Book Review: The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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"Max Carver's father - a watchmaker and inventor - decides to move his family to a small town on the coast, to an old house that once belonged to a prestigious surgeon, Dr Richard Fleischmann. But the house holds many secrets and stories of its own. Behind it is an overgrown garden full of statues surrounded by a metal fence topped with a six-pointed star. When he goes to investigate, Max finds that the statues seem to consist of a kind of circus troop with the large statue of a clown at its centre. Max has the curious sensation that the statue is beckoning to him.

"As the family settles in they grow increasingly uneasy: they discover a box of old films belonging to the Fleischmanns; his sister has disturbing dreams and his other sister hears voices whispering to her from an old wardrobe. They also discover the wreck of a boat that sank many years ago in a terrible storm. Everyone on board perished except for one man - an engineer who built the lighthouse at the end of the beach. During the dive, Max sees something that leaves him cold - on the old mast floats a tattered flag with the symbol of the six-pointed star. As they learn more about the wreck, the chilling story of the Prince of the Mist begins to emerge."

***

 

"Max would never forget that faraway summer when, almost by chance, he discovered magic." So begins The Prince of Mist, the first novel by Spain's most notable literary export since Cervantes. And it's an extraordinary start; punchy, memorable and telling. Combined with the great expectations of all those readers won over by the dizzying charms of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game, it sets a high bar for the remainder of this short, sharp novel to reach.

It's taken nearly 20 years for Carlos Ruiz Zafon's all-ages debut to overcome the language barrier, and it arrives on our English-speaking shores courtesy of the same superlative translator - Lucia Graves - who brought us the author's more adult efforts. In that time, Zafon has been catapulted from moderate renown in a modest nation to global literary stardom, and it's little wonder: The Shadow of the Wind was a spellbinding meta-textual labyrinth of a narrative, and though less critically acclaimed, I found its physical and spiritual successor to be nearly the equal of that unforgettable experience.

The lineage of The Prince of Mist, however, is a less certain thing. The tale of a young boy whose close-knit family the war has forced into a seaside retreat, and who finds in the overgrown garden behind his idyllic new home the beginnings of a mystery that soon comes to captivate his shell-shocked imagination, Zafon's reclaimed debut is fun, no doubt about it, and accomplished - for a first novel - but otherwise... unremarkable. Needless to say it's no regression, but reading a novel divorced from its proper chronological order in which the ideas and themes that so dazzled in Zafon's later adult fiction are but sparks, glittering beneath the waves of the coastal refuge Max finds with a friend, is a curious and somewhat deflating experience.

So put your expectations away: this is not - not quite - the sort of fiction that we have come to stand in awe of Carlos Ruiz Zafon for. In fact, those glimmers that point to the author's eventual literary evolution can be so distracting as to prove problematic. If you can hide that context in the back of your mind, you'll find what The Prince of Mist is, assuredly, is a fine example of fanciful, young adult fantasy. You'll read it in an evening and perhaps forget it in a week, but for those few hours spent immersed in its evocative environs, you can be sure you'll have a jolly old time of it.

The plan is to publish Zafon's three remaining YA novels over the next three years, and I for one will be there for them, but ultimately, The Prince of Mist is but a pleasant blip of a book. Readers of all ages will find within its pages a grand, fast-paced and involving narrative, and while there will be among those a few who hold The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game in such high regard that they'll surely struggle to see past their preconceptions, bear in mind that, in the author's own words, The Prince of Mist "was the book that allowed me to become a professional writer and to start my career as a novelist," and for that - and not that alone, I should stress - we must be thankful.

***

The Prince of Mist

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

May 2010, Orion

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IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review: The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

[Buy this book on Amazon

in the UK / in the US]

"In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

"Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed --- a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home."

***

When writers write about writing, it's usually a safe bet to avert your eyes. In The Angel's Game, however, a standalone narrative with a few satisfying ties to The Shadow of the Wind, bestselling Spanish export Carlos Ruiz Zafon demonstrates once again how to do metafiction right.

Too often, pseudo-biographical books about books descend into a self-referential quagmire of ego and indulgence, but however many authors Zafon tips his hat at over the course of his second novel for mature readers - Dickens being the most singular influence amongst them - The Angel's Game retains the clarity of voice and purpose that made its 2004 predecessor such a standout.

In the opening few chapters of this, his second novel for mature readers, Zafon sketches a memorable portrait of Barcelona in the early 1900s. The cast of characters who inhabit its extravagant streets and seedy alleyways are wonderfully drawn, but the first flourish of The Angel's Game is the city itself. The ominous Barcelona this author presents quickly and effortlessly evokes the tone and the atmosphere that pervade the entire remainder of the text in question.

When David's strange benefactor, Andreas Corelli, offers the sick and struggling writer an escape from his woes that seems heaven-sent, the reader soon understands exactly what an insidious deal with the devil has been struck. It takes our protagonist rather longer to see the light, but in The Angel's Game the journey toward that belated revelation is of no less significance than the destination - and it's a great trip. As soon as Zafon has set the pieces in motion, the reader can only hold tight as the layers of intrigue and suspense build inexorably towards a destructive climax.

Santa's Sack and the Speculative Scotsman

Is it safe to say it yet?

Is it ever truly safe, one wonders...

But to hell with safety - I'll risk a visit from the dreaded Santa man and his wicked band of elves. Step back, now: I'm going call it.

Christmas is... over!

It must be, surely; for one thing, I'm still alive, not to mention that the other half and I have taken down the festive decorations and resigned all the uneaten stocking treats to the recycling. The halls - we have two - no longer ring out with the same twenty Christmas songs playing on some horrific infinite shuffle.

That's quite enough grinching. It's been a hectic time, but then, it always is, and that's half the fun of it. Every day a new experience, or a familiar one from your youth or your adolescence, experienced anew. For one, I had a great time, and I hope you did too, reader, but I don't doubt we're all glad it's over. At least till next year.

In between all the last minute gift giving and the exhausting rotation of visits to friends and relatives, however, this past Christmas has also been a particularly productive one. After all of a week's worth of thinking, and latterly even a bit of planning, The Speculative Scotsman finally launched.

I've been meaning to chime in with the blogosphere for some time now, and the community surrounding speculative fiction in all its forms is nearly unrivalled across all the highways and byways of the internet, where there's a forum for every last ridiculous thing you can imagine and at least one daft fan to fill its pages. TSS aspires to greater things, of course. It need not be your one-stop shop for every sliver of knowledge and commentary about all your particular interests, but it will be reliable, it will be informative, and it will, I hope, be above all else entertaining.

So. With Christmas officially in the can for another twelve months, now that I've got time to think, I thought - I did - that it might be time to go through a select few of the more thoughtful gifts given to The Speculative Scotsman on the day of the baby Jesus.