The angel's game /

DAVID MARTÍN, the young hero and narrator of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's moody, seductive new novel, "The Angel's Game," is one of those writers who suffer the torments of the damned in the practice of their craft. It's not that he has a tough time dreaming up stories or frets much over le mot juste. In fact, he cranks out what he calls "penny dreadful" prose with enviable facility, first in the form of a weekly newspaper serial called "The Mysteries of Barcelona" - his hometown - and later, under the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson, in a monthly series of books entitled "City of the Damned," which demands, he says, a steady pace of 6.66 pages a day. This oddly precise rate is a clue to the source of David's otherwise inexplicable agonies. He has accepted a lucrative commission from a mysterious editor from Paris, a glib, natty gent who claims to represent something known as Éditions de la Lumière - which, David has begun to suspect, means that he may actually have made a deal with the devil. He would not be the first writer to entertain that gloomy thought. In the opening paragraph of this long, twisty narrative, he asserts that every writer starts down a slippery slope from the moment he receives payment, or even a word of praise, for his work. "From then on," David declares, "he is doomed and his soul has a price." The solemn hyperbole of the statement makes you laugh, but the feeling is not, perhaps, totally unfamiliar to those of us who make a living putting one word after another. Most writers, of course, wouldn't express the sentiment quite so melodramatically, but that's David's style - and Ruiz Zafón's. In "The Angel's Game," as in his previous novel, "The Shadow of the Wind," he spins a fantastically elaborate plot from a slender, whimsical idea. Here it's the notion that a writer might, on a bad day, succumb to a sense of futility about the value of his calling, might begin to believe that the act of telling a story isn't just vain, but positively diabolical. "Faust" this isn't. Ruiz Zafón's flamboyant pulp epic is something altogether sillier, a pact-with-the-devil tale whose only purpose is to give its readers some small intimation of the darker pleasures of the literary arts, the weird thrill of storytelling without conscience. David's saga starts in the final days of World War I and ends with a spooky epilogue in 1945. Most of the action takes place in the 1920s, when, after the early success of "The Mysteries of Barcelona" and the "City of the Damned" series (of which he produces 27 volumes), the young novelist is struck by a deadly illness and is given to understand that doing a job for that elegant Parisian, Andreas Corelli, might save him. All he has to do is write, and that's what he does best anyway. The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and out- right crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths. (The novel's exposition is leisurely, but in its second half the bod- ies pile up at an impressive rate.) David, whose sensibility is helplessly Gothic, has moved into a long-abandoned house with a tower, where, he later learns, a past employee of the sinister Corelli once lived and came to an unhappy end. Obviously, the omens aren't good. But in some way David is right at home in the center of these macabre goings-on. When he finally tells the whole story to a policeman, the skeptical cop remarks that it "sounds like something from 'City of the Damned.'" There's a biter-bit kind of satisfaction in witnessing the dire unspooling of David's fate, in watching him become the horrified victim of just the sort of lurid evil that has been his stock in trade, and it's hard not to suspect that Ruiz Zafón is expressing at least a trace of ambivalence about his own rather florid imagination. At one point, after David has quit the "City of the Damned" series and written a "serious" novel under his own name - which flops ignominiously - he remarks that "perhaps it would have been better for everyone, especially for me, if Ignatius B. Samson had never committed suicide and David Martín had never taken his place." It's possible to see in "The Angel's Game" the occasional gesture of Ruiz Zafón toward putting his own inner Ignatius B. Samson behind him and writing something a little less frivolous, more consequential. The characters in this novel are a shade more complex than those in "The Shadow of the Wind," the narrative rhythm ever so slightly more contemplative, and there's a suggestion in the epilogue that the devil (abetted by David) is somehow responsible for the real-life horrors of World War II. But seriousness and high moral purpose don't come easily to writers like Ruiz Zafón. He's essentially a voluptuary whose temperament runs to big emotions and the purplish prose that heightens them. (The superb translation, by Lucia Graves, captures the strangely serene excessiveness of his style.) Ruiz Zafón toys with ambiguity without, it seems, really believing in it. When he places the action in mist and shadows, as he often does, it's because he loves the murk and mystery of them. The contrast between the light and the dark is always sharp, like a black-and-white image from a German Expressionist film of the silent era. Like good and evil. The pleasures of "The Angel's Game" are guilty ones. As he did in "The Shadow of the Wind," Ruiz Zafón provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books (among them that other, very different mysterious-benefactor tale "Great Expectations") and a pervasive sense of the childish joy of credulity - of surrendering to a story and letting it take you where it will, whatever the consequences. "Everything is a tale," Corelli says. And David shares that cynicism. "Emotional truth is not a moral quality," he tells a younger writer, "it's a technique." "The Angel's Game" has emotional truth to burn because Carlos Ruiz Zafón uses every narrative technique in the book, high and (mostly) low. Whatever other ideas may impinge on his consciousness from time to time, he always falls back on storytelling. It's the master he serves, and the devil he knows. There's a biter-bit satisfaction in watching a horror writer succumb to the lurid evil that's been his stock in trade. Terrence Rafferty writes the Horror column for the Book Review.

