses a grace and style that other young girls can only hint at. Their bourgeoning romance is soon causing a public consternation, eventually erupting into a scandal into which Mata is forced to leave the school in disgrace.

When Mata responds to an advertisement in the local paper, put in by a friend of Rudolph MacLeod, little does she know how the encounter with him will change her life. MacLeod, a 38-year-old career man in the Dutch military and a heavy drinker, at first appears to be a natural bedfellow to Mata as both are considered to be outsiders and both are blessed equally rebellious and adventurous natures.

Straight after they are marred, MacLeod begins to hypnotize Mata with his tales of Java, this unusual and mystifying place and she does not hesitate to happily bundle up their little first child Norman and the family's possessions for a new beginning in this foreign land about which she has heard so much yet knows so little about.

Java is of course everything Mata imagines and more - exotic, mysterious and sensual. But soon her marriage to MacLeod begins to fracture; bad temper worsens and he is mean to servants as well as his wife. He openly sees native women and warms his blood at night with many of the whores at the local brothels, telling Mata that such a practice is customary in this neck of the woods.

Mata is soon forced to endure her husband's drunken violence and marital rapes, and as thinks of her walks across the cold sand sea to her childhood home of Ameland, she gradually comes to the realization that Java is not the new beginning for MacLeod and her that she had dreamed it to be. It comes as no surprise that Mata's affair with a local Dutch doctor, who for the first time treats her with a sensual kindness, will end in tragedy.

This after all is a woman who has learnt to use sex to get her way, Pregnant with her daughter Non Mata wonders through MacLeod's angry world, awakening to the seductions of Java. In the end Mata is not condemned for not being some absurd German spy with letter and numbers for a name, but guilty of something much worse, stretching back to a hot August night in Java where she becomes the evil princess and her maid, Tekul, the dagger god who has come to slay her. Mike Leonard December 07.

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