The second book in the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ series by Zafón is mainly set in 1929 in Barcelona just a few of weeks after the World Fair had been held there and several of the passages refer to the fair, with the cable car up to the top of Montjuic hill, which was built to get people to the events, being featured several times including in the final fight between David Martin and Inspector Victor Grandes. I really enjoyed ‘The Shadow of the Wind‘, Zafón’s first novel and so was greatly looking forward to reading this but sadly I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book, I felt that the plot was more than a bit muddled, especially at the end where a new twist appears to happen every other page, although having said that I still got through the five hundred pages quite quickly, so if I hadn’t read ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ and knew what Zafón was capable of I may well have enjoyed it more. There is an enormous body count in the book as well, very few significant characters make it to the end and a lot of the deaths are quite gruesome which also wasn’t particularly to my taste. I now have a dilemma, do I give up here with Zafón or try his third book ‘The Prisoner of Heaven’ and hope that his undoubted literary skill shown in his first book hadn’t been abandoned after that?

The book is difficult to summarise because by the end you’re not sure that even Zafón knows what is going on. With all the twists and turns and contradictions throughout the story you are left with the abiding thought that despite the tale being told mainly in the first person by David Martin he may well be an ‘unreliable narrator‘. Early on we are told that he has an inoperable brain tumour which will kill him in a matter of months but mysteriously this is ‘cured’ and he goes on to have a series of bizarre experiences and encounters with a strange character who may or may not exist; but whom nevertheless apparently commissions him to create a religion and write the book of that belief system. But it is highly possible that the whole thing is a manifestation of the delirium caused by his medical condition and the final epilogue reads more as a hallucination rather than a satisfactory culmination of the strange gothic horror plot so who knows.

Over all reading this book was an unsatisfactory experience, which was sad after the genius of the first novel but it was good to revisit the booksellers Sempere & Son and The Cemetery of Forgotten Books even if we don’t spend much time there. The various aspects of Barcelona were also interesting, that Park Güell, which I visited with friends back in 2020 was intended to be a luxury housing estate which failed financially and was turned into the Gaudi inspired park it has become, but at the time this book was set was a largely abandoned and a dangerous place to be at night. Several other places I recognised from travelling around the city with Anna which made the often ridiculous plot seem more believable as at least it was grounded in reality somewhere.