The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A Suspense Fiction Book Review
Jul 22, 2009 Maria Luisa Antonaya
Above all, The Angel’s Game is about the power of reading and writing. The novel is a literary thriller with hints of the supernatural, where a Faust-like author must write his way out of damnation. David Martín, a one-time journalist, has adopted a pseudonym to write the most torrid of pulp fiction: a series titled The City of the Damned.
Bound by a multi-year contract to a pair of unscrupulous publishers who seem to have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel, and suffering from an incurable brain tumor, Martín’s life is anything but a romantic career devoted to the Muses. His only consolation is his friendship with Señor Sempere, in whose bookstore he has spent countless hours since his youth.
"The publisher who will make you immortal"
Thus, when he is courted by Andreas Corelli, a mysterious French publisher looking for someone to work on a special project, Martín decides to devote himself to what he thinks will be real literature during whatever remaining time he has left to live. When the offices of his former publishers burn down immediately after making his deal with Corelli, Martín has his suspicions about the cause of the fire, but doesn’t give it much further thought.
Fire and Ashes
From that moment on, Martín’s life starts to resemble the plot of one of his own stories. Working in an old, decaying house, he begins to suspect that the project Corelli wants completed (no less than a book that will create a new world religion) is dangerous - and that he is not the only one who has worked on it.
The Angel’s Game lets its plot unwind at a leisurely pace. Even as the body-count rises and a police inspector begins to dog his every step, Martín spends much of his time agonizing over his work and a complicated series of relationships. He is finally spurred into action by a terrible death, and the final chapters of the novel are a frenetic series of revelations and decisions. This results in somewhat murky connections and coincidences, but by now the reader is as trapped in Ruiz Zafón’s story as Martín is in Corelli’s machinations.
The epilogue gives the reader a welcome, if deeply unsettling, respite. Although Corelli’s ultimate motives remain unclear, his last act as Martín’s patron provides plenty of food for thought.
A Dark and Stormy City
One of the outstanding features of this novel is the atmosphere. Most of the action takes place in 1920s Barcelona, a city bustling with industrial and cultural life, but also home to characters capable of insatiable greed and shocking acts of violence.
Darkness is an important element of this setting: the spacious mansions, creaky corridors, and rain-drenched streets are in perpetual gloom. Electric lighting has not come to all parts of Barcelona, and the novel’s characters and action are often seen in between flashes of lightning or moonlight.
Final Thoughts
The Angel’s Game is both a superb example of gritty suspense fiction and a heartfelt homage to classic literature. There are implicit nods and explicit references to the works of Dickens, and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a bibliophile’s version of Dante’s Paradise. As he did in his previous bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón has achieved a happy union between modern mystery and classic storytelling.
Book Details
Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The Angel’s Game. Canada: Doubleday, 2005. ISBN: 978-0-385-66763-0. Carlos Ruiz Zafón's website.
A Building in Downtown Barcelona
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