What is your favorite Indiana Jones movie?  Is it the first Indiana Jones in which the hero (played by Harrison Ford) is pitted against Nazi Germany and the Fuhrer’s desire to possess the powerful Ark of the Covenant?  Perhaps you are a bigger fan of the third movie during which Professor Jones follows in his father’s footsteps to locate the Holy Grail and once again outmaneuver the Nazis.  My gut instinct tells me that despite your opinion about the most recent adventure, the second movie is your least favorite.  It’s darker.  The villains reflect more sadistic and evil traits than the Nazis ever do.  Children find themselves in the hands of brutal guards while they search to uncover sacred stones.  A man’s heart catches fire as his body becomes submerged in lava.

Ruiz Zafon’s second novel inhabits a similar space. His first novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was brought to my attention by a Chilean friend of mine who typically enjoys novels infused with magical realism.  Authors such as Isabel Allende and Garci Marquez frequently add touches of magical realism to their stories.  In my mind, The Shadow of the Wind turned out to be a wonderful novel and a very engaging read.  The love struck but unlucky teenager who discovers a mysterious book only to find out that copies of it are systematically being destroyed winds up in a number of macabre situations which propels the reader around Barcelona in the mid 1900’s.  Brilliant book.

The Angel’s Game, also set in Barcelona and scantly but firmly linked to The Shadow of the Wind, introduces us to another teenager.  From a broken home he slowly raises himself out of poverty by working for a newspaper and sheltering himself under the wing of an older writer.  This time Barcelona is recovering from WWI, and our young protagonist, David Martin, aspires to be a novelist.  As he slowly builds a name for himself over the years through his pulp fiction, he struggles to be the writer he wants to be until a French publisher by the name of Andreas Corelli commissions him to write a book.  But the money and good fortune that goes with the commission quickly dwindles, and David Martin slowly uncovers not only the twisted history of the house he lives in, but also the dangerous game his employer is playing with him.  There are subtle and not so subtle hints that the man behind the lucrative contract might be the Devil himself, the Bringer of Light.  The more enmeshed be becomes in the history surrounding him, the darker the gothic shadows that try to envelop him.

This time around, Ruiz Zafon fills his novel with enough twists and turns to make even the staunchest stomach weak.  As a hero, or perhaps an anti-hero, David does not provide the type of credibility one would need to sustain such a incongruous plot, and I found myself often wondering who was going crazy, myself or Mr. Martin?  The author has no problems painting Barcelona as a city filled with sinister alleys, morbid histories, and people who in one way or another are damned.  But as the story quickly unravels and re-winds itself into different shapes, David’s experiences never quite connect to form the same sort of cohesive thriller as in the first novel.  I have checked the bookshelf every time I visit the bookstore for a new novel from this author (look under R, not Z), and it might be natural that I created too great of expectations.   However, when the way got rough, I plowed ahead because I know what the author is capable of, and even here when he gets it right, you cannot question his sense of morbidity.  His unpredictable characters inhabit a world of shadows and mystery and they will stick with you even after you’ve stopped reading.  I still have hope that the third installment will take me back to the same magic I experienced the first time around.

Cover your heart!

Ruiz Zafon, Carlos. The Angel’s Game, Doubleday, New York, 2009.