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Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle Paperback – August 4, 2009

by Andrew Davidson (Author)

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A New York Times Bestseller

The Gargoyle: the mesmerizing story of one man's descent into personal hell and his quest for salvation.

On a dark road in the middle of the night, a car plunges into a ravine. The driver survives the crash, but his injuries confine him to a hospital burn unit. There the mysterious Marianne Engel, a sculptress of grotesques, enters his life. She insists they were lovers in medieval Germany, when he was a mercenary and she was a scribe in the monastery of Engelthal. As she spins the story of their past lives together, the man's disbelief falters; soon, even the impossible can no longer be dismissed.

Print length

528 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Anchor
Publication date

August 4, 2009
Dimensions

5.18 x 0.92 x 7.97 inches
ISBN-10

0307388670
ISBN-13

978-0307388674
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Spellbinding. . . . A page-turning adventure that will keep you reading well past bedtime.” —The Boston Globe“An undeniably hot book. . . . It's as engrossing as it is gruesome, the kind of horror you watch with one eye closed. . . . A hell of a story.” —The Washington Post"Take a deep breath and plunge into this novel. It's a tale of love and redemption told through Davidson's haunting prose. " —USA Today“A transportingly unhinged debut. . . . Vigorous and impressive.” —The New York Times “Keeps the pages turning.” —The Plain Dealer “Take a deep breath and plunge into this novel. It's a tale of love and redemption told through Davidson's haunting prose.” —USA Today “Mr. Davidson skillfully assembles a centuries-old puzzle involving a series of fables of undying love. . . . The reader is kept guessing until the final pages.” —The Wall Street Journal“Mixes medical drama with medieval religious lore to explore the boundaries of faith and forgiveness. . . . Compelling.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Reads like the mad spawn of Anne Rice and Stephen King.” —Providence Journal “Original and highly addictive. . . . Captivating. . . . An impressive, memorable debut.” —The Denver Post “A story that sweeps us in with no protest. You want to be lost in its pages. . . . The real tragedy of this book is that it ends.” —Daily News“Beguiling. . . . Mixing romance, classic allusion and reality, Davidson's debut is a bravura performance.” —Marie Claire“I was blown away by Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. It reminded me of Life of Pi, with its unanswered (and unanswerable) contradictions. A hypnotic, horrifying, astonishing novel that manages, against all odds, to be redemptive." —Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants“The Gargoyle is purely and simply an amazement, a riot, a blast. It's hard to believe that this is Andrew Davidson's first novel: He barrels out of the chute with the narrative brio and confidence, not to mention the courage, of a seasoned master. This book plucks the reader off the ground and whirls her through the air until she shouts from sheer abandonment and joy. What a great, grand treat.” —Peter Straub

