posted on 07 Oct 2025

Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Readers who are dedicated fans of Calos Ruiz Zafon’s magnificent creation, The Shadow of the Wind and it’s associated cycle of novels, are inevitably hungry for more – but, of course, this is now an impossibility given the author’s untimely early death. As a result, there will always be a market for whatever else Zafon wrote and in those circumstances, publishers are never slow to rummage around and cash in on whatever they can find. So, we have Marina, a novel that pre-dates The Shadow of the Wind but wasn’t translated for UK readers until 2013, more than a decade after that smash hit.

The plot is a feast of Gothic detail and atmospheric plotting that has echoes of what we would find in a more focussed way once The Shadow of the Wind had distilled and settled in the authors imagination a few years later. I was wondering how much plot exposition I might give you and found myself getting lost in the mist, so I thought I’d fall back on the book’s own blurb which will give you enough without spoiling your reading pleasure:

“In May 1980, 15-year-old Óscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts . . .

His story begins in the heart of old Barcelona, when he meets Marina and her father German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Óscar to a cemetery and at 10 am, a coach pulled by horses appears. From it descends a woman dressed in black, her face shrouded, wearing gloves, holding a single rose. She walks over to a gravestone that bears no name, only the mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.

When Óscar and Marina decide to follow her they begin a journey that will take them to the heights of a forgotten, post-war Barcelona, a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.”

Interestingly enough, the book cover carries a sub-heading – ‘A Gothic Tale For All Ages’ – which I think reflects some ambiguity in the minds of the publishers over who the target audience should be for this. I’ve seen it referred to on a number of websites as a ‘young adult’ novel but I think that’s simply a reflection of the fact that the central narrator is a 15 year-old and that, rather lazily, has been presumed to define its supposed target audience. I think though this is as much an adult novel as The Shadow of the Wind but not nearly as accomplished.

The shock/horror element of the plot is ladled-on in rather indigestible slabs and Zefon relies rather too much on one of his favourite tricks – progressing or explaining the plot by exposition with relatively marginal or minor characters given several pages of narrative that spell out for the reader great chunks of plotline. This technique acts to fill-in gaps that would otherwise leave us - and the central characters – scratching their heads in puzzlement.

Just a few years after writing Marina, Zafon is back with Shadow of the Wind and although the melodrama, the Gothic horror and the occasional exposition of plot are still all there, he’s clearly learned how to control and use them without becoming as intrusive as they are in this earlier novel.

But I don’t want to pour too much cold water on this – it’s a gripping romp of a read; it’s just not yet by an author who has learned his craft to quite the level he goes onto just a few years later. I have to say that any fan of Gothic adventure and a romping read will find themselves scooted along by this and it’s definitely a book best read at pace.

Copies are easily available for £10 or less and it’s worth that just to see an author using and trying out his writing skills to find his true voice.

 

Terry Potter

October 2025