Carlos Ruiz Zafón / The Shadow of the Wind / Under the dictator

Under the dictator

Michael Kerrigan is intrigued by Carlos Ruiz Zafón's intricate novel of 1940s Barcelona, The Shadow of the Wind

Michael Kerrigan

Saturday 26 June 2004

The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves
416pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99

In an age of unrelenting austerity, any touch of luxury can stir the soul; a brandname has a poetry all its own. And when a society is, like Franco's Spain, imprisoned in stultifying economic and imaginative autarchy, any hint of imported glamour represents an escape. Hence the care invested by a character in The Shadow of the Wind in his choice of taxi for a trip across town: "He wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least."

The 1940s Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's new novel is by no means the trendy tourist destination of today; rather, it's a city shut down for the duration in death and fear. Its buildings pockmarked by gunfire or abandoned by bankrupt dynasties, it is a place in material and metaphorical ruins. Survivors of civil war, its people hang on grimly, with no apparent expectation of better times. Stalked by secret police, with only a kitsch and collaborationist Catholicism for spiritual comfort, they lead lives of unrelieved monotony and hardship. Yet such people will snatch at scraps - and, as Zafón shows, find real sustenance in a city streetscape whose every corner tells a story. Many of its secrets may be sinister, but we have a sense too of a realm of mystery the regime can't reach, a place in which a taxi ride can become a romantic quest.