About the Author

ANDREW DAVIDSON was born in Pinawa, Manitoba, and graduated in 1995 from the University of British Columbia with a B.A. in English literature. He has worked as a teacher in Japan, where he has lived on and off, and as a writer of English lessons for Japanese Web sites. The Gargoyle,the product of seven years' worth of research and composition, is his first book. Davidson lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.It was Good Friday and the stars were just starting to dissolve into the dawn. As I drove, I stroked the scar on my chest, by habit. My eyes were heavy and my vision unfocused, not surprising given that I’d spent the night hunched over a mirror snorting away the bars of white powder that kept my face trapped in the glass. I believed I was keening my reflexes. I was wrong.To one side of the curving road was a sharp drop down the mountain’s slope, and on the other was a dark wood. I tried to keep my eyes fixed ahead but I had the overwhelming feeling that something was waiting to ambush me from behind the trees, perhaps a troop of mercenaries. That’s how drug paranoia works, of course. My heart hammered as I gripped the steering wheel more tightly, sweat collecting at the base of my neck.Between my legs I had wedged a bottle of bourbon, which I tried to pull out for another mouthful. I lost my grip on the bottle and it tumbled into my lap, spilling everywhere, before falling to the floorboard. I bent down to grab it before the remaining alcohol leaked out, and when my eyes were lifted I was greeted by the vision, the ridiculous vision, that set everything into motion. I saw a volley of burning arrows swarming out of the woods, directly at my car. Instinct took over and I jerked the steering wheel away from the forest that held my invisible attackers. This was not a good idea, because it threw my car up against the fencepost wires that separated me from the drop. There was the howl of metal on metal, the passenger door scraping against taut cables, and a dozen thuds as I bounced off the wood posts, each bang like electricity through a defibrillator.I overcompensated and spun out into the oncoming lane, just missing a pickup truck. I pulled back too hard on the wheel, which sent me once again towards the guardrail. The cables snapped and flew everywhere at once, like the thrashing tentacles of a harpooned octopus. One cracked the windshield and I remember thinking how glad I was that it hadn’t hit me as the car fell through the arms of the convulsing brute.There was a brief moment of weightlessness: a balancing point between air and earth, dirt and heaven. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. But as often happens in that time between existing in the world and fading into dreams, this moment over the edge ended with the ruthless jerk back to awareness.A car crash seems to take forever, and there is always a moment in which you believe that you can correct the error. Yes, you think, it’s true that I’m plummeting down the side of a mountain in a car that weighs about three thousand pounds. It’s true that it’s a hundred feet to the bottom of the gully. But I’m sure that if only I twist the steering wheel very hard to one side, everything will be okay.Once you’ve spun that steering wheel around and found it doesn’t make any difference, you have this one clear, pure thought: Oh, shit. For a glorious moment, you achieve the empty bliss that Eastern philosophers spend their lives pursuing. But following this transcendence, your mind becomes a supercomputer capable of calculating the gyrations of your car, multiplying that by the speed of the fall over the angle of descent, factoring in Newton’s laws of motion and, in a split second, coming to the panicked conclusion that this is gonna hurt like hell.Your car gathers speed down the embankment, bouncing. Your hypothesis is quickly proven correct: it is, indeed, quite painful. Your brain catalogues the different sensations. There is the flipping end over end, the swirling disorientation, and the shrieks of the car as it practices its unholy yoga. There’s the crush of metal, pressing against your ribs. There’s the smell of the devil’s mischievousness, a pitchfork in your ass and sulfur in your mouth. The Bastard’s there, all right, don’t doubt it.I remember the hot silver flash as the floorboard severed all my toes from my left foot. I remember the steering column sailing over my shoulder. I remember the eruption of glass that seemed to be everywhere around me. When the car finally came to a stop, I hung upside down, seatbelted. I could hear the hiss of various gases escaping the engine and the tires still spinning outside, above, and there was the creak of metal settling as the car stopped rocking, a pathetic turtle on its back.Just as I was beginning my drift into unconsciousness, there was the explosion. Not a movie explosion but a small real-life explosion, like the ignition of an unhappy gas oven that holds a grudge against its owner. A flash of blue flame skittered across the roof of the car, which was at a slanted angle underneath my dangling body. Out of my nose crawled a drop of blood, which jumped expectantly