THE LABYRINTH OF THE SPIRITS

 

THE LABYRINTH OF THE SPIRITS

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

ORIGINALLY IN SPANISH IN 2016

IN UK BY WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON IN 2018

Pp 805                        ₹ 699

THE DETECTIVE & THE LABYRINTH OF HUMAN RELATIONS

STANLEY COUTINHO

 

Starting with advertising in Spain and screen-writing in Los Angeles, Carlos Ruiz Zafón published his first novel in 1991. Then, between 2001 and 2016 he embarked upon a stupendous quartet called “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” – the last novel of which is the book under review. The title has been “taken” from the work of one of the book’s characters, Victor Mataix; then another character, Daniel Sempere, takes to recording the ups-and-downs of his family during and after the civil war, in four volumes, giving the entire exercise an autobiographical air. The narrative moves from Zafón’s pen to that of the characters, and back and forth, challenging the reader keep track as he rides through the rubble of war-torn Barcelona, the corruption of post-war leaders, the love-lorn tales of writers, and solid, soul-bruising detective work. It’s a gripping tale of mind-boggling intrigue and criminal subterfuge, of passion and wanton cruelty. The slick, noir-style dialogue keeps up the steady pace as events unfold, and relationships wax and wane. An almost casual reference to Maigret (Georges Simenon) and Marlowe (Raymond Chandler) conjures up images of the detective genre at its peak … but Zafón takes the art further; far from being a mere whodunit, “The Labyrinth” transcends linear investigative strategy to the analysis of over 25 characters interacting over large time-spans, leading each other and so many others, into a mire of secret horrors – all drawn to and from an old musty Library and the Sempere & Sons bookshop.

 

“The Labyrinth” follows the characters and their idiosyncrasies from the earlier novels of the quartet: The Shadow of the Wind (2001), The Angel’s Game (2008), The Prisoner of Heaven (2011), but even as a standalone, it enjoys a labyrinthine, sinuous, tentacular grip on the reader.

 

The action starts when Barcelona is being carpet-bombed (a term that grew out of the Spanish civil war itself) and 7-year-old Alicia Gris is almost killed; around twenty years later, we see her as a secret service investigator, carrying the drug-allayed pains of the war along with a heart that could not find solace in human emotions; she is known variously as a vampire, an elegant woman, the devil, and a detective who looks at events from peculiar angles. On her last strand of tolerance of the dark world she deals in, she has decided to quit … but takes up one last case on the request of her chief. What follows is an incredibly gory hunt for a missing minister of Francoist Spain and for the author of a mysterious series of (ghost-written?) novels, leading on to the discovery of deadly conspiracies executed and aborted, of wrangled snags of Mephistophelean deception, of deaths and … a yearning for death.

 

But above all, it’s an account of the spirit of human interaction, the labyrinths that exist – and the labyrinths we create for ourselves (whether through our own deceptions or by misconstruing the behaviour of the others) – in sustaining those relationships or, more likely, shattering them.