Typically, great novels don't take readers by surprise; they tend to come anointed and predetermined in their greatness. If a book is a classic, its greatness is unavoidable. If it's a new book, its purported "greatness" is a more self-conscious exercise, a strange alchemy of reputation and marketing, packaging and sense of importance, which leaves little question in the minds of the readers that they embark on important work as they crack open the front cover.
Usually with emphasis on the "work."
- The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves, Doubleday Canada, 531 pages, $34.95
Very rarely are readers allowed to discover greatness on their own, to get caught up in a story at a visceral level, immersed in a fictional world, and eventually to emerge blinking wide-eyed into the "real" world, putting the book down, sated and energized, surprised to find that they have read something, unknowingly, that can hold its own with the classics.
The Angel's Game, the new novel from Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, is this sort of rarity, a book that is utterly new, defiantly, nay, irresistibly readable, yet possessing the sense of depth and significance one usually finds only in the vaunted, self-consciously "great" novels, past and present.
The Angel's Game is a prequel, of sorts, to The Shadow of the Wind, which, since its publication in Spain in 2001 and its English translation in 2004, has sold more than 12 million copies around the world and has become a word-of-mouth favourite among readers and booksellers alike. It is not necessary, however, to have read The Shadow of the Wind in order to be enthralled by The Angel's Game; the continuity is more a matter of fictional world (a Gothic, haunted Barcelona) and world view than it is of characters or storylines.
The main element unifying both novels is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, an ancient necropolis under Barcelona, a possibly endless subterranean maze of shelves containing "the sum of centuries of books that have been lost and forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced forever, books that preserve the memory and soul of times and marvels that no one remembers any more." It's a Borgesian conceit brought to vivid, haunting life. Initiates on their first visit to the secret library are permitted to take one book from its uncharted treasures, and "undertake to protect it and do all you can to ensure it is never lost. For life." The initiates are also allowed, at a time of their choosing, to leave a single book behind.
In The Angel's Game, the initiate is David Martin, a young writer who has spent the bulk of the 1920s lurching from failure to failure, from his start in the newspaper world to a soul-sucking work-for-hire life of churning out Penny Dreadfuls, to the twin pains of watching the debut novel under his own name vanish after being savaged by the press while his friend's novel (which Martin ghost-wrote) becomes a cause célèbre (Zafón does know his writers, and their worst nightmares). Martin is rescued, it seems, by a mysterious French publisher, Andreas Corelli, who insinuates himself into Martin's existence before offering him a fortune to write a single book.
As one might expect, Corelli is not what he seems. Thankfully, and in contrast to most genre conventions, Martin realizes this as soon as the reader does, and the bulk of the novel is his investigation into Corelli, which incorporates a decades-old mystery, the secrets of the strange, haunted tower in which Martin lives, and, yes, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
The Angel's Game defies both straightforward summary and rote categorization. It belongs to no genre, while seeming to ruthlessly pilfer from many of them. It's part mystery, part ghost story, part bildungsroman, part romance, part tragedy, part blood-soaked noir … the list goes on. It constantly surprises, at a narrative level, and provides the sort of breakneck, can't-put-it-down reading experience that one usually finds only in genre writing.
Zafón manages to balance this reader-friendliness, however, with significant literary underpinnings. Despite its readability, there is nothing simple about The Angel's Game. The language is rich, and occasionally baroque, the characterizations are realistic and nuanced, and the twisting of the narrative serves to deepen the novel's thematic concerns, rather than simply existing for the sake of the storyline. The novel manages to be both high pulp and high art simultaneously, and reading it is a heady experience.
Which is as it should be, for The Angel's Game , like The Shadow of the Wind before it, is a celebration of books and their power; the joy, and the perils, of reading and writing. "Every book, every volume, has a soul," Zafón writes. "The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it."
It's a beautiful sentiment, coming as it does near the close of a novel that is about nothing less than the very struggle for that soul.
Robert Wiersema is a bookseller and writer in Victoria and the author of the novel Before I Wake.