Dennis Haritou: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game is a city. It is Barcelona in the early 20th century. Broad, sunny boulevards with crowds, outdoor markets and palatial buildings lie jumbled, like tangled electrical wires, with hazy residential avenues, with slums like human sewers and back alleys black with shadows. If you manage to reach the perimeters of this spider-like labyrinth of a polis, you are confronted with either the shore of the Atlantic with its shacks of derelicts and soothsayers or the Pueblo Neuvo cemetery.
Our hero, Martin, learns the writer’s craft by dumping himself on the steps of a tabloid newspaper, The Voice of Industry, as a destitute orphan. Taken under the wing of the forbidding-looking Don Basilio Moragas, its deputy editor with a well-hidden heart of gold, Martin rises to the position of writing special features and becomes the very successful author of a string of 23 hair-raising potboilers called City of the Damned. Then Martin gets a very dark offer from a sinister gentleman, one Andreas Corelli, who will make your blood curdle every time he appears in the story.
There’s lots of material in Angel about the discipline of writing and about how a writing career effects your relationships with your coworkers as your rising fame leaves them in the dust and smoldering with envy. Among the writing advice that I gleaned from the good Don Basilio was that adverbs and adjectives are not necessarily my best friends.
The Angel’s Game is an exquisitely engineered page-turner. The main plot contains a backhanded version of basic Christian doctrine by distorting it through a fun-house mirror forged in hell. Angel is also steeped in the traditions of 19th century lit noir. I don’t know if you have ever heard of Eugene Sue and his massive volume of depraved tackiness, The Mysteries of Paris. I own a musty, old leather-bound two volume copy that gives off a whiff of the gutter every time that I take it into my hands.
One of the conceits of The Angel’s Game is that each book, like a samurai sword, contains the soul of its author and something of the souls of all those who have read it. It’s an attitude that’s over the top but who cares; this novel is a bibliophile’s fantasy. Angel is more coherent and faster-paced than its predecessor, The Shadow of the Wind, and that book was still quite a hottie. That most wonderful of independent bookstores from Shadow, Sempere & Sons, makes a guest appearance in Angel as does the secret library that may haunt your dreams, “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books”.
But you don’t have to read The Shadow of the Wind first. Just dive right into The Angel’s Game. Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the Alexandre Dumas that we didn’t know we needed. With novels as entertaining as The Angel’s Game to read, I might just cancel my cable subscription. The Angel’s Game will be published on June 16, 2009 by Doubleday.
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