London Book Club: February

Posted on February 15, 2011 in Uncategorized

For February’s SYP Book Club we chose to read The Angel’s Game by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón. After a few months of reading philosophical, introspective novels (including Gilead and The Elegance of the Hedgehog) we were definitely ready for a plot-driven tale that would draw us in, not feeling like another intellectual challenge at the end of a hard day! On the night, our discussion revealed that most of us had indeed found Ruiz Zafón’s tale of murder, revenge and books in early twentieth-century Barcelona enthralling – even those who hadn’t finished the book had no intention of stopping there. But we seemed to have as many criticisms as compliments for his characterisation and the messages he was trying to put across.

Gothic horror, a psychological thriller or a detective story?

Ruiz Zafón has created a work that for the first three or four chapters seems to invite you into a detective story, before bouncing you rather mercilessly onto a psychological thriller, then a gothic horror story, then back and forth between the three. While we all agreed that the author’s mixture of fast-paced action sequences with lengthy, disquieting descriptions of Barcelona created suspense and made the twists all the more shocking, there was less consensus on whether his combination of genres really worked. I rather enjoyed having my expectations torn away from me, but others felt short-changed when they realised that the golden rule of crime fiction was being broken with the introduction of supernatural elements.
   
Talk soon turned to one of the main themes in the book: writing. The house in which the novelist protagonist David resides becomes a metaphor for the solitude of the writer. The idea that a novelist’s book is an immortal projection of his soul is one that Ruiz Zafón keeps revisiting. We all (as publishers and book-lovers) enjoyed the idea of a Cemetery of Forgotten Books in which writers’ souls would live on forever in their books, but none of us seemed particularly impressed overall by this. Perhaps we felt that he was being too self-indulgent in romanticising his own profession.

Despite the abundance of religious imagery in the book, none of us had clear ideas about what Ruiz Zafón was really trying to say about religion. The storyline’s twists and turns stood in the way of getting a grip on any particular message. Even a speech given by a rebellious priest who the author seemed to be using as a mouthpiece barely touched on the range of symbolism dispersed throughout the book. We were left with the distinct impression that the author probably didn’t know what he was trying to say either!

Our opinions of the book’s characterisation also tended to be quite critical. Most of us agreed that the sheer number of characters, who often didn’t turn out to be who they said they were, left our heads spinning. In a book full of plot twists, with a rather erratic sense of the passing of time, it would have been reassuring to have some consistency. Some of the group had already read the author’s previous novel, The Shadow of the Wind, and were disappointed when they didn’t fall in love with this new set of characters in the way that they did in the previous book.

From The Angel’s Game to Twilight

It was great to see everyone’s expressions brighten as we moved on to the topic of Isabella, one of the characters who seemed to eclipse David as the protagonist. Her interactions with David and her strong-woman persona brought some much-needed comic relief to The Angel’s Game. I suggested that she was the only ‘real’ character in the book; all the others seemed to fall conveniently into one stereotype or another, whereas she was as erratic and unique as any real human being would be. Discussion floated off at this point to other strong fictional women, passing by Twilight on the way and ending up at Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

Few of us were convinced by Cristina, David’s lost love, who seemed rather two-dimensional even as she was losing her mind. All of us were rather bemused by the book’s ending, which none of us felt their stilted relationship merited. However, we agreed that perhaps, along with the other stereotypes, she fitted with the idea that David had found himself living the life of a character in one of his own penny-dreadfuls, and so the author had succeeded on a metafictional level.

Book Club Questions

We all laughed when someone pointed out the ‘Book Club Questions’ at the end of the paperback edition, thinking them a bit too intellectual for what had essentially been promoted as a mass-market thriller. We were particularly amused by ‘Who is Andreas Corelli?’ which sounded like a bad literature essay question, but actually we had quite a lot of ideas to share. When we were first introduced to him, some people had hoped that he was either a product of David’s illness (a hallucination) or his own personal demon, like Mr Hyde to his Dr Jekyll. When the reality turned out to be even more far-fetched, most of us felt a bit let down.

In the end, it was really David’s sinister house and the backdrop of a languorous Barcelona that were the most interesting “characters” in this book. We felt that Ruiz Zafón could occasionally have taken one of his own character’s advice that ‘the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency’, but the story would not have felt nearly as vivid or ominous without these two imposing elements to set the tone. On hearing that it combines the same backdrop with a set of far more engaging characters whose stories we are likely to fall in love with, those of us who haven’t yet read The Shadow of the Wind now plan to.