into the happy young flames springing to life beneath me. I could feel my hair catch fire; then I could smell it. My flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown onto the barbecue, and then I could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it. I could not reach my head to extinguish my flaming hair. My arms would not respond to my commands.I imagine, dear reader, that you’ve had some experience with heat. Perhaps you’ve tipped a boiling kettle at the wrong angle and the steam crept up your sleeve; or, in a youthful dare, you held a match between your fingers for as long as you could. Hasn’t everyone, at least once, filled the bathtub with overly hot water and forgot to dip in a toe before committing the whole foot? If you’ve only had these kinds of minor incidents, I want you to imagine something new. Imagine turning on one of the elements of your stove--let’s say it’s the electric kind with black coils on top. Don’t put a pot of water on the element, because the water only absorbs the heat and uses it to boil. Maybe some tiny tendrils of smoke curl up from a previous spill on the burner. A slight violet tinge will appear, nestled there in the black rings, and then the element assumes some reddish-purple tones, like unripe blackberries. It moves towards orange and finally--finally!--an intense glowing red. Kind of beautiful, isn’t it? Now, lower your head so that your eyes are even with the top of the stove and you can peer through the shimmering waves rising up. Think of those old movies where the hero finds himself looking across the desert at an unexpected oasis. I want you to trace the fingertips of your left hand gently across your right palm, noting the way your skin registers even the lightest touch. If someone else were doing it, you might even be turned on. Now, slam that sensitive, responsive hand directly onto that glowing element.And hold it there. Hold it there as the element scorches Dante’s nine rings right into your palm, allowing you to grasp Hell in your hand forever. Let the heat engrave the skin, the muscles, the tendons; let it smolder down to the bone. Wait for the burn to embed itself so far into you that you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to let go of that coil. It won’t be long until the stench of your own burning flesh wafts up, grabbing your nose hairs and refusing to let go, and you smell your body burn.I want you to keep that hand pressed down, for a slow count of sixty. No cheating. One Mis-sis-sip-pi, two Mis-sis-sip-pi, three Mis-sis-sip-pii.i.i.i At sixty Mis-sis-sip-pi, your hand will have melted so that it now surrounds the element, becoming fused with it. Now rip your flesh free.I have another task for you: lean down, turn your head to one side, and slap your cheek on the same element. I’ll let you choose which side of your face. Again sixty Mississippis; no cheating. The convenient thing is that your ear is right there to capture the snap, crackle, and pop of your flesh.Now you might have some idea of what it was like for me to be pinned inside that car, unable to escape the flames, conscious enough to catalogue the experience until I went into shock. There were a few short and merciful moments in which I could hear and smell and think, still documenting everything but feeling nothing. Why does this no longer hurt? I remember closing my eyes and wishing for complete, beautiful blackness. I remember thinking that I should have lived my life as a vegetarian.Then the car shifted once more, tipping over into the creek upon whose edge it had been teetering. Like the turtle had regained its feet and scurried into the nearest water source.This occurrence--the car falling into the creek--saved my life by extinguishing the flames and cooling my newly broiled flesh.***Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.I have no idea whether beginning with my accident was the best decision, as I’ve never written a book before. Truth be told, I started with the crash because I wanted to catch your interest and drag you into the story. You’re still reading, so it seems to have worked.The most difficult thing about writing, I’m discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It’s deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I’m constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point during my thirty-five years of life before that. Why not start with: “I was born in the year 19----, in the city of----”?Then again, why should I even confine the beginning to the time frame of my life? Perhaps I should start in Nurnberg in the early thirteenth century, where a woman with the most unfortunate name of Adelheit Rotter retreated from a life that she thought was sinful to become a Beguine--women who, though not officially associated with the Church, were inspired to live an impoverished life in imitation of Christ. Over time Rotter attracted a legion of followers and, in 1240, they moved to a dairy farm at Engelschalksdorf near Swinach, where a benefactor named Ulrich II von Konigstein allowed them to live provided they did chores. They erected a building in 1243 and, the following year, established it as a monastery with the election of their first prioress.When Ulrich died without a male heir, he bequeathed his entire estate to the Beguines. In return he requested that the monastery provide burial places for his relations and that they pray, in perpetuity, for the Konigstein family. In a show of good sense he directed that the place be named Engelthal, or “Valley of the Angels,” rather than Swinach--“Place of the Pigs.” But it was Ulrich’s final provision that would have the greatest impact on my life: he mandated that the monastery establish a scriptorium.