A Review By David Boulton

A while ago, I read and reviewed, Zafon’s novel The Angel’s Game and I called it an example of ‘Grand Guignol’.  This, the preceeding book, is similarly a piece of Grand Guignol. It has a number of characters recognizable from The Angel’s Game, and like that book, it also features a bookshop and, memorably, the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’, perhaps Zafon’s most vivid creation. The story centres around the young Daniel’s choosing of a book from its shelves. That book is The Shadow of The Wind, by the mysterious Julián Carax.

 Set, once again in Barcelona, that ‘City of Shadows,’ in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, The Shadow of The Wind starts off as the protagonist’s desultory investigation of a literary curiosity, but turns into a race to find the truth about Carax, and a desperate effort to save those he left behind. Full of atmosphere and memorable characters, Stephen King said of it that it is a novel “full of cheesy splendour and creaking trapdoors… where even the subplots have subplots… one gorgeous read.’ An opinion I heartily endorse.

 Shadow is resolutely old-fashioned in its insistence on narrative and dramatic tension, and all the better for it: there is enough magic, murder and insanity to keep any reader involved and turning the pages. It’s a gripping tale with the feel about it of a gothic ghost-story. The Daily Mail averred that it is just the sort of literary mystery that would have appealed to William Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone; and I have to agree. Collins would have lapped it up.

The Rev’d David Boulton is Diocesan Curate for the Southern diocese of the Free Church of England, and also a Preacher for The Leprosy Mission, England & Wales.