71 pages • 2 hours read
Carlos Ruiz ZafónThe Angel's Game
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 16-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Lux Aeterna”
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Twenty-four hours before his next meeting with Corelli, David still hasn't written a word. After sifting through his pile of notes on the Bible, he sits down at his typewriter and begins "to squeeze my brain to see what would come out" (307).
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
After reading David's 10 pages, Corelli pronounces them "strange, but interesting" (308). He is particularly intrigued by David's decision to use a warrior messiah rather than a peaceful one. David replies that the decision is rooted in human biology. After the meeting, David says in narration, "I was sure that I'd told him exactly what he wanted to hear. […] I told myself that anything that bought me time in which to discover what I had got myself into was worth a try" (312).
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary
David begins to investigate all the strange circumstances surrounding his situation, starting with Diego Marlasca and the tower house. At the Land Registry, he learns through a lawyer named Soponcio Valera that Marlasca's surviving family members sold the house after his death. Soponcio died in 1919, but his son Sebastian Valera is alive and practicing law.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary
Before tracking down Valera, David has lunch with Sempere. Sempere wants David to find a wife for his son, a handsome young man David's age who has little interest in women.
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary
After a 45-minute wait, Valera meets with David and answers a number of his questions. Marlasca, he says, was his father's business partner and closest friend. Shortly before he died, Marlasca quit the law practice to become a writer. He befriended Irene, causing Marlasca's wife Alicia to believe Irene and her husband had an affair, and so she left him. Marlasca moved into the tower house, went mad, and drowned a year later.
On the way out, David tricks Valera's secretary, Margarita, into giving him Alicia's address.
Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary
At the tower house, Isabella wears one of Irene's dresses in an attempt to look older and more sophisticated for David. They argue, and Isabella—though unaware of the details of the arrangement—asks David to stop working for Corelli because the project obviously scares him.
Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary
The new, more amicable routine with Isabella inspires David:
The text flowed, brilliant, electric. [...] The narrative prepared the way of the arrival of a warrior savior who would liberate the nation of all pain and injustice in order to give it back the pride and glory that had been snatched away by its enemies, foes who had conspired since time immemorial against the people, whoever that people might be (338).
David also concocts a plan that will both save Sempere's struggling business and hopefully hook up Isabella with his son. He directs Isabella to beg Sempere for a job. Because Sempere would never willingly accept David's charity, Isabella will put extra money in the till when he's not looking.
Part 2, Chapter 23 Summary
David takes a day off writing to continue his investigation, traveling to Sarria to track down Alicia, Marlasca's widow. When she asks why he wants to know what happened to Marlasca, he replies, "Because I think the same thing may be happening to me" (351).
Part 2, Chapter 24 Summary
According to Alicia, Marlasca met Irene through Damián Roures, who regularly conducted seances in partnership with Irene and her boyfriend, Jaco. Although Marlasca had always had an interest in seances, he became very serious about them after the death of his and Alicia's young son, Ismael, who died in the backyard pool.
Shortly after they separated, Marlasca got a lucrative writing commission from a Parisian publisher. He believed if he wrote the book, Ismael would be brought back to life. Meanwhile, Irene and Jaco continued to bleed Marlasca's commission dry with Roures's fake seances.
Months later, in 1904, Marlasca was found dead. The police deemed the death an accidental drowning, but Alicia believes he was murdered by Irene and Jaco, the latter of whom disappeared immediately after Marlasca's death. Moreover, almost all of Marlasca's 100,000-franc commission was gone. The only detective who believed Alicia was a young man named Ricardo Salvador, but after being told by his superiors to stop investigating Marlasca's murder, Salvador was kicked off the police force.
Part 2, Chapter 25 Summary
David walks aimlessly until he finds himself at Pedro's estate. He sees Cristina wave to him from her window, but he keeps walking past, noting, "I tried to hate her, but I couldn't find the strength" (359). Back at the tower house, Isabella says she got the job and that Sempere's son stared at her backside all day.
Part 2, Chapter 26 Summary
At a meeting in a cemetery, Corelli tells David, "the work is excellent" (368). He particularly likes how the story is framed from the perspective of an aggrieved person who perceives themselves to be a victim, awaiting the warrior savior: "When we feel like victims," he says, "all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies" (369).
Part 2, Chapter 27 Summary
In search of more information on Marlasca's death, David visits Don Basilio at the new newspaper where he works. Basilio suggests they visit the archive room for more information.
Part 2, Chapter 28 Summary
In the archive, David and Basilio unearth a front-page obituary and a number of shorter stories written in the wake of Marlasca's death. His drowning is repeatedly referred to as accidental, but nowhere does it list how or where Marlasca drowned. With the help of the archivist's police connections, David obtains a current address for Ricardo Salvador.
Part 2, Chapter 29 Summary
Salvador lives in a run-down brothel district where many of David's City of the Damned stories are set. David finds the front door open, but when he enters the apartment, Salvador holds a gun to the back of his head. When David asks about Diego Marlasca, Salvador says, "I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be better to blow your head off right now" (388).