•••Eyes open on a red and blue spin of lightning. A blitzkrieg of voices, noises. A metal rod pierces the side of the car, jaws it apart. Uniforms. Christ, I’m in Hell and they wear uniforms. One man shouts. Another says in a soothing voice: “We’ll get you out. Don’t worry.” He wears a badge. “You’re gonna be all right,” he promises through his mustache. “What’s your name?” Can’t remember. Another paramedic yells to someone I can’t see. He recoils at the sight of me. Are they supposed to do that? Blackness.Eyes open. I’m strapped to a spine board. A voice, “Three, two, one, lift.” The sky rushes towards me and then away from me. “In,” says the voice. A metallic clack as the stretcher snaps into place. Coffin, why no lid? Too antiseptic for Hell, and could the roof of Heaven really be made of gray metal? Blackness.Eyes open. Weightless again. Charon wears a blue polyester-cotton blend. An ambulance siren bounces off a concrete Acheron. An IV has been inserted into my body--everywhere? I’m covered with a gel blanket. Wet, wet. Blackness.Eyes open. The thud of wheels like a shopping cart on concrete. The damn voice says “Go!” The sky mocks me, passes me by, then a plaster-white ceiling. Double doors slither open. “OR Four!” Blackness.***Eyes open. Gaping maw of a snake, lunging at me, laughing, speaking: I AM COMING...The serpent tries to engulf my head. No, not a snake, an oxygen mask...AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. I’m falling backwards gas mask blackness.Eyes unveil. Burning hands, burning feet, fire everywhere, but I am in the middle of a blizzard. A German forest, and a river is near. A woman on a ridge with a crossbow. My chest feels as if it’s been hit. I hear the hiss as my heart gives out. I try to speak but croak instead, and a nurse tells me to rest, that everything will be okay, everything will be okay. Blackness.A voice floats above me. “Sleep. Just sleep.”***Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It’s rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only released the monster--a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.While a small burn results in a blister filled with plasma, burns such as mine result in the loss of enormous quantities of liquid. In my first twenty-four hospital hours, the doctors pumped six gallons of isotonic liquid into me to counteract the loss of body fluids. I bathed in the liquid as it flowed out of my scorched body as fast as it was pumped in, and I was something akin to the desert during a flash flood.This too-quick exchange of fluid resulted in an imbalance in my blood chemistry, and my immune system staggered under the strain, a problem that would become ever more dangerous in the following weeks when the primary threat of death was from sepsis. Even for a burn victim who seems to be doing well long after his accident, infection can pull him out of the game at a moment’s notice. The body’s defenses are just barely functioning, exactly when they are needed most.My razed outer layers were glazed with a bloody residue of charred tissue called eschar, the Hiroshima of the body. Just as you cannot call a pile of cracked concrete blocks a “building” after the bomb has detonated, neither could you have called my outer layer "skin" after the accident. I was an emergency state unto myself, silver ion and sulfadiazine creams spread over the remains of me. Over that, bandages were laid to rest upon the devastation.I was aware of none of this, and only learned it later from the doctors. At the time, I lay comatose, with a machine clicking off the sluggish metronome of my heart. Fluids and electrolytes and antibiotics and morphine were administered through a series of tubes (IV tube, jejunostomy tube, endotracheal tube, nasogastric tube, urinary tube, truly a tube for every occasion!). A heat shield kept my body warm enough to survive, a ventilator did my breathing, and I collected enough blood transfusions to shame Keith Richards.The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. They brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I’ve never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (August 4, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307388670
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307388674
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.18 x 0.92 x 7.97 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #427,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,793 in Gothic Fiction
- #4,991 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #22,585 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Andrew Davidson

