The angel's game

DAVID MARTÍN, the young hero and narrator of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's moody, seductive new novel, "The Angel's Game," is one of those writers who suffer the torments of the damned in the practice of their craft. It's not that he has a tough time dreaming up stories or frets much over le mot juste. In fact, he cranks out what he calls "penny dreadful" prose with enviable facility, first in the form of a weekly newspaper serial called "The Mysteries of Barcelona" - his hometown - and later, under the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson, in a monthly series of books entitled "City of the Damned," which demands, he says, a steady pace of 6.66 pages a day. This oddly precise rate is a clue to the source of David's otherwise inexplicable agonies. He has accepted a lucrative commission from a mysterious editor from Paris, a glib, natty gent who claims to represent something known as Éditions de la Lumière - which, David has begun to suspect, means that he may actually have made a deal with the devil. He would not be the first writer to entertain that gloomy thought. In the opening paragraph of this long, twisty narrative, he asserts that every writer starts down a slippery slope from the moment he receives payment, or even a word of praise, for his work. "From then on," David declares, "he is doomed and his soul has a price." The solemn hyperbole of the statement makes you laugh, but the feeling is not, perhaps, totally unfamiliar to those of us who make a living putting one word after another. Most writers, of course, wouldn't express the sentiment quite so melodramatically, but that's David's style - and Ruiz Zafón's. In "The Angel's Game," as in his previous novel, "The Shadow of the Wind," he spins a fantastically elaborate plot from a slender, whimsical idea. Here it's the notion that a writer might, on a bad day, succumb to a sense of futility about the value of his calling, might begin to believe that the act of telling a story isn't just vain, but positively diabolical. "Faust" this isn't. Ruiz Zafón's flamboyant pulp epic is something altogether sillier, a pact-with-the-devil tale whose only purpose is to give its readers some small intimation of the darker pleasures of the literary arts, the weird thrill of storytelling without conscience. David's saga starts in the final days of World War I and ends with a spooky epilogue in 1945. Most of the action takes place in the 1920s, when, after the early success of "The Mysteries of Barcelona" and the "City of the Damned" series (of which he produces 27 volumes), the young novelist is struck by a deadly illness and is given to understand that doing a job for that elegant Parisian, Andreas Corelli, might save him. All he has to do is write, and that's what he does best anyway. The literary project in which Corelli has enlisted David winds up involving him in all manner of deceptions and out- right crimes, including a fair number of violent deaths. (The novel's exposition is leisurely, but in its second half the bod- ies pile up at an impressive rate.) David, whose sensibility is helplessly Gothic, has moved into a long-abandoned house with a tower, where, he later learns, a past employee of the sinister Corelli once lived and came to an unhappy end. Obviously, the omens aren't good. But in some way David is right at home in the center of these macabre goings-on. When he finally tells the whole story to a policeman, the skeptical cop remarks that it "sounds like something from 'City of the Damned.'" There's a biter-bit kind of satisfaction in witnessing the dire unspooling of David's fate, in watching him become the horrified victim of just the sort of lurid evil that has been his stock in trade, and it's hard not to suspect that Ruiz Zafón is expressing at least a trace of ambivalence about his own rather florid imagination. At one point, after David has quit the "City of the Damned" series and written a "serious" novel under his own name - which flops ignominiously - he remarks that "perhaps it would have been better for everyone, especially for me, if Ignatius B. Samson had never committed suicide and David Martín had never taken his place." It's possible to see in "The Angel's Game" the occasional gesture of Ruiz Zafón toward putting his own inner Ignatius B. Samson behind him and writing something a little less frivolous, more consequential. The characters in this novel are a shade more complex than those in "The Shadow of the Wind," the narrative rhythm ever so slightly more contemplative, and there's a suggestion in the epilogue that the devil (abetted by David) is somehow responsible for the real-life horrors of World War II. But seriousness and high moral purpose don't come easily to writers like Ruiz Zafón. He's essentially a voluptuary whose temperament runs to big emotions and the purplish