He became a cult bestseller with The Shadow Of The Wind. Now Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón is back with a prequel, The Angel’s Game. He talks about the influence of Dickens on his work and his debt to the ’70s school of American cinema.
For an author success comes with its own set of problems. If your previous novel is to adult readers what Harry Potter was to pre-teens, there’s an awful lot of expectations and hope riding on you as you sit down to pen your follow up. Such is the case with Carlos Ruiz Zafón. His first book for adults, The Shadow Of The Wind, wasn’t just a commercial success – his readers loved it and were more than a bit anxious for Zafón’s next instalment.
Writing the follow up, Zafón acknowledges that he felt the pressure, but he says, “Every time you finish a book, you feel pressure. You may be aware of the expectations but I think there’s a danger in trying to surrender to those, because then you’re condescending to the readers, trying to second-guess them. You have an idea of the story you want to tell, of the book you want to write, and you hope people enjoy it. Luckily working on a book is complicated enough so you forget about those things.”
Fortunately for his fans, The Angel’s Game doesn’t stray from the territory that made Shadow such a success. We’re back in the magic realist Barcelona of the Sampere & Sons bookshop and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Set in Spain in the 1920s The Angel’s Game is a sort of prequel to Shadow but, says Zafón, it’s not a companion piece.
“This is part of a cycle of four novels which are interconnected. They are not necessarily sequential stories, they are standalone stories, but they share some common threads and they all intersect at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
Like Shadow, The Angel’s Game uses many different genres – gothic horror, magic realism, fable, romance and mystery to name a few.
“It is difficult to use many different registers and techniques trying to get them to work together, but that’s part of the challenge because these are books about storytelling, about books, about writing, about reading, about the very nature of the process of storytelling and it’s interesting to play with all these different elements. I think anything that deviates from the normal, from everyday things, trying to create a dream world that seems coherent and believable takes hard work and it’s complicated, but that’s part of what I find interesting about writing – trying to challenge yourself.”
The mixing of genres is, says Zafón, partly a response to his own reading habits.
“I think I’ve been influenced by many, many things. My influences come from a number of sources, especially the great nineteenth century writers – Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Balzac. But I’m also very influenced by film, especially the generation of film-makers that came out of the US in the ‘70s – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Cappola, Brian De Palma, Spielberg and Lucas.”
“I’m also influenced by writers that are characterised as genre writers, such as noir writers like Raymond Chandler. I read widely and I’ve always done, since I was a child. I’m interested in all forms of storytelling and I try not to listen to the labels – this is good, this is bad, this is high, this is low. I’m interested in the architect, the construction and the mechanics of things and I try to learn from everything. It might be a nineteenth century novel or Japanese anime. I absorb and analyse and see what I can learn from them.”
The most obvious example is Dickens. The Angel’s Game has a number of nods to Great Expectations. David, Angel’s hero, risks his father’s wrath to save a copy of the book and like Pip, David is destined for a lowly humble life, until he finds an unexpected benefactor who turns his life around. Like Magwitch in Great Expectations this benefactor turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Although this was one story he used as an overlay structure, it was not the only one.
“There are many echos with Great Expectations and the book is in many ways written into the plot. Dickens in general is very important to the book. In many ways the figure of David Mártin is an homage to those great nineteenth century writers who wrote their novels in instalments and had to fight for their readers every week. I think that’s one of the book’s many layers. It’s a game of references, there are many stories that overlap in the book. Depending on your references, your baggage, you’re going to find different things. It’s a game for the reader.”
Zafón has been lauded for bringing Spanish history to the masses, but he says, this is less important to him than telling a good story.
“What I think is important when you’re using an historical period is to be honest to it – not to try and transform it into something it’s not. I try to reflect elements of the history of the period in the action, but it could be set anywhere because the essential core of the story is the characters and their dramas, rather than trying to do a story about Spain in the 1920s. I’m never trying to convince people of anything – I’m not a priest.”
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The Angel’s Game is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
