The Labyrinth of the Spirits

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the latest (and the last?) in his sprawling Spanish gothic Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. It has been several years since I read the previous three volumes of what I then thought was a trilogy of novels: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game, and The Prisoner of Heaven.

Like the other three installments, Labyrinth is filled with beautiful decay, crumbling palaces, manias for obscure novels, and madness. It is, though, decidedly darker than I recall the others being. Set in the period of Franco's repressive corruption, there is plenty of moral ambiguity and outright horror to go around. There are nested stories within stories, and ultimately, we are thrust backward only to learn that there has been a meta-narrative at work over all four novels. Their plots are all quite complex, and I admit I only vaguely remembered the other three, but that didn't matter a great deal. A reader could certainly start with this one, and then work backward, so that obscure details would be revealed in what would then work as prequels.

This is a book for lovers of books, for those of us who fantasize about moving to Barcelona to work in an old bookshop surrounded by the glories of fallen empires.

Sarah Perry, Melmoth

Last year, I read and very much enjoyed Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, which I found in one of my favorite bookshops. TES is soft and spectral and a bit wistful, even if there is a theoretical monster at its center. In both novels, Perry's writing is both beautiful and a bit precious, evocative and overly self-conscious. This seems a piece with the gothic genre, not known for restraint.

Perry's new novel, Melmoth, is far less gentle, almost a horror tale in that it seeks to build a growing sense of dread such that the reader is looking over their shoulder as they walk down the street. It is based on a gothic ghost story of sorts from 1820, A kind of paranoia takes hold of one character after another as they become convinced (as in The Essex Serpent) that an old fairy tale is true, that Melmoth is watching every transgression, that she is there (something like the satanic narrator of Sympathy for the Devil) to watch the personal and political violences of the world, that she sees the individual failings and the epic, national failings (and Perry suggests that the latter are little more than the accumulation of the former). We roam widely, from Prague to England to Armenia to Manilla, and while the settings change, there are two constants: human failings, and Melmoth's presence, observing every one.