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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
All this nostalgia and mystery pretty much guarantees that Gerard will get the yen to visit England, and when he becomes pen pals with Alice -- an elusive English orphan whom he imagines to be a pre-Raphaelite-style beauty -- the die is cast. After his mother's death, when Gerard has become a quiet, recessive young man feeding off his own longings for faraway things, he heads back to the old country, searching for Staplefield and Alice. A series of short stories, written by Viola and published in various obscure reviews decades earlier, becomes part of the trail. At least one-half of "The Ghost Writer" is made up of Viola's rich, supremely spooky yarns, all of which seem to involve young men who are martyrs to love and victims of supernatural forces. The stories are obscurely entwined with the fate of Gerard's mother, whom he suspects of having been involved in a terrible crime. On her deathbed, when Gerard asks her about Viola's stories, his mother will only tell him, "One came true."
"The Ghost Writer" has a patchwork quality reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's "Possession"; each of the several voices (Gerard, Viola, Alice) is entirely distinct, as if the novel were assembled from documentary evidence. Byatt is only the most subterranean of allusions, however, for Harwood weaves many overt literary references -- most notably to Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" -- into his book. This isn't just postmodern cleverness; in fact, it isn't postmodern at all. Instead, the technique shows Harwood's keen understanding of how alternating the prosaic with the unreal can create a pervasive creepiness. It's as if by reading about James' haunted (or mad) governess, Gerard invites a similar fate. The heady, story-drugged atmosphere of Viola's tales melts into Gerard's fairly rational account of his quest, and where the two blur together is exactly the sort of place ghosts come from, the borderline between dream and waking.
Gerard's investigation of his mother's past takes him deep into a thicket of fact, fiction and lies that might be someone's attempt to hide her guilt, but might also be a trap. Harwood's plot is intricate -- it may leave you puzzling out the finer points of the various twists on your own after you follow it breathlessly to its conclusion -- but what lingers are Viola's tales. Some are more inventive than others, particularly a story set in the Reading Room at the British Museum that gives a whole new meaning to the expression "a foggy day in London town." But all of them have a hypnotic quality that oozes out beyond the solid structure of Harwood's plot and in the end envelopes it. By the last page, all the loose ends have been tied up, but that aura of the uncanny still clings to everything. As with all the best ghost stories, you're left feeling that the truth about what happened can never finally be pinned down.
-- Laura Miller
"The Shadow of the Wind"
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
Penguin Press
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The cover of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's "Shadow of the Wind" sports an atmospheric photograph of a foggy European street at night, and the spine is made to suggest a leather-bound, gold-stamped volume from some venerable library. So you might reasonably guess that this novel is either 1) an evocation of "Casablanca"-style intrigue à la Alan Furst or 2) a bookish thriller in the mode of Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (Ruiz Zafón is Spanish, like Pérez-Reverte, and "The Shadow of the Wind" was a bestseller in his homeland.) It's neither; Ruiz Zafón has revived the kind of full-blooded story of romance and mystery perfected by Victor Hugo.
"The Shadow of the Wind" has an innocence that doesn't prevent it from being thoroughly enthralling; at heart, the novel is a story of star-crossed lovers, bold young heroes, their lovably eccentric sidekicks and a cruel, dastardly villain. There are no fiendishly clever twists or secret codes, but Ruiz Zafón doesn't need them. He sweeps you along with the sheer riverine force of his sincerity and passion.
It's 1945 in Barcelona, and the brutality of Spain's recent civil war dominates everyone's mood. (It's fascinating to read a European novel in which World War II is a relatively distant conflagration.) The city hasn't lost its beauty and charm -- at least a dozen scenes take place in its famous cafes -- but everyone is a little wobbly on their feet. "Wars have no memory and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened," as one character puts it. A young boy, Daniel Sempere, is taken by his widower father, a book dealer, to a secret library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and allowed to select one title to adopt and preserve. Daniel picks "The Shadow of the Wind," by Julian Carax, and falls in love with the novel. He decides to find out more about its obscure author, and thereby hangs the tale.
