The Gargoyle
Ratings17
Average rating4.3
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of timeThe narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide--for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life--and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete--and her time on earth will be finished.Already an international literary sensation, the Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.
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The beginning was a real shocker, but I loved it cause it was gruesome with his burn damage. The idea of past lives was really interesting and the history behind it and the love story wasn't over the top. If you like James Reese you'll like Davidson.
The Gargoyle is not as good as it wants you to think it is. The author's bio boasts that he spent seven years researching and composing this book, and you can tell. Unlike more skilled writers, who are able to take their researched information and thread it subtly through their work so that it is both an integral and imperceptible part of the story, Andrew Davidson seems to want you to see his work. And for a while its kind of fun reading in large chunks about medieval German nuns and Galileo's theories on the physics of Dante's hell, until you realize that that is actually the meat of this book. Things like the story, the characters and the depth of their relationships are all seriously lacking.
Davidson's narrator, while witty at times, is hardly engaging, despite his many tragedies. He's given a background of potentially rich and complex character, but he just feels flat. His romantic interest, Marianne Engel, has many different sides to her personality - dysfunctional artist, doting lover, sheltered nun - but they don't seem to come together to make a cohesive whole (though she's possibly schizophrenic, so maybe that's the point). And this great epic love that they supposedly have? Not feeling it. They've got some chemistry, sure, but there is no sign as to how they are the long-awaited answer to each other's deep rooted questions. Over and over, this book tries to tell you that it is bigger than it is, that it's an epic for the ages, but it feels more like an amateurish attempt. The narrator's descent through Dante's hell should've been a rich, profound part of the story, instead it felt tedious and boring. The themes of penance and redemption were lost on me because I just didn't see why these characters needed redemption anyway.
That said, this is not a terrible book. I enjoyed reading it, the prose for much of first part of the book, where the narrator was at his most angst-ridden, was really original and beautiful, and I was entertained mostly until the last hundred pages or so. But its not a groundbreaking debut, nor an “Inferno of our time” as the description on the book jacket claims. Its beach reading, possibly the beginning of a great career even. But not anything special.
I got mixed feelings after finishing this. Some parts were pretty good and some kind of boring. I really liked all the descriptions about the burns. I almost could feel the pain. I also really liked the protagonists journey through Hell near the end. But I guess those ideas were copied right out of “The Divine Comedy”, so I don't want to give Davidson the full credit here.
