By Cameron Woodhead
The Spy
Paulo Coelho
The Spy. By Paulo Coelho.
Hamish Hamilton, $29.99
Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho has sold hundreds of millions of books, rising to fame with his esoteric parable, The Alchemist, in the late '80s. Opinion of his work is starkly divided, particularly by the author's penchant for peppering his novels with snatches of cod-wisdom that can sound suspiciously like platitudes of a self-help variety. That quirk is manifest too in The Spy, a novella about Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer and double agent, that is both too short and too slapdash to detain anyone interested in this fascinating woman for long. Nor does Coelho mine the psyche of his subject with any conviction. You're better off reading a biography – try Pat Shipman's excellent Femme Fatale: Love, Lies and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari.