Paulo Coelho: Book I have just finished

Title: The Devil and Miss Prym (Paulo Coelho)

I have just finished this book. For those who knows Paulo Coelho might be familiar with his style of stories, and this one is also sort of the same in style with his others books.

This book is the last of the trilogy: "And On The Seventh Day". The first two books are: By The River Piedra I Sat Down And Wept and Veronika Decides To Die. But they can be read separately.

The book is about a question: Is human basically good or evil?

Good question.
One small town had a visitor coming. With his coming, came as well 'the devil' by his side. This visitor challenged the honest n modest people in that small town, offered them a good fortune of gold bars in return of a death of someone in that town within a week. A girl named Miss Prym was the first one to be offered to deliver that news to others, and she had a separate condition to have a gold bar just for herself. That was a challenge for the girl should she just thought of herself and being selfish, she would take the gold and just go away from that small village. The offer itself was very challenging for those modest people, the money could be used for their welfare and to build their village for better, the cost was one life of someone...  just one life... just find a useless person among them.. and one sacrifice to save many...

The ending is actually a happy ending, might be weird if Coelho did it differently. But somehow I am too happy with the way the story ended. Same case with the previous book I read: The Zahir. The ending is a bit strange...

Or maybe it is not important? Maybe the message is far more important that Coelho thought the answer to the question is seen from the optimistic view: That people are clearly capable to do evil but still essentially or basically they are good. The villagers in the story were lucky to have a Miss Prym to remind them of something evil they might have done because they were just one inch away to do a murder.. as guns were ready, a (not volunteered) victim was unconscious and everybody was ready to do their part for the murder...

What a relief the murder had been stopped from happening..

But what if someone like Miss Prym is not there? ........

??
??
??

I remember a good friend said: people are not completely black or completely white.. we are grey..... the difference is whether it is light grey or dark grey..
and I hope we all are trying hard to be light grey..