The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

There are occasions when I finish a book with my mind and soul saturated, often so overwhelmed that I am simply unable to talk about it. That is rare for me, as I’m always able to articulate at least a few thoughts once I’ve put a book down. Some recent examples of books that have rendered me speechless would probably include John Irving – especially his A Prayer for Owen Meany; Anthony Doerr’s All the light We Cannot See; Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; and William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace, among others.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon had me similarly dumbfounded. I read the first book in the series – The Shadow of the Wind (arguably one of the best books I’ve ever read) years ago in 2004 when it was first published. The next book in the series was Angel’s Game, but I found it to be something of a let-down after the magic of The Shadow in the Wind.

And it wasn’t until the enforced isolation of Covid-19 caused me to rummage around the back of the bookshelf where I stumbled upon Zafon once more and found the last two works in this series; ironically, just weeks before his death – and what a loss to the literary world it was.

I dived back in and was set right back in the dark underbelly of the wounded Barcelona in The Prisoner of Heaven, book number three in the series. Yet, in the end it was the 800-plus pages of The Labyrinth of the Spirits that left me in such awe that I needed a few days to get back to myself. It is a work of such deft craft and complex storytelling that even trying to place it in a single genre is almost impossible. Is it a novel, a historical expose of Barcelona under Franko’s fascist regime, mystery, crime, suspense, supernatural, adventure, drama? Or is all of the above and then some?

When I think about the novel I visualise a staircase that spirals through a multi-storey building filled with shelf upon shelf packed to the brim with books. The book, in much the same way, presents a labyrinth of story paths with layer upon layer of intrigue, twisting, converging and turning at every corner to keep the reader guessing, never knowing who will live and who will die in their relentless pursuit of the truth.

Alicia Gris is a ‘damaged’ survivor of the war and a well-trained and ruthless spy and agent. She is the one who will lead Daniel Sempere, the young boy from The Shadow of the Wind, who now runs the Sempere & Sons bookshop, to find out what happened to his mother and to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her death. That is to name just one of the many plots and subplots based on conspiracies more sinister than one could ever imagine and, in many ways, on true stories typical of a hellish regime.

The richness of the storylines, the incredible tension the writer manages to maintain so artfully throughout the narrative, the colourful and eccentric characters, the vivid backdrop, and the brave exposure of the ruthlessness and cruelty of a regime that kept Spain in a grip of fear for more than 20 years after the end of World War II, are all woven together to make up the genius that is The Labyrinth of the Spirits. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.