“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

While attempting recently a purge of my overloaded hard disk (isn’t it curious, incidentally, how even those of us on the British side of the Atlantic now spell “disc” with a “k”?), I came across a few notes I had written for the book group (to which I belonged at the time) on The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Since any search of this title on the net yields page after page of gushing encomia, I thought a dissenting view might not go amiss. So, without further comment, here it is.

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In The Shadow of the Wind, we are asked to believe that the fictional Julian Carax was a great writer; indeed, the intended effect of the novel depends upon us accepting this as a fact. But, for all that, I can’t help wondering: What sort of writer was Julian Carax? We are told that many people have found his writings “inspirational”, but we are never told what sort of books he wrote. Nuria Monfort tells us that she had read all his works within two weeks. She – and the author Ruiz Zafón – takes it for granted that this is indicative of the quality of Carax’ writing. To me, it indicates quite the opposite. I cannot think of any writing of substance that one can race through. Any book of quality, any book of substance, needs to be read slowly, and savoured, and thought about. The only books that one may race through are books where there isn’t really much to be absorbed. I have never regarded “un-put-downable” as a recommendation in itself: the best books are those that you need to put down frequently in order to reflect upon what you have read. The fictional Carax would have been writing his novels in the 20s and 30s: those were the decades in which novelists such as Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Bulgakov, Mann, Woolf, etc. were all active. And no, you can’t race through any of their novels.

Of course, one can race through a novel that tells a good story well, with no pretensions of being profound or “inspirational”. One can race through The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Dracula, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Flashman novels, etc., as these are superbly narrated tales. But we are not led to believe that this is the sort of novel Carax wrote: his books inspire his readers. And I can’t get my head around this concept of books that inspire – and hence, one may assume, books of some substance – which may nonetheless be galloped through.

One must beware of sentimentality about books. There is nothing particularly wonderful about a book: the vast majority of books (if my regular bookshop-browsing sessions are anything to go by) are pretty innocuous at best, and usually pretty worthless. When I was a student, the shelves in bookshops used to be overflowing with novels by Harold Robbins, but they don’t even turn up in charity shops any more: if Harold Robbins is remembered at all, it is because there’s a gag in an episode of  Fawlty Towers about Sybil reading one of his novels. Presumably, all those millions of copies of his books that had once been available have now been pulped. And not only is the world not poorer for this, it is arguably much richer. And, similarly, I guess, most of the books I see nowadays on the shelves at Waterstones will eventually be pulped too, with no discernible loss to humankind.

Just imagine all those books that so richly deserve to be pulped (i.e. most books that get published) ending up in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. What a terrible, tawdry place it would be! No doubt, it would contain the odd treasure here and there, but for the most part, the shelves would be groaning with the most unutterable tripe. I can’t really feel very inspired about such a place. And a book picked out more or less at random from such a ghastly place is most likely to be fully deserving of being pulped. Let’s not get sentimental about it.

So, would The Shadow of the Wind end up in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? Who knows. But, despite page upon page of Amazon reviews telling me how inspirational it is (not to mention recommendations on the back cover of my edition from those two giants of literary criticism, Trinny and Susannah, who give us such incisive insights as “The most amazing book ever! Beautifully written!”) I can’t help feeling that in years to come, this book will be keeping those Harold Robbins novels company.

Like Carax’ novels, this book is an easy read. Which is another way of saying that the prose is so bland and the content so lacking in anything that may make me want to linger that I can get through it at a fair lick. True, the writing is not clunky, as it is in, say, The Da Vinci Code. But it isn’t very interesting either. And, every now and then, the blandness is broken by the author inserting a paragraph or two of self-consciously purple prose, perhaps under the mistaken impression that such writing is, somehow, “poetic”. It’s almost as if he had found on page 164 of “How to Write a Novel in Ten Easy Steps” the final instruction: “Now sprinkle in a tablespoonful of imagery.”

Sadly, he seems to have little idea about imagery. The very second sentence gives a foretaste of what is to come:

“It was the summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.”

Hmmm. One wonders how a wreath, which has a very specific solid shape, can be “poured”; one also wonders how the skies can remain “ashen” when the dawn is pouring itself in the form of “liquid copper” – because, after all, copper is not of an ashen colour, is it? This is the writing of an over-enthusiastic sixth former who hasn’t yet learnt his craft.

Throughout, there is imagery that just has not been thought out. A flash of lightening “bleeds” through the cracks of the door: this is clearly not literal, but it doesn’t really make much sense as metaphor either. (At least, I have no idea what it is a metaphor of, and neither, I suspect, does the author.) Later, the streets bleed in the rain: no, I have no idea what that means either. At one point, snow is described as “God’s dandruff” (I kid you not!). At another point, a void “weighs down” upon the soul: just how much weight, one wonders, does a void have? And so on.

Imagery is difficult, and requires skill. But not only has Ruiz Zafón not mastered this skill, he seems blissfully unaware that there exists anything that needs to be mastered.

And when the prose isn’t self-consciously (and, to my mind, incompetently) purple, it is merely bland. Just read any page of George Macdonald Fraser, say, or of Patrick O’Brian to confirm that aiming for a popular market need not necessitate such characterless writing.

