'Once upon a time there was a prostitute,'the writer wrote. And then he stopped himself, abruptly. "A prostitute? I can't begin a story about a prostitute in a manner traditionally used for fairytales! Or can I? Are we not all of us living half in a fairytale, and half in the darkest abyss?" And having pondered this question he decided that yes, all of our lives we experience the dark, the painful and the evil side as well as the light and joyous side of life. And so he wrote a fairytale about a prostitute called Maria. And it turned out to be an extremely good book, and he was pleased with it. And his publishers were pleased, too, because they knew that this book would sell millions of copies, like his other books did, and that always makes people happy.

The writer is called Paulo Coelho. He is most famous as the author of 'The Alchemist" a simple fable about an Andalusian shepherd boy who follows his dreams. But Coelho is much more than a writer. He is a philosopher, a mystic, a magus. Some people would go further and say that he is a guru, a prophet, an angel. In fifty six countries, people read his books, and he has sold more than thirty million books. When he arrives at a bookstore, to sign copies, thousands of people wait to meet him, security guards must be employed, fans besiege him as if he were David Beckham or Robbie Williams. And he loves it. As a child, he idolised Marlon Brando and James Dean and later on he became famous writing lyrics for a Brazilian rock-star, and made millions. The mantle of celebrity is one that he is entirely at home with.

The millions of fans, the millions of dollars and the minimalist hotel rooms have come with a price, however. The fairy-tale that is the life of Paulo Coelho has been written complete with a dark and evil twist that is entirely worthy of the nastiest Harry Potter imaginable.

Born into a middle class Brazilian family, in 1947, he was an artistic and poetic child, who studied under the strictest of Jesuits and won competitions for essays and poems. At the age of seventeen, he decided that he wanted to work in the theatre, to the disappointment of his parents who wanted him to study Law. Because he was deemed un-cooperative they had him committed three times to a mental hospital, where he was given ECT. He escaped and ran away, but was never able to survive alone and always returned to his parents, only to be locked up again.

When he finally left home and married a girl with money, who could afford to finance his creative endeavours, he was captured again. At that time, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship who did not tolerate young men like Paulo, revolutionaries who read Marx and Engels and expressed an interest in Che Guevara. Having teamed up with a hippy rock-musician called Raul Seixas, Paulo was arrested and tortured. An experience which also involved electric shock treatment, only this time it was his balls that were being fried. It was, he says, a thousand times worse than the mental hospital. And it caused him to lose his wife, as well as his freedom, something which has left an indelible mark. To this day, he will not say the name of that wife, because she despises him so much for what she considered to be his cowardly behaviour, while in prison. What actually happened, he says, was that his wife who had also been imprisoned, was being tortured in another room. And when they were both escorted, blindfolded, to the bathroom, she recognised him and called out to him. But he was too frightened to respond.

Before Paulo Coelho could be transformed from hippy revolutionary to mega-guru, a baptism of fire even more extreme and far more dangerous had to take place. Having already experimented with LSD, cocaine and almost every other drug available, Paulo turned his attention to the Occult. And joined a black magic cult. Black magic and the attempt to become all- powerful frightened him so much that he almost went completely insane. After two years of intensive practice, he woke up one morning to find a black cloud in his house, a thing which blocked out most of the room and which terrified him so much that he believed that he would die. Only when he picked up a bible and renounced evil forever, did it go away. And he was never again tempted by the dark side.

The journey to the light was equally dramatic. A pilgrimage to Dachau, the former concentration camp resulted in a realisation that he himself had a job to do in life. The bells of the nearby chapel were tolling, he says, for him. For him to wake up and do something about the madness and the horror that humanity was undergoing. And the realisation was followed by a vision, and a voice. He will not say who he saw, but one suspects that it was Jesus. The man who had appeared in the vision turned up two months later and guided Paulo to rejoin the Catholic Church, and in particular an ancient order of Catholics called 'RAM". As a child, he says, he was put off religion by the Jesuits, who eradicated his faith with their dogma. But having found his faith again, he clings to it tenaciously. It is, he says, all he really has.

A couple of years ago, Paulo Coelho came to Ireland at the invitation of film-makers Catherine O Flaherty and Liam Mc Grath, who were making a documentary about moving statues and visions of Mary that were reported in Ireland at that time. In the documentary, Paulo stands in Grafton Street, in the rain, watching a religious fanatic with a megaphone who is denouncing the evils of mankind. He watches impassively. Afterwards he asks with genuine curiosity, if the man believes that statues move and that Mary appears to people. As if he genuinely wants to know.

'To accept faith, you have to be a little crazy,' he explains. 'God has hidden His wisdom from wise men, He reveals Himself to the crazy people." After a journey around Ireland, which lasted seven days and during which it rained every day, Paulo decided that those who claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin were probably telling the truth.
One question that must be asked of anyone who has delved so deeply into the mysteries of the human condition, and of the spiritual realms is does it make you happy? Is Paulo Coelho happy? I have been sent to meet the great man, so that I can find this out for myself. And I arrive, one afternoon, at an expensive hotel in Knightsbridge, and I am welcomed to an air-conditioned suite, where he has been patiently answering the same questions all day, for a string of journalists. A gentle, unassuming and unobtrusive chap, he offers me a seat and a drink. In his trademark black, he reclines comfortably across his chair, a priest-like character with brown eyes that smile and yet reveal absolutely nothing of what is going on behind them. No, is the answer. He is not happy nor would he want to be.

