The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's GameBy Carlos Ruiz Zafon

(Text Publishing $30 & $38)

Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan

This review was first published on 30 May 2009 in the excellent Canvas magazine, part of the New Zealand Herald Weeekend edition, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the NZ Herald books editor, Linda Herrick.

The publisher of these two books aimed for a double coup with new writer (to New Zealanders, anyway) Carlos Ruiz Zafon, by releasing The Shadow of the Wind in March with the first chapter of The Angel's Game, as a prequel at the end of the book. This was to entice readers into the second novel. And it may well be an effective ploy.I baulked at reading The Shadow of the Wind because the title has the light and airy sound of what they used to market as a "true romance" - not my sort of book at all. But I decided to get on with it because Ruiz Zafon is a lately famous Spanish writer who sells by the million.

My experience over the past 20 years with Spanish language writers in translation has been overwhelmingly good. Mario Vargos Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorges Luis Borges, Javier Marias, Javier Sierra, and others, have all brought me enormous satisfaction because of a quality they have more than anyone writing in English these days - an expansive and wondrous imagination.And so it turned out.

The Shadow of the Wind (translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves, daughter of the great 20th century historian and writer, Robert) is as compelling a read as anything I have lugged around with me day and night for a long time. It is so seductive a tale you note and then ignore the overly sentimental patches and, as you pass hurriedly by, you admire the vividly portrayed urban backdrop, the tight, explicit dialogue and unravelling tension of the characters in conflict - as most of them are.

Vastly different from the cool delights of Borges and the sparkling magical realism of Marquez, it is more Gothic, with characters driven by the passionate obsessions of people living in the dark underside of Barcelona.Daniel Semperes, son of a bookseller, is taken by his father to the mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books. He is allowed to take one title away with him as long as he protects it. He chooses The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, a failed novel by a Barcelonian who took refuge in Paris from the Spanish Civil War. A disfigured spectre is trying to buy up all the copies of Carax novels. Those who won't sell the books for burning find their houses or shops burnt down.

The labyrinthine plot follows the loves and lives of Semperes and Carax, who carry the weight of the story, although Carax is mostly off-stage, a shadowy figure. In the end the story disappoints because it tails off: just about everyone in Barcelona seems to know a crucial fact that Carax ought to discover but he seems impervious to it. However, it is seriously interesting getting to that point.

So I moved on to an advance copy of The Angel's Game. Again, it is a pull-you-in read, even pacier, with the same obsessions, and the same pervasive feeling that love among the young is more trouble than it needs to be. David Martin, the motherless son of an impoverished war veteran father, works as a hack on a daily newspaper and emerges as a writer of popular fictional serials.

He moves on to a publishing firm and turns out a series of crime novels that prove popular. He wants to write literary novels but is tied to a contract he wants to get out of.In the meantime, he falls in love with an unattainable girl, and then makes his pact with the devil. For large sums of money he agrees to write a religious novel for the spectral publisher who exacts revenge on those who would stand in Martin's way.

About there, the plot gets devilishly complicated as well and the reader needs to concentrate hard.This novel is more terse - or is the word glib? - and even more mysterious, allusive and fast moving than The Shadow, as though the author, knowing what pulls in the crowds, amplified the spiel, and it too has an unsatisfactory ending. But I still got moved compulsively along by the sheer vibrant, magical implausibility of it all, perhaps explaining why it has sold more than a million copies in Spain alone.

Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.