The Gargoyle

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.

The story begins with a handsome young man driving whilst under the influences of drugs and alcohol. He suddenly sees a vision of shooting arrows coming towards him, swerves and crashes his car. The car catches fire and he watches himself burning, unable to move from the vehicle.

Surprisingly, he survives and ends up in a burns ward where he gets a visit from a stranger, Marianne Engle: a sculptress who tells him stories of how they met centuries ago. She takes him under her wings, provides financial and medical treatment as well as unconditional love. This is ultimately a story of friendship and love. It has short stories that weaving in and out of the main story line, which was a nice feature. These short stories are about characters who have loved and lost and were heart warming, although sad, to read.

There was plenty of vivid descriptions along the way, which at times was gruesome. The nameless main character I grew to love even though he was portrayed as a vile man before his accident. By the end I truly believed he was a changed man who had made friends through his journey of self-discovery and had understood the true meaning of love. The ending left me wondering whether Marianne had indeed lived the life she had claimed or had been good at researching the past in order to spin her tale.

I absolutely loved this book, it was unique, thought provoking and takes you through a multitude of emotions, from horror to tenderness. I would highly recommend this book.

There is some fantastic prose, at times.
There are some beautifully heartbreaking short story asides.
Parts of the ending are pretty moving as standalone circumstances.

But there really isn't any romance between the main characters, in their past or present...

And I don't even mean physical interactions here, as the main character loves reminding you every other page that he has no penis, because that's all that matters right?



I kept waiting for it. Surely by the time the main character moves in with his mysterious benefactor in the present timeline, she'd have told him this moving, heart-wrenching story of their love right? Nope.

There's literally zero emotional connection. No romantic dialog. No physical interactions from the time they were both fairly whole. No witty, playful banter. Nothing beyond the circumstances of her being a nun and him being a deserter and now we're facing the world as outcasts... yadda yadda yadda.

I'm glad I read this as there were beautiful stories and descriptions in it, but as a “transcends time” sort of love story, it fell flat for me.