"Thankfully, happiness is not the ultimate goal for humankind."
Nobody is happy?

"I don't think anybody could be happy. Happiness is a Sunday afternoon when you have nothing to do, you have no challenges. But what is life about? Life is about challenges. Life is about daring to cross your own barriers, your own limits."
Being a poet himself, as a youth he idolised the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Who wasn't interested in happiness either.

"I will not be happy now. It may not matter. There are so many more things in the world," Borges wrote. Paulo has read every one of Borges poems a thousand times, he says and recites them from memory. He does not long for happiness, but for joy.
"Joy is different from happiness. You can have joy in love, but I don't think you can be happy in love."

Love is a very up and down thing, I agree.

"Fortunately! You are being constantly provoked by the object of your desire and your life is much more interesting. People who believe that the moment that you marry, everything will remain the same forever, they are lost."
Paulo has, himself been married four times now. His whole life has been ruled by women, he says, including his editor, his agent and his current wife, Cristina. The most important thing that ever happened to him, more significant than torture or the encounter with evil was his first kiss, from a girl, when he was a teenager.
'When you are young you think that you are ugly, you have no money, no job, no car!' he says. 'That kiss changed my life, because it meant so much to me."

The girl surprised him, as all of the women in his life would do, with her love and generosity. She saved all her birthday money so that he could study theatre. And later on, he disappointed her by refusing to return the favour. All of the women were kinder to him than he was to them, he says. But they showed him that he has a feminine side, which he now embraces, and many of the protagonists in his books are women, all of whom, he says, are him in disguise. Maria, the heroine of his latest book, is based on a real prostitute, but the way in which he writes about her, in particular about her sexuality, suggests an understanding of the female that is extraordinarily, almost scarily perceptive.

He has explored the nature of prostitution in depth, in the book, and he admits that as a teenager, he also used their services, even if he was scared to death by the experience. Why do men go to prostitutes?

"I don't know, but neither do they. I don't want to judge prostitutes or their clients. The prostitutes say that the men feel lonely. I don't really believe that. But I don't believe it is all about sex, either. Men are looking for love. The major theme of this book is how to put soul and body together."

Maria is desperately lonely. Loneliness, he says, is the very worst kind of human suffering.

"When you are lonely, every single moment seems like an eternity. It is then that you realise that you are not in this world to be alone. You have to fight for love and you have to be open to it. Which is not what you naturally do, because you think that you deserve to be loved and that someone else should struggle for you!"
The ego, he says, is the enemy of love. And having been a rock-star and a major celebrity, he has experienced the loneliness of egotism.

"You say to yourself "I am so difficult! I am so seductive, so attractive!' You go to a party and if someone approaches you, you pretend that you are not interested. During a party, ten or twelve people approach and you play being the king or the queen of the night and then you go back to your apartment alone and miserable. Because you know that you lost several opportunities for the sake of a stupid role that you decided to play."

There is someone waiting for everybody, he says. Everybody?
" I am convinced of it. I never saw a person who decided to find her or his love, who didn't find them. But you must be humble and fight for love. You must be open to people and realise that the ego is not important!"

Could there be more than one love?
"Of course. I am on my fourth marriage! But people don't dare to fall in love more than once, in their lives. When they think they have found the right person, they stop and stay with that person."

The problem with most people, he says, is that they are too scared to follow their dreams. And so they settle for less, and stay miserable. This, he himself will never do. He is a warrior, who must be fully engaged with life.

"Most people feel guilty, or they feel cheated by life or they feel that they don't deserve, or they feel themselves to be victims. But it is a matter of attitude. I have been through very difficult times. I never chose to be a victim. It is good for us to be tested, otherwise we lose our skill. If you don't have to fight, you forget how to fight.'
Does God sit up there and say Okay, Paulo, it's time for you to have another test? He laughs.

"No. But I believe in God as a living energy of love. And love is always testing us. Some of the tests happen just to see if you are capable of withstanding the punch and not falling down!"

Whatever I might think about his books, he says, he does not have all the answers. He is not the alchemist, even though he is the shepherd boy and he is every other character that inhabits his works. So I must find my own answers, he is not the guru, even if people think he is. To prove it, he offers me a cigarette. I refuse it, horrified.

'Ha!" he laughs. "You don't want to smoke a cigarette? You think you are going to die, if you do?" I don't think I will die, I say. But I don't think smoking is good for you. And I am reminded of a new book by a famous Brazilian philosopher, in which the writer tells a fairytale about a prostitute. And in the book, the heroine says of herself 'Although she was capable of writing very wise thoughts, she was quite incapable of following her own advice." Does this happen to Paulo?

'Not at all!' he says, enigmatically. And off he goes to enlighten a few more millions with his wisdom.

'Eleven Minutes" is published by Harper Collins, 16.60 euros.