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Writing for the devil
By Terrence Rafferty |
June 28, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
DAVID Martin, the young hero and narrator of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's moody, seductive new novel, "The Angel's Game," is a writer who suffers the torment of the damned in the practice of his 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 Editions de la Lumiere 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 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 Zafon'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 Zafon'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, which is what he does best.
The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and outright crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths. 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 bitter 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 Zafon is expressing at least a trace of ambivalence about his own rather florid imagination.
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 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 Zafon. He's essentially a voluptuary whose temperament runs to big emotions and the purplish prose that heightens them. Ruiz Zafon 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 in "The Shadow of the Wind," Ruiz Zafon provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books 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. "The Angel's Game" has emotional truth to burn because Carlos Ruiz Zafon uses every narrative technique in the book, high and (mostly) low. Whatever other ideas may impinge on his consciousness, he always falls back on storytelling. It's the master he serves and the devil he knows.
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 Editions de la Lumiere 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 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 Zafon'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 Zafon'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, which is what he does best.
The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and outright crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths. 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 bitter 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 Zafon is expressing at least a trace of ambivalence about his own rather florid imagination.
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 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 Zafon. He's essentially a voluptuary whose temperament runs to big emotions and the purplish prose that heightens them. Ruiz Zafon 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 in "The Shadow of the Wind," Ruiz Zafon provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books 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. "The Angel's Game" has emotional truth to burn because Carlos Ruiz Zafon uses every narrative technique in the book, high and (mostly) low. Whatever other ideas may impinge on his consciousness, he always falls back on storytelling. It's the master he serves and the devil he knows.
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