Jan 15 2009
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson - a review
The main character and narrator of The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson is everything that I would expect a contemporary narrator to be - he’s cynical and extremely smart. In his pre-accident days, he was a porn star and was beautiful - he made a lot of money doing that. When we first meet him, he is driving a car very quickly down a dark, windy road, drunk, high and doing shots of whiskey as he’s going along. He becomes distracted by what looks like a storm of arrows and crashes the car. The car rolls and spins down into a ravine and bursts into flame, burning the majority of the narrator’s body.
He is rescued and hospitalized. As he recovers, slowly but surely, he meets Marianne Engthal - a beautiful, sexy, talented sculptress that is also a patient at the same hospital, and who insists that the were lovers in medieval Germany. During Marianne’s telling of their love story during medieval times, he was badly burned during a skirmish in which his mercenary troop fought with another band of mercenaries and she, as a nun, was made responsible for his care. As he recovers in the hospital, and later in her beautiful home, he gains stregnth from the love stories that she tells him.
I loved this book - it was such a masterful first piece - I couldn’t put it down. Andrew Davidson creates a character that is utterly self-interested, makes no excuses for being self interested and then being only interested in Marianne. I actually didn’t mind the cynicism and selfishness - unlike Holden Caulfield, to some, in The Catcher in the Rye, this character doesn’t whine or bemoan his fate. However, he grows during the course of the novel in such amazing ways. You can see his soul reawaken and begin to flourish as the novel goes on and his recovery progresses.
The story itself is also touching - it’s a love story between Marianne and the narrator that goes back centuries but also between the other characters that Marianne introduces us to. Such a wonderful novel…go out and get it now.
Book 4/100
