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A review by mediaevalmuse
The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
3.0
I adored Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind and Marina, but this book fell kind of flat for me. To be fair, Prince of Mist is Zafon’s first book, and he has grown and improved as an author since this book’s publication in 1993, but still. I didn’t quite love this one as much as his other work. The passive characters, lack of atmosphere, and absence of a strong, central theme made me feel like I was reading a book without real substance, though there were enough interesting images and creepy moments for me to give this book 3 stars.
Writing: Zafon’s prose is usually incredibly atmospheric, and though I got some of that out of this book, overall, Prince of Mist seemed to be lacking. I really wanted Zafon to lean more into the unsettling environment of the seaside town - perhaps by making it feel uncanny, or by making things feel deceptively peaceful. I also would have liked Zafon to hang back a little more on the telling and instead showing the reader the significance of certain events.
Plot: The main plot of this novel involves Max and his older sister, Alicia, figuring out what happened to Jacob - the son of the previous owners of their house - who supposedly drowned a number of years earlier. At first, I thought this book was going to be about ghosts or a haunted house, but it’s more about the creepiness of the ocean nearby. This is all well and good - the ocean can be terrifying. However, I ultimately felt like I was waiting for random spooky things to happen, rather than characters gradually solving a mystery and creepy things happening along the way. Supernatural events seemed to have no real connection to each other - they happened to mainly insert a spooky scene here and there, without really pointing to a reason why the spooky thing is happening here and now. For example, there’s a scene when Max visits a graveyard, and spooky things happen, but we’re not really told why. Does the Prince of Mist want to prevent Max from learning a secret buried in the graveyard? We never find out.
Also, I felt like a lot of backstory and rationale for the spooky things is dumped on us through one character’s extended monologues, rather than revealed over time by characters uncovering secrets and piecing together a story. This made the characters seem somewhat passive - Max and Alicia mostly had to wait for information to be revealed to them, rather than drawing their own conclusions. I would have rather seen Max put together the story himself, perhaps by watching all of the mysterious home films he found, perhaps by checking out the graveyard in more detail. Something more than just depending on the lighthouse keeper to tell him what everything means.
Characters: Max, our primary protagonist, is a likeable 13 year old boy, but ultimately doesn’t have much development. He seems smart, but doesn’t actually piece together much himself; instead he relies on other characters to tell him what to make of certain information. I did like that he was brave and did things even when he admitted to being scared. That much was admirable, and I wish Zafon had made that part of his character development.
Alicia, Max’s sister, is also around a lot but mainly exists to be a damsel in distress towards the end of the book. She does much less than her brother, and I felt like she and Max could have been combined into one character for a stronger story.
Roland, the boy that the siblings meet by the sea, is also fairly likeable in that he’s adventurous and friendly, but again, he doesn’t really develop much. I think I would have liked to see him be more self-centered and egotistical so that his act towards the end of the book would have been more impactful.
Max and Alicia’s family - their parents and younger sister, Irina - seem to exist just to be absent, and by that I mean Zafon had to give a plausible reason for why the parents aren’t around while all the spooky shenanigans are happening, so he wrote the rest of the family in only to have them spend most of the book at the hospital. While I think the rest of the Carver family is charming, I think their absence was too painfully obvious.
Rolan’s grandfather, Victor Kray the lighthouse keeper, was also likeable but existed mainly for infodumps. His backstory is sad, and I think the way he tells it is moving, but he didn’t have much of a role other than to dole out information.
The Prince of Mist was perhaps the most disappointing character in that he didn’t have nearly as complex a motivation as some of the antagonists in Zafon’s other works. Because the Prince of Mist isn’t seen directly for most of the book, he feels like a boogeyman more than an actual threat (even though we learn that he does have the ability to harm people). I would have liked Zafon’s story to hammer home a central message or theme that the Prince of Mist embodies: in Marina, the theme was about extending life beyond its natural boundaries, and the antagonist showed how that could be a bad thing. If the Prince of Mist was something like a stand-in for greed or some other concept, then the other characters and their arcs could have lined up with that and we would have gotten a more compelling narrative.
