Ambitious historical melodrama playfully entertaining

By Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Doubleday Canada, 531 pages, $35

SPANISH star Carlos Ruiz Zafón's ambitious new historical melodrama is a prequel to his 2001 international bestseller, Shadow of the Wind.

And while it might be too jam-packed for its own good, given its dizzying array of Byzantine plot twists and nefarious characters, it is nevertheless playfully entertaining escapist fiction.

The Angel's Game is set in 1920s Barcelona, about 20 years earlier than Shadow of the Wind. Our hero this time is David Martin, whose anglophone name may be Zafón's homage to two Charles Dickens novels, David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit.

Martin is an aspiring writer himself, and his favourite book is none other than Dickens' Great Expectations. When we meet him at age 17, as parentless as Pip and a copy boy in a Barcelona newspaper, Martin has acquired as a patron not an escaped convict but an aristocratic playboy journalist.

Don Pedro Vidal gives Martin a leg up into authorship, but also causes him much grief. Martin falls in love with the beautiful daughter of Don Pedro's chauffeur, meets a devilish Parisian editor who offers him a deal he can't refuse and wanders into the city's mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Shadow of the Wind's hero, Daniel Sempere, also discovered this literary graveyard. Daniel turns up again here as a boy, but it is his kind-hearted father, the bookstore owner Isaac Sempere, who plays the more significant role.

The novel defies easy classification. It often reads like one of the Grand Guignol penny-dreadfuls that Martin himself churns out. Other times it reaches for the densely layered magic realism of Borges and Marquez. As well, Zafón's impressive erudition may remind some Winnipeg readers of Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle, which also mixes elements of commercial and literary fiction.

Zafón's prose, at least in the translation by Englishwoman Lucia Graves, is wittily ironic and bursting with amusing aphorisms.

"It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality," one character tells Martin.

Another says: "Envy is the religion of the mediocre."

For all of Zafón's verbal pyrotechnics, his characters tend toward the one-dimensional, from whores with hearts of gold to shady lawyers and cynical detectives.

As in Shadow of the Wind, perhaps Zafón's most vivid character is Barcelona itself. From the bars and brothels of the seedy Raval quarter to the architectural marvels of Antonio Gaudi and the hills of Montjuic, Zafón depicts his hometown with the combination of mockery and affection that only a native can manage.

Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona is weak tea compared to this.

The novel's opening half, if only for its satiric tone and knowingness about authorial ambition (the angel's game, no doubt), commands attention. As a period piece, it is remarkably contemporary.

But as Zafón labours to extricate himself from his maze-like plot, his energy and conviction fade. That said, The Angel's Game is worth playing.

In March Free Press books editor Morley Walker and his wife lodged for five nights in Barcelona's Raval quarter.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 21, 2009 D4