The problem with being utterly lazy is that things don’t get done when they’re supposed to get done.  Take tonight, for instance.  At this moment I am supposed to be putting the finishing touches on a psychology assignment that was due today, and flicking through the final pages of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s excellent new novel The Angel’s Game.  Instead I’m on my second glass of red wine, the assignment has barely been started and I’ve read exactly thirteen pages of Zafón’s 450-page opus.  But what a thirteen pages! 

The action opens in 1917.  A young assistant at a Barcelona newspaper is finally given his big break when a planned article falls through, and one of his original crime fiction pieces is substituted.  These become a regular feature and prove immensely popular with the paper’s readership, earning him a sense of satisfaction but the undying enmity of the rest of the paper’s older, jaded staff members.   

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  It’s not that I’m not enjoying it; on the contrary Zafón has an impressive command of the written word, the characterisation is excellent and Lucia Graves’ translation first class.  It’s that I’ve got lots of other things to do.  I’ve just received a review copy of Churchhill’s German Army that isn’t going to watch itself.  I’ll probably be drunk soon.  Plus I’m lazy.  Very, very lazy. 

So let’s see what some other reviewers, who presumably have read the book in its entirety, had to say.  ‘A love letter to literature’ declared Who Weekly.  ‘A story so expansive that to describe it as an epic doesn’t quite do it justice’ crowed someone from the Adelaide Advertiser.  People from slightly higher-end publications have been equally as kind.  ‘Fucking dynamite’ cried the New York Times.  They didn’t really.  I’m paraphrasing.  What they wrote was ‘Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges,’ which when you think about it is kind of the same thing. 

In short, if the three percent of the novel I’ve read so far is anything to go on, The Angel’s Game, despite its title, promises to be a corker and you should probably read it without further ado.   It certainly has hints of Marquez, without being a boring overrated piece of shit like Love in the Time of Cholera, and is possessed of an endearing, subtle humour that instantly resonates.  The first paragraph, for example, is fucking hilarious.   

But don’t take my word for it.  Here it is in its entirety:  ‘A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story.  He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that will surely outlive him.  A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.’ 

See?  Dynamite.