Exclusive interview with author Michelle Moran and a review of her novel about the famous sensuous spy
Rating: 3 Stars
Review by Gabrielle Pantera
What interested me most about Mata Hari was not actually her dancing or even her extravagant lifestyle, but her emotional arc,” says Mata Hari’s Last Dance author Michelle Moran. “What was it like to go from such a privileged and carefree upbringing to total poverty, then back again to tremendous wealth? How did she handle it? Was this why she couldn’t seem to make any relationship stick? What would make an eighteen year-old woman answer an ad for marriage in a newspaper and then give herself to a man twenty years her senior? Desperation, obviously, but what else? I try to cover all of that.”
Moran’s books are typically about women in power. Mata Hari has almost no power. She’s a beautiful woman who knows how to use her beauty to captivate men. She was a sensual woman in a time when it was considered scandalous to be so. It still is. Hari did what she had to in order to survive in a male-dominated world. She travels, dances and meets many important people of the day. The bravery she shows at the end of her life tells us she must have been deeper. I’ve been reading Moran’s books since 2007, when I first picked up in the UK a copy of Nefertiti: A Novel. Her stories typically leap off the pages, with Moran bringing the location and historical figure to life. With Mata Hari it seems that everything is happening to her. I wish we’d gotten inside Mata Hari’s feelings.
In 1904 Paris, after failing to be hired to dance at the swanky nightspots La Madeline and L’Ete, 25-year-old Margaretha Zelle meets Edouard Clunet, a lawyer to some very rich men. Edouard becomes her agent, booking her to dance for exclusive events. She becomes a star in Paris. She takes many lovers, some men, some women. She’d abandoned her daughter to escape an abusive marriage. By 1917 Mata Hari’s star has faded. She’s become a spy and a double agent, seducing officers from France and Germany. Arrested as a spy, she is convicted by the French military in a secret trial. Was she an enemy spy or just a beautiful woman persecuted for refusing the advances of an obsessive French officer?
Visiting the Musee Guimet in France inspired Moran to write about Mata Hari. “This is where Mata Hari had her debut. Imagining her dancing there pre-WW1 made me want to know more about who she had been. She was the Madonna of her time. Everyone knew of her. And then suddenly one day she was gone. A closed trial, an execution…. Can you imagine?”
Moran began her research in France, then continued in the U.S. reading biographies and memoirs. Everything she found was in books or online in old newspapers. Moran’s book covers from Mata Hari’s childhood to her death.
Mata Hari’s Last Dance is Moran’s seventh novel. Shes’ written Nefertiti, The Heretic Queen, Cleopatra’s Daughter, Madame Tussaud, The Second Empress, and Rebel Queen. Her fourth novel, Madame Tussaud, was optioned for a miniseries. A screenplay adaptation was written by the Michael Hirst of The Tudors fame. However, it was not produced.
“After every book I attend signings and the readers I meet there make everything worth it,” says Moran. “There are so many fascinating people in this world. If you had a full-time job just talking to people you still wouldn’t ever hear every possible life situation or story.”
Moran hasn’t announced her next book, but says she’s completely in love with the subject matter. “I’ll be going to Canada to do some research for it in a few months, and after that, Europe.”
Moran was born in California and now lives in the San Fernando Valley. She herself as a Valley girl.
Mata Hari’s Last Dance: A Novel by Michelle Moran. Hardcover: 272 pages, Publisher: Touchstone (July 19, 2016), Language: English. ISBN: 9781476716398 $25.00
