Imprisoned between the covers

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Mystery Novel, Spanish

There are worse prisons than words. That's a short line from one of the characters in this often disturbing and highly crafted novel, translated from the original Spanish. It is a book which imprisons between its own covers.

It isn't an easy read. The Shadow of the Wind is a book that I didn't grow into quickly. But even in the initial short bursts of time I gave it, the characters began to insinuate their way into my soul. Though I sometimes felt I'd not want to finish it, they and their stories eventually became compulsive.

Spanish is a wordy language, and though Lucia Graves' translation turned it into quite natural English, the flowery idioms and long conversations require concentration. Give it that, and the time required, and the author rewards the effort.

Set initially in the turbulence of Spain in the early fifties, Zafon uses flashback techniques to open up the mystery of a group of people connected by a book found in a Barcelona old book depositary. This book is the last in a series by a forgotten and failed author, and possession of it brings the story's narrator through danger, terror, and anguish, to love.

It is a Gothic tale in style, and the characters include a vindictive and savage policeman, a variety of oddball but very human people in the world of publishing and bookselling in Paris and Barcelona, where the tale is set, as well as several women who mostly seem doomed to tragedy and who generally drag the men with whom they connect into tragedies of their own.

Zafon's technique is like one of those pictures which feature a mirror that continues a series of reflections of the same scene until they are too small to see. Except that the mirrors each distort slightly, so the reflections are not exact. There's a taste of eternity here, and a sense of hopelessness repeating itself through several generations condemned to make similar mistakes as did their forefathers.

The nearest English author I can get to Zafon is Robert Goddard, whose wonderfully crafted stories will always find their way onto my shelf of books waiting to be read. The Shadow of the Wind was recommended to me by Julie O'Donoghue in Kilcullen Library, and in turn I commend it on to those of you who like something meaty and totally devoid of beach-book saccharine.

Be warned, though. You will be imprisoned by the words until the final release, without any remission of sentence.

Brian Byrne.