Welcome To the Cedar Grove

That night I went up to the study in the tower and sat at my typewriter, even though I knew my brain was a blank. The windows were wide open, but Barcelona no longer wanted to tell me anything; I was unable to finish a single page. Anything I did manage to conjure up seemed banal and empty. It was enough to reread my words to understand that they were barely worth the ink with which they'd been typed. I was no longer able to hear the music that issue from a decent piece of prose. Bit by bit, like slow, pleasant poison, the words of Andreas Corelli began to drip into my thoughts. The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Where do I start? When I opened the book and discovered that it was a translation, I instantly started to get a little bit nervous. I've not read many books that have been rendered in English from another language, but those I have read... well lets just say they lost a little something in translation. I was extremely happy to discover this was not the case with Zafon's novel. From start to finish, this book had me hooked, intrigued as to just what is going to happen next; and the direct the author is going to take the novel.

I don't want to give too much away about the plot by giving a detailed summary, so let's just say that the novel follows the events in the life of a struggling author who, when he's perhaps at his lowest ebb, receives an interesting and life changing offer. However... you remember that story about the little sparrow that ends up burried in a pile of sh*t? This takes that cautionary tale perhaps one step further.

The journey of the book takes you down avenues of cringing obviousness, where you find yourself shouting at the 'hero' of the story for his stupidity and/or carelessness. There are less obvious moments in the story which leave you wondering how the hell you had missed the signs that led to the particular event that surprised you, and there are a whole range of other moments and emotions in between. It was simply one of those books I didn't want to end even as I was reluctant to put it down.

It's a very dark novel, full of seedy hopelessness in places, but there are lighter, more uplifting moments, but even these manage to maintain a gritty realism that does not shy away from the overall tone of the novel. One thing I will perhaps say is that at times I found myself wishing that Zafron would pick a genre and stick with it. This particular novel seems to mix and switch genres so often it leaves you a little off balance... but then again, maybe that was his intention all along.

"Even an artificial language is real. Star Trek Fans insisted that the Klingon language be made real. Tolkien invented languages for his characters, human and non-human. Peiple are always creating languages. It's one of the things we do that sets us apart from every other creature on the planet" Prof. Lourds, The Lucifer Code by Charles Brokaw

The book is a very easy read in a kind of "Indianna Jones meets the Davinci Code" kind of way. However, an easy read doesn't mean it is a well written piece. I found myself getting wound up by redundancies in the text that should have been picked up by the editor, much less never written in the first place, for example, "dead corpse."

The other problem with the book was that it couldn't decide what genre and/or approach it was going to take. Was it to be an action/adventure novel... a mystery...? Or, with the 'twist' at the end, a little 'fantasy/horror' thrown in for good measure.

If you can see past that, and want to read a tale where everything happens, one thing after another, (you could argue that this gives the novel pace), then you'll probably enjoy this book. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, just that I could see there was a lot wrong with it, from a writer's point of view.

"Please don't banish me from the sight of you. You can't understand, because of all you have heard of us, all of the half-truths and the myths, which have nothing to do with what we really are. Nothing." Lazodeus from Fallen Angel by Kim Wilkins

I suppose one of the book's saving graces is that it is such a quick read, although toward the end I will confess that I was skimming rather than reading closely. The book is really a story within a story in which a reporter who is trying to debunk a Ritual Magic group ends up falling foul of an ancient curse whereby someone must find a willing listener to hear his or her story. The reporter becomes that willing victim, and recounts the story she has been told by the wanderer as the main part of the book. So the story within the story tells of the three daughters of John Milton (yes /the/ John Milton, poet, author of Paradise Lost), and their dealings with their guardian angel Lazodeus.

We bought the book at a time when we were still busy reading everything we could get our hands on about angels and angel myths, angel stories mostly for the Irin. It seemed a promising story at first, presenting the fallen angels as we see them, as our Irin guides see themselves... the quote above, and a whole section describing the war in heaven and the fall of the once archangel Lucifer lead you to believe in a balanced presentation, but then Ms Wilkins blows it all and has said former archangel and his cohorts behave exactly as the present day expectation of fallen angels/demons/devils... call them what you will. A great dissapointment in that regard.

The writing is neither good, nor bad - it just /is/... though there are many times I would have liked to have been 'shown' more than 'told'. There are also certain scenes that could have been writen in a differnt way which would have been more appealing to /me/, but I'm sure there are people out there that do not object to the use of four letter words in decribing romantic/erotic moments of a story. I guess overall it was just not poetic enough for me.