Sadly, it was not just the prose I found characterless. I got no sense of place. Merely mentioning the streets and some landmarks, or giving the odd passage of description (which is presumably Step 9 in the novel-writing recipe book: “Mix in a few descriptive passages here and there”), is hardly enough to bring a city to life. From reading this book, at no time could I picture Barcelona. Take, for instance, that old deserted mansion of the Aldayas: given the part it plays in the novel, it should have had about it an air of fear, of menace. I didn’t get that at all. Once again, a few comparisons will make clear what is lacking here: read Bram Stoker’s account of Castle Dracula, or, from more recent times, read Susan Hill’s description of the old house in The Woman in Black: in both these cases (just to pick on the two that occur immediately to mind), the author has conveyed a sense of menace, of evil, lurking in a place. There is nothing like that here.

Or consider the characterisation. There isn’t any. There’s Furmin, who is, I think, supposed to be a colourful character: all I can see is a sort of Catalan version of the Cheeky Cockney, a serial bottom-pincher with a heart of gold who keeps coming up endlessly with woefully unfunny lines. No, I’m sorry – it needs considerably more than that to convey a colourful character (once again, look through any of Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels to see how a really skilful writer does it).

Then, there’s Fumero, who is a sort of Scarpia-like character – the epitome of all that is evil. And we know he is evil because he keeps doing evil things. Very evil things. But at no point does the character itself exude a sense of menace. Once again, compare Count Fosco, or Long John Silver, or Count Dracula, or Milady, or Phyllis Niedlinger: all of these characters exude an air of menace, even when they are not doing anything particularly nasty; all of these characters have a threatening presence. In comparison, Fumero is merely bland and forgettable.

As for the rest, there is barely any characterisation at all. Daniel and Julian both have sex as teenagers in a society in which pre-marital sex was considered unacceptable; that does not mean, of course, it didn’t happen, but it does mean that it did not happen as frequently as it does in more liberal societies, and that the psychological ramifications would, necessarily, have been different. But both Daniel and the young Julian are, effectively, modern Western teenagers, who take pre-marital sex for granted: there is no indication at all that they have grown up in a sexually repressed society. And as for the girls – Penelope and Beatriz – we know absolutely nothing about them beyond the fact that they were gorgeous – it being one of the unwritten rules of any love story that anyone who is less than gorgeous has no business falling in love.

Neither is there any sense of these people living in a totalitarian society. What sort of totalitarian society is it where people openly and loudly criticise the government on a public bus? At the end, Fumero is killed, and that seems to solve all problems. Surely, in a totalitarian society, the problem is not so much that there is a single evil man in a position of power, but that the nature of the power structure itself is evil? But that sort of thing is clearly far too sophisticated a concept in a work as essentially simplistic as this.
So what of the plot itself? Generally, the storyline in itself doesn’t matter too much. What really matters is the skill with which the story is told. Even books such as The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo would have been dull if narrated by a less skilful storyteller than Dumas. But, it hardly goes without saying, Zafón is no Dumas. Much has been made of the multiple plotlines in this novel, but frankly, compared to what one gets in this respect in The Count of Monte Cristo, what we get here is child’s play. There aren’t really multiple plotlines, as such. Whenever a new aspect of the plot is revealed, it is inevitably through a long narration: each time a new character is introduced, it is almost inevitably to allow this new character to tell us some more of the plot. Indeed, there were times I was scrawling in the margin of my copy “Bloody hell! Not another big chunk of exposition!” And yes, that is precisely what we got. And of course, the solution to the “mystery” – such as it is – is explained in a very long piece of narration. This is clumsy storytelling. In a detective story (which is what this essentially is), the detective has to work out the solution of the mystery: here, Daniel is simply told the solution by someone in a very long narrative letter. (The letter-writer, Nuria, seems to have the same prose style as Daniel.)

Spoilers in next paragraph … but they’re so very obvious it doesn’t matter

And it isn’t much of a solution either: I’m not a great reader of mystery stories myself, but it was long obvious even to me that (a) the man in the mask was Julian himself; and  (b) Julian and Penelope were actually brother and sister. Both of these had been telegraphed to the reader.

End of spoiler warning

But even beyond all of this, what I found myself disliking most were the pretensions to profundity. I’m afraid I find phony profundities particularly irritating – all this “Life can be beautiful if you hold on to your dreams” kind of crap. For instance:

“Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate.”

Eh? What the bleeding hell does that mean?

Or, when Miquel bids farewell to Julian at the station:

“Keep your dreams … You never know when you may need them.”

How true. How very true. When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star your dreams come true.

However, even if one were to ignore the cod profundity, Zafón falls well short in his basic narrative skills. I never went along with “just a story” line of criticism: storytelling is a fine art, and one shouldn’t be dismissive about it. This book was badly plotted, badly paced, with no sense of place, and not even the basic characterisation to make the reader interested in what happens. Alexandre Dumas or George Macdonald Fraser it ain’t.

As I was reading it, I took to scrawling my own notes in the margin. Most of them were along the lines of “What the fuck!” (I do usually try to be a bit more articulate than this, but one does sometimes need to give way to the impulse of the moment.) Modesty prevents me from claiming that my scrawled margin notes are the best pieces of writing in my copy, but they are certainly the most sincere and deeply felt.