Readers familiar with The Shadow of the Wind will find themselves back in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, the echo of Eco where, from a labyrinthine library, volumes seem to select their readers. We meet again the gentle, kindly Sempere family, owners of a Barcelona bookshop, and glimpse in his youth the father of Daniel Sempere, hero of Zafón’s earlier novel. And literature is, again, the driving force of this work — as a boy Martin is given a copy of Great Expectations by Sempere, and it resonates through the book, the title alone a talisman reappearing at significant junctures of the plot. Satis House lurks behind the cobwebs of Martin’s tower home and Estella’s blood is coursing through the veins of Cristina, Martin’s unreachable love. Jane Eyre is invoked time and again and The Picture of Dorian Gray pops up on cue.
But if Zafón nods at the most celebrated gothic elements in mainstream English literature, this dark tale of the supernatural is more in line with Mrs Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and Bram Stoker. Nervous characters are pursued by chill winds and the stench of death, staircases ooze nasty liquids, afternoons spread over the city ‘like blood floating in water’. There are hellhounds with blazing eyes, Igor-like servants and desiccated corpses. There are scenes in graveyards (several) and madhouses, in walled-up rooms and overgrown gardens. There are bodies in stagnant swimming pools and under the ice, bloody footprints in the snow, and so on.
This is all rattling good gothic fun, but there is a danger that this novel takes itself too seriously. ‘Emotional truth is not a moral quality,’ the hero tells his acolyte, ‘it’s a technique … literature is science tempered with the blood of art.’ Whatever that might mean, The Angel’s Game won’t quite bear the weight of Zafón’s endless aphorisms on the nature of truth and evil, his meditations on the formalising of religion, the manipulation of faith and dogma or the ‘sweet poison’ of authorial vanity. As 1.5 million Spanish readers attest, Zafón has undoubtedly found the formula for a best-seller, and no doubt a Hollywood blockbuster is on the way. But for my money the ‘science’ is the fizz and fantastical apparatus of Frankenstein’s laboratory and the ‘blood’ the blood of the make-up department. A good read, but it is the world of Hammer and Dan Brown and not that of Dickens, Charlotte Bronte or Oscar Wilde that Zafón inhabits.
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