The Gargoyle: An Appreciative Review

Every once in a while, a book comes along that makes me remember why I love reading and writing so much. The Gargoyle, by Winnipeg author Andrew Davidson, is just such a book. It has elements of the fantastic, the historic, the real, the hyper-real, and the absurd. It's written with a tone of sardonic weltschmerz that belies the wonder that lurks just beneath the surface.

In short, it's a stunning book, and I'm sincerely glad that it dropped into my life.

The protagonist of the story, whose name is never revealed, is a porn actor and producer who suffers extreme burns in a car accident. The first third of the book takes place in the hospital where his lengthy treatment occurs. It is during this period that he first meets Marianne Engel, a sculptress and former mental patient who tries to convince him that they knew each other in a past life.

Throughout the book, Marianne Engel tells him stories of her life in the Engelthal monastery in 1300s Germany and how she and he eventually met. Entire chapters of the book are in Marianne Engel's voice, like pieces of a novel-within-a-novel. Other chapters are self-contained stories of other people Marianne Engel either knew or knew of, and they are again told in her voice.

This continual pulling of the reader out of the main narrative into a secondary (or even tertiary) storyline should have been jarring, or at least mildly irritating. But it wasn't. Davidson's presentation of the story, his deft agility with language, and his obvious certainty about his tale made me trust that everything was there for a reason and that all would be revealed in time.

I wasn't disappointed.

A brief synopsis and a few glowing comments are hardly enough to convey the complexity and beauty of this story. It is a love story, certainly, and a semi-historical novel, and a fantasy, and a parable, and a commentary on modern life, religion, faith, and skepticism. But it is simultaneously all of those things and none of them. It is a genre all its own, and I can honestly say that I've never read anything remotely like it in all my life.

The supporting characters in The Gargoyle all come to life just as vividly as the two main characters. Everyone from the protagonist's doctor, psychologist, and physical therapist to Marianne Engel's agent to the near-mythical characters in the stories Marianne Engel tells are all fully-formed and breathing on the page.

In the commentary at the end of the book (newly included for the trade paperback edition), author Davidson talks a bit about the research that was required for the proper telling of the story. The fact that he did his homework shows in every page of the novel. The details of the Engelthal monastery, the descriptions of burns and their treatment, and the inclusion of lines written in Japanese, Icelandic, Italian, and German are all testament to the loving care to detail Davidson took with this work.

The Gargoyle has taken its place right alongside The Time Traveler's Wife as a book that I will be heartily recommending to anyone who cares to listen.

Gesundheit (That's German for "Good health", by the way).

(Here's a video from book's website, Burned by Love. The site encourages readers to share their own intense stories. I found this gal's tale quite compelling.)