The Gargoyle

I've read it twice and it breaks my heart each time.

Great story and great characters. When I finished this book I was bummed! I did not want it to end. Such a great find.

To me a novel is a means to travel in time and space, in thoughts and emotions, allowing us to return to the childhood-like trance brought on by amazing stories. That's what The Gargoyle did for me. I couldn't put it down. The story unfolds completely unpredictably and elicits a maelstrom of emotions. The initial part in which the hero describes his accident had me simultaneously close to tears and bursting with laughter - quite a feat. And then the plot changes directions abruptly with the arrival of Marianne and has us wondering whether she should be dismissed as completely nuts or whether she has inside knowledge of numerous previous lives along with our hero. This was the most enjoyable read of the year for me, something completely fresh and unfamiliar. I cannot recommend it enough!

As ever, the plot is adequately summarized in other reviews, so I will not go in detail here. Instead, I will tell you why you should read this novel. I can understand why many people didn't like this book. I personally loved it, but that is not the point, yet. Many people will not like the details that the author describes about burn recovery and/or will be displeased with the other physical descriptions. One reviewer goes so far as to mention the eponymous character a "male fantaasy". Which is amusing to no end, if you have read this novel. The male lead is not a fantasy for most men. It would simply be awful. It is clear in his description that he loathes his life, even before his accident. One of the refreshing things about the book is that the narrator never asks for forgiveness from the reader. He doesn't ask for understanding. He is unrelentingly self-interested for the beginning of the book and then interested only in Marianne Engel for the remainder. This, to me, was beautiful. It was a description of the healing moment for a soul in agony. The narrator, whose name we never learn, spends the beginning of his life hating himself and those around him. He doesn't feel anything, ever. It's only after he has lost everything that he valued and is stripped of the empty shell of his life that he begins to gain an understanding of beauty and compassion. His growth is charming, including his involvement in the relationship of other characters. The author has done a wonderful job of creating two individuals, tied to one another: The Narrator and Marianne Engel. The remainder of the characters do indeed lack detail, with few exceptions (and the ones that are present are awkward enough to seem a heavy-handed redaction at the behest of an editor - thankfully, they are brief). The point is never that these people are supposed to be detailed. The point is that they are vignettes, stories of a love in another time and in another place. The backstory of Marianne Engel and the Narrator are also beautiful and tragic. Both stories interweave in the fashion of an experienced storyteller. Normally I find the maintenance of stories in two timelines to be quite tedious. The efforts to reintegrate them is always awkward and predictable. In this case, however, Marianne Engel is a constant. And she is not merely telling a story of a different time and place. She is reminding her love who he is. One final comment. The portrayal of the characters in this novel is what gives it its beauty. Some reviewers have mentioned that there is little conflict in the present story (although there is plenty in the vignettes and in the backstory). This is untrue. There is conflict between the Narrator and himself. In reality, there are really only two characters in this tale, and even Marianne Engel is secondary. The character that is of interest has no name - he is our narrator. The detailing of Marianne Engel is quite accurate for a person with a mental disorder (or a p

The narrator in this story is nameless and I'm sorry, that just doesn't work for me. Four pages in and he became Ricardo. Why Ricardo and not Bob, Bill or Al, I don't know know, Ricardo, just seems to work. For me, people need a name, so our pornographer, burn victim, who had everything, then lost it all (and he really loses it all) is Ricardo. And Ricardo, in addition to being a pornographer is a booze drinking, coke loving, hard bodied, handsome son of a gun, till he flames out in a horrific accident. His body is burned, his manhood is toast and he's got a snake living in his spine (gotta read the book to figure that one out). This happens very, very early in the book and then we go into a couple hundred pages of Ricardo's pain and this is going to cause many to trash this tome and look for something more pleasant. One day when I was eleven my grandmother was cooking pea soup the old fashioned way, which was the only way she knew, in a pressure cooker. I loved Gran's pea soup, could hardly wait for it to be finished, so I tried to open the pressure cooker. I got my little girls hands on those two handles and I pulled and pushed with all my child's might and at first I got no joy, then it gave with a horrible sound and I was bathed in pain. Gran says I screamed. I don't remember. Scalded soup covered my arms, neck and chest. Two days I was in the hospital. It was the most painful time of my life, but the burns were all second degree and I recovered completely and buried the incident away in a dark closet in the back part of my mind, but this book opened it right up, ripped the door off the closet, turned the light way up bright. This is horror. Not the scary, what's under the bed kind of horror, but the real deal. This book will scare you, because Mr. Davidson makes you that burn victim. You are in his head, you feel his pain, you suffer with him, you are him. You become Ricardo. I know. The book moves beyond the pain into a different realm and I enjoyed it immensely. This is a love story too. And it's a story of redemption. And more than anything, this is literature. Some writers work their whole lives, putting out a book a year, getting better with each effort, till they've got a body of work that makes the world sit up and take notice. Margaret Mitchell wrote one book and it was enough. If Mr. Davidson never puts his fingers to another keyboard, that's okay, because this book is enough. Reading over this, I can see how one might think I started out being flippant here, and maybe I was, but I really did name the narrator, because it made the story more real for me. At first. And it helped get me through the pain of his burns. However, for most he will always be nameless, that's okay, it's what the author intended in this beautiful, haunting, horrific masterpiece.

