Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game "Wicked Stepsister" To Shadow Of The Wind~
Written: Jun 30 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: thrilling and entertaining as expected
Cons: quite dark with supernatural elements
The Bottom Line: Looking forward to next two novels in this quartet of gothic-style thrillers set in Barcelona.
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| jankp's Full Review: The Angel's Game |
The fallen angel, disguised as a reclusive French publisher of sacred texts, has approached a young, obsessed writer of popular penny dreadfuls in 1920s Barcelona and posed a question.
"...Do you know what a religion is, Martin, my friend?...Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or society...Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated..."
In Carlos Ruiz Zafon's latest novel The Angel's Game, second in a loosely connected quartet of novels set in a murky, sinister Barcelona after The Shadow of the Wind, the theme again sizzles with the sometimes unholy power of literature upon our very souls, but this time Zafon, translated by Lucia Graves, holds nothing back in what he refers to as the wicked stepsister of Shadow. It hasn't even been a month since I chewed up the pages of the previous international bestseller and when epinionater mike_holmes wised me up on the recent release of what is and isn't a prequel (in Zafon's words found on the amazon.com page for it), well, I lost no time in ordering it. While there are a couple of the same characters found in each book, this novel may stand alone with its own diabolical story.
The main character, David Martin, is a youngster as the book opens in Act One called City of the Damned. He's like a shadow of the star crime reporter on "The Voice of Industry" newspaper, for reasons we'll learn later, that gains the attention of the terrifying editor one Christmas Eve. Martin gets his chance to show his writing flair and is such a success that he writes a series of stories called City of the Damned in the Grand Guignol style. (That means it bleeds!)
He becomes such a success that he comes to the attention of the Parisian publisher mentioned above and who eventually proposes that Martin write for him a kind of fable for adults which will change hearts and minds. The writer isn't interested for a year, being under contract and not into religion, but when it looks like he's lost the woman he loves as well as his health to a brain tumor, he changes his mind and takes the one hundred thousand francs to write this book. Overnight his health returns. Of course, it could've been that fortune that got rid of his headaches...
Act Two: Lux Aeterna (eternal light) is the name of the book Martin selects (or that selects him) in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a mysterious place that a beloved bookseller takes him to, and it turns out to be the kind of book that his boss, the publisher, wishes him to write. Eerily its author's initials are D.M. as well and when Martin begins investigating the former owner of the long-abandoned, creepy tower house he has lived in for a decade, he discovers what he suspected: that D.M., Diego Malasca, lived there, too. And do you imagine that Malasca was of sound mind and died naturally of old age? It sure doesn't look promising as Martin investigates intriguing characters who knew Malasca and hears their stories...before they're horribly murdered by someone. With bodies piling up and police thugs hot on his heels, he wonders if he's going mad and is really the killer. As we hurtle through Act Three's The Angel's Game, he no longer likes or trusts the impeccably-dressed publisher so icy to the touch and with a leer like a wolf's. He scoffs when his lover, now in a sanatorium, hysterically accuses a man of preventing her from burning his manuscript, then realizes, too late, what is going on.
I wasn't quite as enamored, in the end, with The Angel's Game as with The Shadow of the Wind. While I love how Martin makes a Faustian pact with a devil of a publisher who then stirs up all kind of trouble for him that results in his need for a big gun, Zafon's zeal for the macabre isn't for everybody. It gets a bit much and all the characters bewildering. He also endows the evil publisher with very powerful, god-like attributes that didn't set right with me. The publisher even displays human emotion at the end. It's not that I'm religious or believe in a devil, but supernatural elements in a book seem better suited to science fiction than crime fiction. Zafon would disagree and tell me to lighten up, heh.
Other than that I had lots of fun reading the 531-page book and could hardly leave it alone for a few days. Martin became a flawed hero I really enjoyed as he lost the innocence of youth and found himself embittered by the end of his maze-like journey through the dark secrets of Barcelona. Zafon creates amusing, lovable characters who help him through it, not only bad guys chasing him, and his atmospheric prose and witty social commentary are an irreverent delight.
If you loved his writing before, you'll love it again, but maybe not as much.
Recommended:
Yes
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jankp
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Member: Jan Peregrine
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