Salvador explains that despite the drowning death, Marlasca was a champion swimmer. Moreover, he was found in a water reservoir that was only 60 centimeters deep at the time of the drowning. According to the suppressed autopsy report, Marlasca had been burned alive and was already dead by the time water filled his lungs. Like Alicia, Salvador believes Jaco killed him with Irene as his accomplice.
When David asks why this was all kept secret, Salvador says the law firm didn't want to sully its reputation with rumors of its former partner associating with murderous occultists. With a few sizeable payoffs, the police were happy to oblige. He says, "With the lawyer dead and buried, it was time to turn the page and put all our efforts into the pursuit of starving anarchists and schoolteachers of suspicious ideology" (395). David asks Salvador for a photograph of Marlasca, and Salvador pulls one out of a box. David asks if he can keep it, and Salvador hesitates, then agrees.
Part 2, Chapters 16-29 Analysis
David's choice to make the savior of his religion a warrior messiah rather than a peaceful messiah is a diabolically inspired one, rooted in both history and biology. While David claims to have done this simply to placate Corelli as he continues his investigation of Marlasca, there is a distinct energy to his speech when he explains his rationale to his boss. The biological component, he argues, is that:
[…] most of the great religions either were born or reached their apogee at a time when the societies that adopted them had a younger and poorer demographic base. Societies in which 70 percent of the population was under the age of 18—half of them males with their veins bursting with violence and the urge to procreate—were perfect breeding grounds for an acceptance and explosion of faith (309).
Aside from the historical and biological reasons for choosing a warrior messiah, the political considerations make the decision especially disturbing. In the previous chapters, David noted that it usually takes a vast administrative bureaucracy to distort a religion's peaceful message into a weapon of war. By adopting a warrior messiah, David can simply cut out the middleman:
I asked myself, why not get straight to the point and establish a mythology around this warrior messiah? A messiah full of blood and anger, who saves his people, his genes, his womenfolk, and his patriarchs from the political and racial dogma of his enemies—that is to say, from anyone who does not subject himself to his doctrine (310).
Again, the zeal with which David approaches Corelli's task—not to mention the virtually incontrovertible evidence that Corelli is Satan—suggests there is a sincerity to David's attempts to create a religion aimed at destroying the world, raising serious questions about the narrator's character and conscience.
Corelli loves the warrior messiah idea. A staple of Greek and Roman mythologies, the warrior deity is rarely found in the most popular monotheistic faiths. While the historical figure of Mohammed led conquering raids throughout Mecca, the Mohammed of Islamic scripture offers a message of peace and love. Corelli does, however, question how women will receive this warrior narrative. David's response is blunt:
The main pillar of organized religion, with few exceptions, is the subjugation, repression, even the annulment of women in the group. Women must accept the role of an ethereal, passive, and maternal presence, never of authority or independence, or she will have to suffer the consequences. She might have a place of honor in the symbolism, but not in the hierarchy. Religion and war are male pursuits. And anyhow, woman sometimes ends up becoming the accomplice in her own subjugation (310).
While a number of theologians would surely view this as a gross over-simplification, one must remember that David is crafting a religion under the direction of Satan himself.
As David's manuscript grows, the rough outline of its plot begins to surface, and another one of the book's major themes emerges:
The narrative prepared the way for the arrival of a warrior savior who would liberate the nation of all pain and injustice in order to give it back the pride and glory that had been snatched away by its enemies, foes who had conspired since time immemorial against people, whoever that people might be. The mechanics of the plot were impeccable and would work equally well for any creed, race, or tribe. Flags, gods, and proclamations were the jokers in a pack that always dealt the same cards (338).
Here, the author explores the concept that the animating factors behind communities that conspire violently against a perceived "other" often have little to do with the specific contours of the ideologies or nations involved. Rather, these leaders and their followers are called to action through more fundamental shared qualities of grievance and in-group pride. It is why ideologies as diverse as European Fascism, Soviet Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Western Populism can all be easily plugged into these universal narratives of grievance, with often violent results. This is a view that's grown more popular of late, particularly with the rise of populist groups in the West. As the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra writes in his book Age of Anger, "Gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishul-wielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and populists elsewhere, than any of them realize" (Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017).
This emphasis on speaking to readers' victim complexes is one that Corelli hits upon hard. He tells David, "When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. […] We stop being aggressors and become defenders" (369). With this quote, Corelli neatly outlines the basis by which large groups of otherwise non-violent people are compelled to participate or become complicit in violence. It also supports the theme that victimhood and grievance are not the result of particular cultural or religious traditions; rather the traditions are merely the match that lights the fuse of social unrest. Under this assumption, the dogma of a given religion or ideology—its principles and practices—is arbitrary compared to the narratives that create the necessary conditions under which fear and victimhood thrive.
Luckily for Corelli, Spain is already in a state of political turmoil: Most people have nothing and feel rightfully aggrieved at the middle and upper classes, while the middle and upper classes fear losing the status and wealth they already possess. In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Spanish elites feared that their country would also undergo a communist revolution that would redistribute wealth and property across both rural and urban areas. As a result, the state took an aggressive posture toward anarchists, communists, and other supposed ideological criminals. Salvador makes reference to this situation when he tells David, "With the lawyer dead and buried, it was time to turn the page and put all our efforts into the pursuit of starving anarchists and schoolteachers of suspicious ideology" (395).
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