prose that heightens them. (The superb translation, by Lucia Graves, captures the strangely serene excessiveness of his style.) Ruiz Zafón toys with ambiguity without, it seems, really believing in it. When he places the action in mist and shadows, as he often does, it's because he loves the murk and mystery of them. The contrast between the light and the dark is always sharp, like a black-and-white image from a German Expressionist film of the silent era. Like good and evil. The pleasures of "The Angel's Game" are guilty ones. As he did in "The Shadow of the Wind," Ruiz Zafón provides, along with sex and death, a nice slide show of old Barcelona, a handful of affectionate riffs on favorite books (among them that other, very different mysterious-benefactor tale "Great Expectations") and a pervasive sense of the childish joy of credulity - of surrendering to a story and letting it take you where it will, whatever the consequences. "Everything is a tale," Corelli says. And David shares that cynicism. "Emotional truth is not a moral quality," he tells a younger writer, "it's a technique." "The Angel's Game" has emotional truth to burn because Carlos Ruiz Zafón uses every narrative technique in the book, high and (mostly) low. Whatever other ideas may impinge on his consciousness from time to time, he always falls back on storytelling. It's the master he serves, and the devil he knows. There's a biter-bit satisfaction in watching a horror writer succumb to the lurid evil that's been his stock in trade. Terrence Rafferty writes the Horror column for the Book Review.

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting any-one discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that mo-ment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price. My first time came one faraway day in December 1917. I was seventeen and worked at The Voice of Industry, a newspaper that had seen bet-ter days and now languished in a barn of a building that had once housed a sulfuric acid factory. The walls still oozed the corrosive vapor that ate away at furniture and clothes, sapping the spirits, consuming even the soles of shoes. The newspaper's headquarters rose behind the forest of an-gels and crosses of the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery; from afar, its outline merged with the mausoleums silhouetted against the horizon-a skyline stabbed by hundreds of chimneys and factories that wove a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black above Barcelona. On the night that was about to change the course of my life, the newspaper's deputy editor, Don Basilio Moragas, saw fit to summon me, just before closing time, to the dark cubicle at the far end of the editorial staff room that doubled as his office and cigar den. Don Basilio was a forbidding- looking man with a bushy moustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency. Any journalist prone to florid prose would be sent off to write fu-neral notices for three weeks. If, after this penance, the culprit relapsed, Don Basilio would ship him off permanently to the "House and Home" pages. We were all terrified of him, and he knew it. "Did you call me, Don Basilio?" I ventured timidly. The deputy editor looked at me askance. I entered the office, which smelled of sweat and tobacco in that order. Ignoring my presence, Don Basilio continued to read through one of the articles lying on his table, a red pencil in hand. For a couple of minutes, he machine- gunned the text with corrections and amputations, muttering sharp comments as if I weren't there. Not knowing what to do, and noticing a chair placed against the wall, I slid toward it. "Who said you could sit down?" muttered Don Basilio without raising his eyes from the text. I quickly stood up and held my breath. The deputy editor sighed, let his red pencil fall, and leaned back in his armchair, eyeing me as if I were some useless piece of junk. "I've been told that you write, Martin." I gulped. When I opened my mouth only a ridiculous, reedy voice emerged. "A little, well, I don't know, I mean, yes, I do write..." "I hope you write better than you speak. And what do you write- if that's not too much to ask?" "Crime stories. I mean..." "I get the idea." The look Don Basilio gave me was priceless. If I'd said I devoted my time to sculpting figures for Nativity scenes out of fresh dung I would have drawn three times as much enthusiasm from him. He sighed again and shrugged his shoulders. "Vidal says you're not altogether bad. He says you stand out." "Of course, with the sort of competition in this neck of the woods, one doesn't have to run very fast. Still, if Vidal says so." Pedro Vidal was the star writer at The Voice of Industry. He penned a weekly column on crime and lurid events-the only thing worth read-ing in Excerpted from The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.