Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s first novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was one of those runaway bestsellers that comes along now and then. A period gothic-horror romance, it got reviews such as, “I loved it so much I bought six copies for my friends.” Zafon himself seems a little wary of the hype. His new biggie, again set in Barcelona between the two world wars, centres on a hack writer of sensational pulp fiction who turns his hand to “literary” novels, more or less accidentally producing two at once: one under his own name, David Martin, the other ghostwritten for well-connected man about town Don Pedro Vidal.

The Vidal book is absurdly acclaimed by the papers as one of the great international masterpieces, much as happened with The Shadow of the Wind. The Martin book is dismissed as the work of a talentless no-hoper. Mind you, there is a certain vanity at work here: Zafon is so successful that he can afford to laugh at the mere jobbing reviewers who made his name.

He has been called “the Dickens of Barcelona”, and clearly doesn’t mind, as his hero seems to take his oddly English name from two Dickens heroes, David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit. The thing about Dickens, of course, is that his work was popular and lasting. Martin tells Isabella, his teenage hanger-on, no doubt speaking for the author, “All art that is worthy of the name is commercial sooner or later.”

Martin is approached by a mysterious publisher, Andreas Corelli of Editions de la Lumière, who wants him to write a religious text, one that will actually found a new religion. Corelli is polite, but he has yellow eyes like a wolf and is frankly offering far too much money. Martin discovers that the previous owner of his house received a similar sum for a similar commission and apparently came to a sticky end. He also discovers that the Parisian address on Corelli’s calling card is a burnt-out shell, long derelict, and that Corelli supposedly died many years ago. Ooh-er. Lumière; light-bringer; Lucifer, anyone?

The novel is styled like the penny-dreadfuls that Martin used to turn out, with lots of horrible murders, tragic lost loves, crooked cops, shady lawyers, supernatural mysteries and shocking revelations. Although the plot retains its overall shape, such as it is, the amount of picaresque incident and Grand Guignol lead to something of a pile-up. Characters are thrown in and killed off at a great rate. Rather as in Hindu mythology, anything can happen, so nothing is surprising. Zafon does not quite sustain the loony levels of excitement found in the one great survival of the penny-dreadful era, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantomas.

There are some effective scenes, such as a fight in a cable car that seems to owe something to Where Eagles Dare, but when, for about the 10th time, Martin arrives at a ­rendezvous to find the front door spookily ajar and steps into a sinister, silent hallway, calling out to see if anybody’s there, you start to feel a bit led by the nose. The principal plot twist is the famous one invented by Eric Ambler in his 1939 novel The Mask of Dimitrios, which was clever at the time (The Third Man works a variation on it), but it has become a familiar standby. Another twist goes back to Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos, if not beyond.

Popular fiction often creates this mildly agreeable sense that you’ve read it all before somewhere, but seldom to the same extent. Characters come out with zingers such as, “Try and get some rest,” which is up there with “I’ve never been more serious in my life.” At one point, Martin visits a house whose inhabitants turn out to be dummies, a self-conscious allusion to the artificiality of the fiction. The subtext is sly but obvious: the true Faustian bargain is Zafon’s own. He wanted to write authentic masterpieces or, failing that, good honest thrillers; instead, he sold his soul to produce meretricious and slightly pernicious million-selling middlebrow tosh such as this.

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
translated by Lucia Graves
Weidenfeld £18.99 pp443

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