TL;DR: Prince of Mist is a spooky but disappointing novel that fails to stick with readers due to its passive characters and lack of strong theme. While it had enough creepy imagery to keep readers entertained, it’s ultimately one of the weaker examples of Zafon’s writing.
Writing: Zafon’s prose is usually incredibly atmospheric, and though I got some of that out of this book, overall, Prince of Mist seemed to be lacking. I really wanted Zafon to lean more into the unsettling environment of the seaside town - perhaps by making it feel uncanny, or by making things feel deceptively peaceful. I also would have liked Zafon to hang back a little more on the telling and instead showing the reader the significance of certain events.
Plot: The main plot of this novel involves Max and his older sister, Alicia, figuring out what happened to Jacob - the son of the previous owners of their house - who supposedly drowned a number of years earlier. At first, I thought this book was going to be about ghosts or a haunted house, but it’s more about the creepiness of the ocean nearby. This is all well and good - the ocean can be terrifying. However, I ultimately felt like I was waiting for random spooky things to happen, rather than characters gradually solving a mystery and creepy things happening along the way. Supernatural events seemed to have no real connection to each other - they happened to mainly insert a spooky scene here and there, without really pointing to a reason why the spooky thing is happening here and now. For example, there’s a scene when Max visits a graveyard, and spooky things happen, but we’re not really told why. Does the Prince of Mist want to prevent Max from learning a secret buried in the graveyard? We never find out.
Also, I felt like a lot of backstory and rationale for the spooky things is dumped on us through one character’s extended monologues, rather than revealed over time by characters uncovering secrets and piecing together a story. This made the characters seem somewhat passive - Max and Alicia mostly had to wait for information to be revealed to them, rather than drawing their own conclusions. I would have rather seen Max put together the story himself, perhaps by watching all of the mysterious home films he found, perhaps by checking out the graveyard in more detail. Something more than just depending on the lighthouse keeper to tell him what everything means.
Characters: Max, our primary protagonist, is a likeable 13 year old boy, but ultimately doesn’t have much development. He seems smart, but doesn’t actually piece together much himself; instead he relies on other characters to tell him what to make of certain information. I did like that he was brave and did things even when he admitted to being scared. That much was admirable, and I wish Zafon had made that part of his character development.
Alicia, Max’s sister, is also around a lot but mainly exists to be a damsel in distress towards the end of the book. She does much less than her brother, and I felt like she and Max could have been combined into one character for a stronger story.
Roland, the boy that the siblings meet by the sea, is also fairly likeable in that he’s adventurous and friendly, but again, he doesn’t really develop much. I think I would have liked to see him be more self-centered and egotistical so that his act towards the end of the book would have been more impactful.
Max and Alicia’s family - their parents and younger sister, Irina - seem to exist just to be absent, and by that I mean Zafon had to give a plausible reason for why the parents aren’t around while all the spooky shenanigans are happening, so he wrote the rest of the family in only to have them spend most of the book at the hospital. While I think the rest of the Carver family is charming, I think their absence was too painfully obvious.
Rolan’s grandfather, Victor Kray the lighthouse keeper, was also likeable but existed mainly for infodumps. His backstory is sad, and I think the way he tells it is moving, but he didn’t have much of a role other than to dole out information.
The Prince of Mist was perhaps the most disappointing character in that he didn’t have nearly as complex a motivation as some of the antagonists in Zafon’s other works. Because the Prince of Mist isn’t seen directly for most of the book, he feels like a boogeyman more than an actual threat (even though we learn that he does have the ability to harm people). I would have liked Zafon’s story to hammer home a central message or theme that the Prince of Mist embodies: in Marina, the theme was about extending life beyond its natural boundaries, and the antagonist showed how that could be a bad thing. If the Prince of Mist was something like a stand-in for greed or some other concept, then the other characters and their arcs could have lined up with that and we would have gotten a more compelling narrative.
TL;DR: Prince of Mist is a spooky but disappointing novel that fails to stick with readers due to its passive characters and lack of strong theme. While it had enough creepy imagery to keep readers entertained, it’s ultimately one of the weaker examples of Zafon’s writing.