Reviewed by Bill Sheehan

In 2004, Carlos Ruiz Zafon made a spectacular English language debut with The Shadow of the Wind, a grandly conceived, beautifully constructed novel set in Barcelona in the aftermath of World War II. The novel offered many pleasures, chief among them a ringing affirmation of the primal importance of stories. To that end, its central symbol - and single most indelible image - was an ingenious Borgesian labyrinth called The Library of Forgotten Books. Zafon’s latest, The Angel’s Game, also takes place in Barcelona (though most of the action occurs in the mid-to-late 1920s) and also revisits the mysterious Cemetery. The new book, however, is neither sequel nor prequel. It is, instead, an independent narrative that elaborates a coherent, increasingly complex fictional universe. Like its predecessor, it is aimed primarily at the bibliophiles of the world, those of us whose lives are shaped and governed by the power of the written word.

The hero/narrator of The Angel’s Game is David Martin, an orphan raised in circumstances of Dickensian squalor. Abandoned by his mother and made to witness his father’s violent death, David finds a home of sorts in the office of a local newspaper called The Voice of Industry. Over time, he rises from glorified errand boy to become a prominent writer of popular weekly features. When his colleagues’ jealousy forces him to leave the paper, David adopts the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson and proceeds to publish a series of sensational “penny dreadfuls” appropriately entitled City of the Damned. Eventually, his work comes to the attention of a mysterious Parisian publisher named Andreas Corelli, who offers David an unusual - and extremely lucrative - commission.

Corelli agrees to pay 100,000 francs - a considerable fortune in that time and place - if David will use his narrative gifts to create “a new religion.” The narrative Corelli envisions would embody a comprehensive spiritual mythology, one that addresses the ancient human longing for definitive answers to fundamental questions. Quite literally, Corelli wants David to “create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing themselves to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handing over their soul . . . a story so powerful it transcends fiction and becomes a revealed truth.” Astonished, intrigued, and ultimately tempted both by the money and the challenge, David accepts the commission, unaware that he has entered into a Faustian compact that will alter the course of his life.

Almost immediately, bizarre, sometimes impossible events begin to take place. David recovers, completely and miraculously, from a potentially lethal illness. The publishers to whom he is contractually obligated die in an unexplained fire. A manuscript found in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books echoes the themes and substance of David’s own projected narrative. In time, it becomes clear that he is not the only writer to have accepted such a commission. In the course of investigating these and other interconnected mysteries, he comes to understand that the price of his relationship with Andreas Corelli is more than he is willing to pay.

Like The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game is many things at once: mystery, love story, supernatural thriller, historical drama, Bildungsroman. It is also a classic Gothic Romance filled with all the traditional elements of the form: haunted mansions, mysterious murders, mistaken identities, and hairbreadth escapes. At every turn of his increasingly convoluted plot, Zafon opts for baroque, colorful storytelling over the quotidian demands of commonplace realism. The result is a furiously paced narrative that reaches backwards in time to Dickens and Dumas and forward to such modern figures as Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Once again, Zafon puts his own highly individual stamp on these various influences, giving us a novel that is unique, deeply personal, and almost impossible to put down.

At the same time, The Angel’s Game is very much a novel of ideas, a meditation on the forces that animate our lives and help chart the direction of human history. It is, among other things, a novel about the nature of faith and the urge to power, about the ways in which faith can be utilized to further the goals of ruthless and ambitious men. At its deepest level, it is a story concerned with the ultimate significance of stories, of narrative itself. Andreas Corelli, Mephistophelean seducer and master manipulator, has the final word on the subject:

“Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know,

what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story,

a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating

an emotional content. We can only accept as true what can be narrated.”

At several points throughout the novel, Zafon reminds us that books, in fact, have souls, and are reflections of the souls of both their authors and their readers. The Angel’s Game (which has been superbly translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of poet Robert Graves) beautifully illustrates this proposition, and offers further proof that Carlos Luis Zafon is one of the most compelling - and unpredictable - storytellers of the modern era,