The Angel's Game

On Friday the sofa, the heater and The Shadows of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Safon made a compelling combination. David Martin, the hero of this doorstop book, falls into a career as the writer of a series of "penny dreadfuls" called The City of the Damned. I loved the term "penny dreadful". It builds a sense of nostalgia for a time when trashy books were cheaper than their more worthy cousins! And of course, The Shadows of the Wind is in its own way a penny dreadful (but of the $32.95 variety). David is a self -deprecating narrator and he comments early in the novel on his adolescent creation of his dream girl, and Shadows has two of them, the unattainable Christina and the more worthy but overlooked Isabella. Ruiz Safon is borrowing from Dickens here. Great Expectations becomes a touchstone in this book and its plot is plundered repeatedly. The mysterious benefactor is also a device Ruiz Safon borrows Vidal with his guilty secret and the sinister Corelli. Ruiz Safon's literary pantry is also well stocked with Faust and Borges. There's a labyrinth of lost books and a pact with the devil!


The novel opens splendidly - it's evocation of a writer's life and the world of books was highly seductive - but ultimately the layers and layers of pastiche left me with a soulless feeling. It invokes all the elements of the Gothic without really believing in it and the Gothic needs its raw passion. Yet it's not really clever enough to be pure pastiche in the Borges style. Nevertheless it had a page turning quality!