Review: The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (TSS)
The Angel’s Game
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Back in 2001, Carlos Ruiz Zafon released his fifth novel, The Shadow of the Wind, and the story sold like gangbusters. For a while it seemed like The Shadow of the Wind was everywhere, yet I never got around to reading it. When I received a copy of The Angel’s Game for review, my first big concern was Will I need to hunt down a copy of The Shadow of the Wind before I read this? Luckily, the answer is no - although set in the same world as Zafon’s previous novel (the second of a projected series of four books) the stories are independent of each other, and can be read in any order.
The Angel’s Game crosses all sorts of genres. A little bit fantasy, a little bit horror, a lot of mystery/ thriller with a healthy dose of historical tossed into the fiction mix. Set in Barcelona in the 1920s, our narrator is one David Martin, a young writer struggling for recognition. Working first as a journalist and then as a pulp fiction novelist, Martin dreams of creating his own Great Spanish Novel. Working at a frantic pace, Martin manages to write two such novels - one under his own name and secretly revising his friend Vidal’s manuscript - but when published, Martin’s book tanks while Pedro Vidal’s is almost universally acclaimed. To add to Martin’s humiliation and misery, Pedro Vidal - who has no idea that his text was “fixed” behind his back - marries the love of Martin’s life. When a mysterious publisher named Andreas Corelli offers Martin an enormous sum to write a grand fiction of a book, the sort that will spawn a new religion, he accepts. What has he got to lose? Everything’s going wrong in his life anyway. But death seems to follow this Corelli wherever he goes, and the more Martin learns about his publisher and a previous writer who attempted the same project, the more Martin wants out of the deal, especially as he begins to fear his sanity may be slipping…
I enjoyed reading this book, but I could only take it in very small dose. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because Zafon’s prose is so dense. There is endless description of musty scents, shadowy streets, flickering lights and ancient books. A rich and moody atmosphere oozes out of every single page. But the dialogue often seemed stilted and unnatural, and almost overbearing in its need to pass information to the reader. (Andreas Corelli was especially bad when he slipped into ‘lecture’ mode.) After reading three or four chapters (which were quite short) I’d have to take a break to let the words break down and penetrate, I guess.
The end of the book is extremely open-ended. It’s hard to talk about without revealing spoilers, but I think the big question it boils down to is this: was Martin a reliable narrator? Can his account of the events - and we are given no other - be trusted? It’s hard to write these ambiguous endings; it can leave the reader satisfied, engaged with the book and interacting with the text in a way a straightforward resolution doesn’t allow. But it can also leave the reader with the impression the author wrote himself into a corner and didn’t quite know how to finish things, so he didn’t - and personally, this was how I felt. The book started out in a richly imagined world with a vibrant narrative and interesting characters, but by the time I was two-thirds of the way in the plot had lost focus and sunk into a loose, uncommitted dream world. No longer did things seem to be progressing. There was something frustrating in that, but I also know a lot of readers would love that, so it’s very much a personal thing.
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