Standing behind the high altar in Prato Cathedral last week, binoculars trained on a fresco some 40 feet above, I found myself puzzling over a barely discernible detail in a scene of the nativity of St Stephen. At the foot of the new mother’s bed a winged figure, knees bent in a gesture of tender genuflection, cradles in his left arm a haloed baby. With his right he touches another baby, swaddled like the first, and lying on a crib. The angel — as he appears to be — has a sorrowful expression, and is an attractive dark green, like the patination of an ancient bronze. Slowly, other details emerge from the gloom to disturb the first engaging impression: he has no halo, his feet are clawed and he sports a tail. Tender he may seem, but he is swapping the baby Stephen for a changeling.
The lucid elegance of quattrocento Italy may at first sight seem a far cry from the gothic extravagances of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s new novel, The Angel’s Game, set, like his previous blockbuster, The Shadow of the Wind, in 20th-century Barcelona. In one important respect, however, Fra Lippo Lippi and Zafón concur: the most chilling representation of the devil is not the traditional horror manifestation but the fallen angel, the son whose father, in Zafón’s words, ‘rejected me and threw me out of his house’.
Although the ‘son of the morning’ is the pivot of this long and intricately plotted novel, its hero is David Martin, a junior in a newspaper office whose talent as a writer is fostered by well-meaning superiors and leads to a successful career writing grand guignol novels under a pseudonym. The financial rewards of his new life enable him to realise a dream of living in a long-deserted tower house. As time passes, however, Martin becomes obsessed with the house’s previous occupant, a lawyer turned writer, Diego Marlasca, whose life seems to offer curious parallels with his own. From out of the blue appears the sinister Andreas Corelli, a French publisher who senses Martin’s frustration with the limitations of his sub-literary output and offers an extravagant contract to write for him instead. From this the ‘game’ flows — and Martin and everyone he knows or meets is caught up in a devilish web of deceit, betrayal and death.
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