The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2008; translation by Lucia Graves, copyright 2009)

When a mysterious gentleman who doesn’t blink offers you what you most desire, even immortality, warning bells should go off. But young writer David Martín is desperate. And all he has to do is create a new religion, or at least its story: how hard could that be for the man who churns out penny dreadfuls at 6.66 (uh huh) pages a day? And anyway, as Martín maintains in the opening sentence of The Angel’s Game, “A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. . . . from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.” The unblinking gentleman, publisher Andreas Corelli, is just offering a better price.

Much like the sensation novels Martín writes, with “plots as thick and murky as the water in the port,” The Angel’s Game is melodramatic, darkly atmospheric, sometimes silly, but greatly entertaining if you like that sort of thing—and I do. I also like the setting, a Barcelona that’s as moody, seductive, mysterious, and doom-laden as any femme fatale (so compelling, in fact, that Martín titles his newspaper serial Mysteries of Barcelona and his penny dreadfuls City of the Damned).


Equally spooky is the house Martín rents, especially its tower room containing a seductive Underwood typewriter “for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent,” he says, stroking the typewriter keys lovingly. Though there’s a doomed love affair (of course), books and writing are much more convincing love objects in this novel, like Martín’s childhood copy of Great Expectations, restored to him by Corelli: “I stared at the bundle of paper that to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world.”


But magic in this book isn’t so light. Things get dark and complicated, haunted by connections between and among Martín, his shadowy tower house, and past tragedies. Bodies start to pile up in Grand Guignol fashion as Martín gets more and more embroiled in his real-life sensation thriller, and he slowly realizes the true nature of his bargain.


The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, with only a few infelicities. I did sometimes wished that street names and so on were translated, because names can be so evocative. The name of a brothel, for instance, is given as El Ensueño; it helps to know this means The Dream.


More importantly—I had great fun reading this book, thoroughly enjoying the melodrama, mystery, and atmosphere. The first half was stronger, I thought, with some humor to lighten things up a bit here and there. The unrelenting and somewhat repetitively arrived at body count in the last half wasn’t always satisfying. Some complications seem to exist for the sake of complication. But I liked the recurring images of blood/water/tears/drowning and fire/arson/flames—in both cases, associated with both destruction and purification. As are books and writing, come to think of it.


I didn’t quite know how to read the ending and I sort of didn’t believe it. But that’s only a few pages out of the whole, and didn’t affect my great enjoyment of this twisted, book-adoring book.