Other reviewers manage to give reasonable skeletons of the plot, but one thing with this novel is that basic shape doesn't give a good idea of the flavor. Sure, there are some stereotyped or possibly overplayed elements (but hey, who here is entirely original?!) like the Spunky Asian Girl and the Neurotic Psychiatrist, but what makes them worth your while, and what most reviewers seem to be forgetting, is that they are given to us THROUGH a first person narrator, who is self consciously aware that he is writing a book. (You get a prize if you survived that last sentence). First-person narration is notoriously and wonderfully unreliable--as we read and try and decide if this person really is as unlikeable as he started out, he in turn is trying to decide if Marianne is nuts, or just another woman (out of many) or, maybe, the real deal. It's a risky thing--that apparently didn't pay off for some readers--to introduce the narrator as he was: an arrogant smug, drug-abusing dirtbag. Yuck, I said, after reading the first three pages. This guy deserves what's happening to him and it's gross. I put it down for a week. Then I picked it up again, deciding to give it another chance. On the second try, I got swept into Davidson's use of language--he has some breathtaking similes in this novel, and some beautifully evocative prose, and the story unfolds through a variety of tale-telling that covers a host of emotions. Some of the mini-stories are wonderfully sad, and there are points where the narrator actually made me laugh with his sarcasm. So, people seem pretty split on this novel, and I think I can suggest why: if you like hard-hitting plots with lots of action and tension and a breakneck pace, you will not like this book. If you don't like 'literary' language, or having to figure out what to do with interrupted narratives, you will not like this book. However, if you like beautiful writing, complex narrative structures and a protagonist who is, if not loveable, is surely fascinating, you will love this book. It has a deep sense of literariness to it, and most of his historical research is faultless. Really a wonderful, if kinda-ugly book.

Read this book. Read it. Just shut up and read it, already. Are you reading it? Why not? I told you to read it! "But it's yucky!" you complain. "The narrator gets all burned and gross, and he's mean, and what's up with the crazy lady?" All right, yes, I will grant you, the first few chapters are incredibly difficult to get through, particularly if you have a delicate stomach. The unnamed narrator does, indeed, get in a horrific car crash where he is terribly, almost fatally, burnt. What follows is a stomach-turningly graphic depiction of what goes on in a burn ward. Stephen King would probably turn green at some of these scenes. You will be tempted to set "The Gargoyle" down and walk away. But I'm begging you to come back. Your suffering will be rewarded. This is what Marianne claims, as she enters the narrator's life in the gown of a psychiatric patient at the hospital. She is jealous of his pain, as she believes that it means God has not forgotten him. Marianne is 700 years old, born in the year 1300 and raised in a convent. She is overjoyed when she meets the scarred narrator, as she believes that he is her long-dead lover returned to her. She then must set about convincing him of her story: of how the two fell in love all those years ago and how they were separated, about her divine mission to set her hearts free by carving huge gargoyles out of stone, and about the redemptive powers of love, suffering, and sacrifice. So much happens in this book I don't even know how to start describing it. Marianne takes the narrator in and begins telling him stories. Interspersed with the tale of her own past are four other short love stories, set in eras and locations as varied as feudal Japan, medieval Italy, Victorian England, and Viking Iceland. These stories weave in and out of the main one, forming tentative connections and complementing its themes. Literary classics are alluded to as well, most notably Dante's Inferno. People suffer and die (or not), they sacrifice everything they have for love, they create powerful art and watch it destroyed, they journey to the underworld, and they approach God. And through it all are the two lynchpins of this book, love and pain, forever entwined, each intensifying the other, unwanted and unlooked for but present in every page. This is quite simply one of the most powerful, intense, gripping, and captivating books I have read in a long time. Maybe it's too intense for some readers; I can tell already from the reviews that many are put off by this love story between the disfigured misanthrope and the schizophrenic artist. But if you have the strength to shoulder the burdens Andrew Davidson places on the reader, I promise, your suffering will be rewarded.