Through all her transformations, her life's fatal questions- was she a traitor, and if so, why?-burns ever brighter. And then, in flight from her husband, Margaretha reinvents herself: she becomes an artist's model, circus rider, and finally the temple dancer Mata Hari, dressed in veils, admired by Diaghilev, performing for the crowned heads of Europe. In the chill of her prison cell she spins tales of rosewater baths, native lovers, and Javanese jungles, evoking the magical world that sustained her even as her family crumbled. As she waits, burdened by a secret guilt, Mata Hari tells stories, Scheherazade-like, to buy back her life from her interrogators.įrom a bleak childhood in the Netherlands, through a loveless marriage to a Dutch naval officer, Margaretha is transported to the forbidden sensual pleasures of Indonesia. In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell.

Her Bouchardon, like the actual attorney, bites his nails to the quick.In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell in Paris awaiting trial on charges of espionage. Buy a cheap copy of Signed, Mata Hari book by Yannick Murphy. (The liberties Murphy has taken in her re-imagining of Margaretha’s inner life are all the more credible for her close study of the details surrounding the historical Mata Hari’s case. Murphy has written a wonderful, simple, beautiful book. Her audience is her prosecutor/interrogator, Bouchardon, and the nuns charged with caring for her in solitary confinement. Signed, Mata Hari touches on subjects like parenthood, sex, abuse and desperation without the reader even realizing that this beautiful and enjoyable book is saying something deeper about our humanity. Thus, in Murphy’s artful hands, the story of Margaretha’s life emerges as a series of anecdotal tales, reveries and reflections, delivered Scheherazade-like, as Margaretha – dolefully imprisoned and awaiting execution – attempts to seduce the authorities into clemency. Above the incriminating circumstances cataloged by her accusers, she is utterly convinced of her innocence not only by the exculpatory force of her own explanations but also by the fact that she had, since girlhood, “cheated death.” Yannick Murphy is author of the novels The Call, Signed, Mata Hari, This is the Water, Here They Come, and The Sea of Trees. The Mata Hari – or Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, as she legally was known – who speaks from the pages of Yannick Murphy’s layered, unself-consciously sensual and achingly beautiful third novel, Signed, Mata Hari, is her own best advocate. 280 pp.Īlthough the great treacheries of the last 100 years almost invariably were worked by men, the archetypal spy who springs most readily to mind is a woman – Mata Hari, the Dutch-born exotic dancer, whom the French executed at Vincennes in 1917 because they believed she was a German double agent.

Signed, Mata Hari by Yannick Murphy