Inspiring Older Readers
The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This 800+ page monster of a book concludes the quartet of linked novels that are grouped together under the collective title, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The other individual novels - The Shadow of the Wind, a 15m-copy bestseller published in English in 2004, which was followed by The Angel’s Game (2009) and The Prisoner of Heaven (2013) – can be read independently of each other but all of them share characters and unresolved perspectives or ambiguities that get resolved by this final instalment.
Zafón is a remarkably compelling author and his translator, Lucia Graves deserves a good share of whatever kudos is going around for this. I was hugely sceptical that I would stay the course with this huge slab of a book but I found myself spending swathes of my mornings and evenings page turning, not quite able to drag myself away from the unfolding mysteries that were being unravelled.
Although Zafón will often be referred to as a Spanish author, he’s actually a Catalan and his books are a sort of reluctant love letter to Barcelona and to some of the darker shadows that the Fascist regime of Franco covered the city with in the years following the civil war. Although the Cemetery books are never didactically political it’s pretty clear where Zafón’s sympathies lie.
The books are also the product of a lover of books and literature and the Labyrinth referred to in the title isn’t just the hidden, secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books that lies beneath Barcelona and which we first encountered in The Shadow of the Wind, but the labyrinth of literature, the never ending thread of books that lead us from one book to another. In his masterly review of the book in The Guardian, Mark Lawson puts it in this way:
“Among the imaginary forgotten books, readers’ memories of real literature are regularly nudged. Don Quixote is invoked in ways both small – the concierge of a Madrid apartment block is compared to Cervantes’ “knight of the doleful countenance” – and large: the windmill-fighting knight had a vast library of old books and the novel in which he appears diverges, like Zafón’s, into numerous stories within stories. The sequence also frequently flirts with Spain’s other most famous cultural Don – Juan – while the Morcerfs, a Catalan family in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, are mined for names and plotlines. There are vigorous nods as well to Castilian history in the film El Cid. Spanish readers report references to writers – such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Eduardo Mendoza – with less anglophone impact.”
This is not a book that lends itself to plot synopsis – it moves in time and place in ways that defy chronological précis – and, in any case, any substantial synopsis is bound to be a spoiler. What I can say however is that Zafón, as he does in the other books, introduces at least one new substantial character to his story. In this case it’s the ambiguous, magnetic Alicia – his own mutant and hugely more dangerous version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. In fact Alicia has a lot in common with the sort of super-sleeper female secret agents that have become rather commonplace in the cinema.
But in novel form, Zafón is able to make her a more complex and infinitely more interesting character, full of vulnerability and contradictions. Taken as a damaged young girl (her hip desperately damaged in the bombing of Barcelona) and moulded into an elite member of the Fascist secret police, she is nonetheless, herself drawn into a labyrinth of lies, deceit and professional assassination whose trail of killing and secret revelations will eventually land in the lap of the residents of Sempere & Son, booksellers.
The last words should go to Mark Lawson who rightly captures the appeal of the quartet brought to its conclusion by this book:
“Publishers dream of novels that appeal to habitual readers and to those seeking one big book to last a holiday, and that is what Zafón’s quartet has delivered. His trick is to have linked multiple genres – fantasy, historical, romance, meta-fictional, police-procedural and political – through prose of atmospheric specificity. Different eras and strands are united through imagery of burial and death: an undersea cemetery, demolition revealing bodies in a hotel, incarceration in a fetid prison cell, mummified murder victims in a police museum. These collections of the dead echo the books and documents in the bibliographical and bureaucratic catacombs that haunt the story.”
Although I read the hardback it is akin to an exercise in weight-lifting and so you should consider the paperback edition which is now available.
Terry Potter
September 2019