Some years back when I reviewed Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind for The Compulsive Reader, I found it a combination of page-turning story telling with significant post modern overtones. And although the climactic ending was something of a disappointment, it was a comparatively minor flaw (and who can forget Samuel Johnson's comment on a passage he found objectionable in Milton's Paradise Lost — flaws so great who could wish away) in what was otherwise a truly excellent novel. Not surprisingly, when Zafón's latest, The Angel's Game came out, I was quite eager to get my hands on it.
Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed. Not that the story is poorly told; Zafón is nothing if not a fine story teller. There are mysterious secrets to be revealed; there are thwarted lovers. There are Gothic settings, supernatural presences, murders and betrayals. It is a big novel in the tradition of the great nineteenth century story teller, Zafón refers to over and over again in the novel, Charles Dickens. Not only does he subscribe to the Dickensian emphasis on elaborately plotted fiction, he peoples that fiction with a cast of characters, major and minor, that could easily find a home in one of the darker Dickens novels.
The hero and narrator, David Martin, although a talented writer, finds it expedient to produce pulp supernatural fiction as a means of paying his bills. Like Pip's in Great Expectations, his story begins in childhood, and, like Pip, he is helped through life by mysterious benefactors whose motives he doesn't understand. Indeed, like many first person narrators, he is often the last to understand what is going on around him. Much of the mystery in the book is grounded in Martin's failure to see things, almost at times refusing to see them for what they are. He has a love interest who feels obligated to another. He has a love interest that he either pays no attention or treats badly. A variety of characters come to Martin's aid in the course of the book — another writer with wealth of his own, a book store owner, an editor, a publisher, a young girl who wants to be a writer — some with good intentions, some with evil. There are villainous policemen who play good cop, bad cop, witch-like old women, and pettifogging lawyers.
Moreover, there are even one or two of those nice little post modern ironic moments tucked into this book as well. David Martin makes himself a success writing in the Grand Guignol, a thriller genre that he thoroughly deprecates, yet it is quite obviously the genre of the work in which he appears, and a genre in which Zafón himself excels. While his thrillers are hugely popular and sell extremely well, they are not the kind of work he respects, and when he finally does write something that he considers has worth, it has no success at all. There is an interesting discussion of the relationship between books and the souls of the writers as well as of those who read them. Thus, when a writer sells his work to a publisher there are certain obvious Faustian indications, especially when that publisher seems to be making an offer that certainly looks too good to be true.
Article comments
1 - Lynn Voedisch
Hard to care about the characters? I found The Angel's Game every bit as good as The Shadow of the Wind and I wonder how you can justify saying this. The writing is just as elegant, the setting works as well as an emotional backdrop, the artistic goal of the protagonist is largely the same--only this time there is a real antagonist, Mr. Corelli, who is chillingly close at hand. I found the book to be a marvelous piece of magical realism and I judged it on its own merits, not as a prequel to anything.
2 - Jack Goodstein
I guess that's what makes the world go round. By the way I think what I said was that it was not really a prequel. Zafon has said that he is interested in building "a fictional universe with four interconnected stories in which we would meet some of the same characters at different times in their lives. . . ."