Zafón's international best-seller, The Shadow of the Wind (2004), a book-steeped fantasia set in post-World War II Barcelona, introduced us to Daniel Sempere and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library where books are guarded against oblivion. The Angel's Game, a prequel of sorts set in the 1920s, features another Daniel Daniel Martín an orphan who learns the writing trade at a newspaper, then finds success with a pseudonymous series of gothic potboilers called City of the Damned. After his lone literary effort falls flat, his health failing, he accepts a commission from a mysterious publisher, Andreas Corelli, to write an audacious book for an astronomical sum but soon has reason to suspect that his handshake deal is worse than any contract he has signed. Once again, Zafón proves himself a magician, vividly invoking bygone Barcelona while unscrolling a byzantine plot at breakneck pace. The crumbling houses, supernatural secrets, and emotionally responsive weather might be a bit much for some readers to digest, though for others it will be a feast. But what would have kept The Angel's Game itself from being someday consigned to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books would have been a stronger connection between storybook evil and the real-life kind. While Zafón portrays Martín as a successful seller of entertainments who longs to be a serious scribe, his own unfinished thoughts about religion and totalitarianism show his priorities. Pity, because he seems the perfect author to help prove that serious stuff can also be entertaining as hell.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2009 Booklist

Fans of Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and new readers alike will be delighted with this gothic semiprequel. In 1920s Barcelona, David Martin is born into poverty, but, aided by patron and friend Pedro Vidal, he rises to become a crime reporter and then a beloved pulp novelist. David's creative pace is frenetic; holed up in his dream house--a decrepit mansion with a sinister history--he produces two great novels, one for Vidal to claim as his own, and one for himself. But Vidal's book is celebrated while David's is buried, and when Vidal marries David's great love, David accepts a commission to write a story that leads him into danger. As he explores the past and his mysterious publisher, David becomes a suspect in a string of murders, and his race to uncover the truth is a delicious puzzle: is he beset by demons or a demon himself? Zafón's novel is detailed and vivid, and David's narration is charming and funny, but suspect. Villain or victim, he is the hero of and the guide to this dark labyrinth that, by masterful design, remains thrilling and bewildering. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Another delicious supernatural mystery from bestselling Catalan author Zafn (The Shadow of the Wind, 2005). Mix Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges, intellectual mysterian Arturo Prez-Reverte, and maybe add a dash of Stephen King, and you have some of the makings of Zafn's sensibility. Fans of his earlier book will be pleased to find themselves on patches of familiar ground, including a revisit to that wonderful conceit, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Indeed, this is a prequelbut only of a kind: Familiar figures turn up at points, only to seem less than familiar as the narrative twists and turns. The none-too-heroic hero, David Mart"n, is an aspiring journalist who bucks hackwork to turn in a crowd-pleasing series for a tough boss. This leads him into an onerous contract with the usual crooked publishers and, indirectly, into a rivalry with his former mentorall of which, naturally, entails love triangles and smoldering egos. The picture is complicated by the arrival of another curious publisher, Andreas Corelli, who offers David piles of pesetas to write, well, a book of a different sort, involving research that yields piles of corpses and occasions ample cliffhangers. Zafn has a fine talent for inserting unexpected hitches into a story line already resistant to graphing, whose outcome is definitely not seen from afar. The plot resolves in a rush, for the author finds himself with many a loose end to tie up, but once it sinks in, the result is more than satisfying. Zafn delivers a warning about the dangers of obsession, mixed with an obvious passion for literature and the printed word; his book is also a song of love for Barcelona with all its creaking floorboards and hidden subbasements. A nice fit with the current craze for learned mysteries and for spooks of both the spying and the spectral kind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.