What Book to Read?

‘A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story … A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price’.

The Angel’s Game (2008) is a gothic melodrama. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.

The story is set in Barcelona in the 1920s. David Martin is a writer who is recounting the story of his life from a vantage point of fifteen years after the principle events he describes. As he tells it, he becomes a writer against the odds, being the only child of a drunken and illiterate father. With the support of a kindly bookseller and a rich patron, he begins writing stories for a newspaper under the general title Mysteries of Barcelona, and then is employed to write ‘penny dreadfuls’ under the general title City of the Damned.  After the real novel he has written is unfairly undermined by his publisher and the city’s literary critics, and the woman he loves marries his rich patron, he is told he has a brain tumour and only a short time to live. He then receives a mysterious offer from another publisher to spend a year writing a book which will ‘create a religion’. ‘Are you not tempted,’ asks the publisher, ‘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 souls? What greater challenge for your career than to create a story so powerful that is transcends fiction and becomes a revealed truth?’ In despair, he accepts, and is immediately healed. He starts work on a story with an ‘iconography of death and flags and shields’. But is he directing the project, or is it directing him? And is he the first person to undertake this task? Murder and mystery await.

Looking back, Martin says that ‘uncertainty has been my only recollection’. His version of events is very different from that offered by the police Inspector investigating the crimes which seem to surround the writer. He is venial, and we have no reason to believe him. But can we believe Martin? By his account, the publisher can only be Lucifer; in a nice touch, he admits that what he wanted to be when he grew up was God. Martin has entered into a Faustian pact. The ‘religion’ he has created is obviously fascism: ‘the inferno promised in the pages I wrote … that has taken on a life of its own’. Martin has a number of strange experiences, but if they are illusion, what else is he deluded about? If they are ‘real’, then it is the reality of magical realism. By the end of the story, some events are given a concrete basis, but others are not. It’s a case of suspending disbelief.

I’m willing to do this partly because I like the way the book is written. I’m not sure whether any of this is due to the translation, which is by Lucia Graves (2009). She’s the daughter of Robert Graves, and has presumably been around good literature all her life. Although it is set in the 1920s, conversation in particular has a modern ring to it. The writing is lush, as befits a melodrama. The descriptions of Barcelona in particular are a joy. There are the slums of the dark old town, the mansions of the rich in the hills above the city, the lanes and squares, the churches and cemeteries and the crumbling houses, like the tower house Martin lives in. And in addition to the real Barcelona of the 1920s, we have such delights of the imagination as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinth of stairs and tunnels in an old necropolis that houses ‘the sum of centuries of books that have been lost or forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced forever, books that preserve the memory and the soul of times and marvels that no one remembers anymore’. Those lucky enough to be initiates may choose one book to take away, but must protect it from harm. It is often said that the book chooses the reader, rather than the other way round. (Bit like a wand in Harry Potter.) All this is great fun, and compelling reading. But I’m still a bit confused.

The Angel’s Game is a loose prequel to Ruiz Zafon’s earlier book The Shadow of the Wind (2001, trans. 2004). This story, set in post–Spanish Civil War Barcelona, also turns on a visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

You can find out more about Carlos Ruiz Zafon here.