While mystery stories always require an unraveling of the mystery, I frankly don’t feel that Zafon has mastered mystery unraveling.
The necessary backstory is given by a character to Daniel, the narrator and clue-seeker. One lead takes him and his friend, Fermin, to see a Father Fernando, a monk at St. Gabriel’s School where Julian Carax, the author of the novel, went to classes along with a few friends whose names we’ve slowly gotten and whose character have neatly been tied into the story.
However, when we have a priest remembering twenty or more years back (he turns out to have been a classmate and friend of Julian’s) and giving exact conversation where he was not even present, I have a problem with that.
While Zafon has put the priest’s story in italics and does not present it in the first person, it has been started as coming from the priest and ended as such. Since Zafon employs the use of chapters in this novel, I would think that a better structure to present this backstory would simply have been to give it a chapter of its own and leave it to the reader to realize that we are going back in time.
Zafon appears afraid to break out of linear narration and utilizes his characters instead to tell "what happened way back when." The problem is that we are given these jumps back with additional characters and details that read like an obvious "clue" or missing piece to the story. I sort of wish that since all these folks cropping up are within Daniel’s easy traveling distance, he would get them all together at a cookout and solve it right then and there, with steaks, potato salad, and a couple beers.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology