Before the international runaway success of Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón was an award-winning children's writer in his native Spain. The Prince of Mist, in fact, was Zafón's first published novel, back in 1993, and was followed by three more children's books. At last reaching these shores in English translation, does The Prince of Mist offer tantalising clues of the world-beater to come? Will it thrill the millions of English Shadow of the Wind fans?
To be honest, I have absolutely no idea, being one of the handful of living adults in the UK not to have read Shadow of the Wind. This does, however, mean that I approached The Prince of Mist as the children who are meant to read it will, without baggage or expectation. I can also answer the more important question: does it deliver on its own terms? The answer is a qualified yes.
Thirteen-year-old Max Carver is the son of eccentric watchmaker Maximilian. It's 1943, and to get away from the city during the war, Maximilian unexpectedly buys a seafront house and moves the family there. Which city and which seafront are left rather maddeningly vague, though it does finally seem clear that they are London and somewhere on the Channel.
Max and his two sisters, the elder, Alicia and Irina, the younger, find the new house covered in dust. It turns out that it used to be owned by a Dr Fleischmann and his wife, who moved out when their seven-year-old son Jacob drowned a decade earlier. When the Carvers arrive it is summertime, and Max meets Roland, the teenage grandson of the town's lighthouse-keeper. He teaches Max how to dive out to the wreck of a ship just offshore, which sank in mysterious circumstances. Roland also flirts with Alicia, and they fall in love in a single afternoon, as you do.
But strange things begin to happen. Where did the statues come from in a nearby, mist-shrouded garden? What secrets are hidden in the home movies Max's father finds in the basement, movies that seem to have been filmed by the young Jacob? What really causes the terrible accident that threatens Irina's life? And who is the malevolent Prince of Mist who seems to be calling from beyond the grave?
These mysteries take a bit of unpacking and don't always make as much sense as they could. Almost fatally, Zafón never properly defines The Prince of Mist's powers an omnipotent and all-powerful villain is paradoxically less threatening than one who has to operate within rules and the book's climax, in particular, doesn't bear a lot of scrutiny.
There's also a startlingly old-fashioned approach to the prose. The opening line "Max would never forget that faraway summer when, almost by chance, he discovered magic" is so musty, you want to wipe it with a damp cloth, and the nostalgia is always just on the wrong side of stodgy to ever feel quite timeless. Besides, who would this nostalgia be for? Children aren't necessarily going to care for pastiches of wartime children's literature. They're more likely to wonder if there really were home movie cameras back then portable enough for a seven-year-old to use (I'm guessing probably not).
Once The Prince of Mist gets moving, though, Zafón's real strength shines through: chills. There are some genuinely, deliciously scary sequences that will thrill young readers, particularly if they, like me, have a thing about clowns. And by "thing about", I mean "terrified hatred of". The unevenness here is probably that of a first-time novelist finding his feet, but there are treats enough for an enjoyable read.
Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy is published by Walker.