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Andrew Davidson was born in Manitoba, and graduated in 1995 with a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. He has worked as a teacher of English in Japan, where he has lived on and off, and as a writer of English lessons for Japanese websites. The Gargoyle is his first book. He lives in Manitoba, Canada.

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How Do You Like The Gargoyle, Original or Extra Crispy…

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

“Only a man unable to handle the actual world would create another one in which to hide.” The Gargoyle

For the record extra crispy if you please… it’s been awhile since a book came close to rivaling my favorite; that’s not for you to know, my favorite but The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson comes pretty damn close. Especially considering this is a love story where the Anti-hero *spoiler alert* has no penis; that one fact alone had me ready to stop reading but he had the balls, there were plenty of hearts, and as the song goes “Now look how beautiful destruction is.”

Can you imagine how the first of humanity must have felt about fire… do you think it was valued more for its creation or its destructive prospects, for how long I cannot say I’ve been more of the former, “Girl on Fire”, “Dauntless”, “Ember” “Fireflies”, “Anima Sola” to name a few, always women, always beautiful, always my type; what can I say fallen angels turn me on. Seems a change of pace to watch a man and at the same time I can relate… after seeing the narrator’s Hell, I have no right to complain, but the pain, the knowledge gained by and through destruction, an idea of salvation amidst the flames other than without them, suppose my friend was right and this book spoke to me.

Now while this book was by no means trite, unoriginal, or uninspired, it is the tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme… how old is it; according to Marianne Engel, around seven hundred years or longer, around seven love stories, two occurring in the modern age. Man creates fire, man creates monster and/or God, man creates love but wait a minute that takes two doesn’t it and what a two indeed “the burnt guy and “the tattooed chick with weird hair”. I should also mention there is plenty of medical jargon but honestly if you get passed the burned penis, and the talk of burns, schizophrenia, severed limbs, and plenty of fun ways to die get you going well… nah I was never one for medical school, I’m not a psychopath… yet, maybe I should go into the horror genre, but love is both horrific and quite beautiful, as my uncle would say; balance.

In Hell you have all the time in the world, Heaven speaks of eternity but as with this book all good things come to an end but what is the lesson; for one don’t drink and drive… you might lose your penis, if I haven’t said that enough. Maybe it’s as the narrator took from one Winston Churchill “If you’re going through hell…keep going.”

“... but the truth is that I dislike most men as much as I dislike women. If anything, I am an equal opportunity misanthropist.” The Gargoyle

Well at least girls are pretty, not that I have anything against gay guys… unless they hit on me *shudders* anyway to continue what can I say about two lovers seven hundred years in the making, well with every love story within these pages with the exception of Dr. Gregor Hnatiuk and Sayuri Mizumoto to put it simply love stinks. Okay so it wasn’t much of a death toll but between the black plague, being buried alive, some torture, et cetera, no wonder people fall in love with Jesus Christ, someone they cannot see, or taste, or touch, quite clinical when I think about and considering the two protagonist never had sex… in this life at least.

The narrator was never given a name… I sort of like that, reminds me of “GTA III” with the player being allowed to somewhat exude their own personality over the character by I digress; our narrator is from the school of hard knocks, no dad, dead mom, death relatives, drugs but not a fan of Breaking Bad, the only breaks he had… a handsome face and plenty below the waist. Cut to his career in pornography… a man after my own heart, worked his way up from actor, to director, to business man which probably saved in with the hospital stay and plenty of surgeries before he met her… His salvation I find was quite the ugly business, the good news is it wasn’t God, it was love itself, and don’t give me God is Love, God is cruel ““Personally, I believe it's a poor idea to tell a seven-year-old girl that God's tremendous plan is to incinerate her lungs.” The Gargoyle

“My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie. My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.” The Gargoyle

Yes my words are but allow me to try… first off I should say that her claims of who she was were never refuted; I’ve heard of vampires with less backstory, and while it wasn’t A Thousand Years, to love someone for seven hundred years, well give me a girl like that anytime. There was no hiding her insanity with all the talk of Schizophrenia and her love of the gargoyles her grotesques, if there was anything she loved more than the narrator but this was both her gift and her curse. However would she have been better off being a nun in love with a God or a woman in love with a man… I found it rather intriguing her Three Masters or the voices in her head; a somewhat suitable fate.

Of course there were plenty of other characters but I would ask which century… people don’t change but I think about the hearts I drew as a child, with the arrow going through them; I never thought to ask what it means but when a person falls in love, it is the beginning of a new life. With all the characters with some new love or at the very least affection they were born again, just my two cents but if you prefer… “This will mark the third time that an arrow has entered my chest. The first time brought me to Marianne Engel. The second time separated us. The third time will reunite us.” The Gargoyle

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” The Gargoyle

You might wish to stop here in case I spoil anything more for you, but there were those classic scenes that truly meant something to me; too many to recount. I’m still coming to terms with this book rivaling my favorite, especially since I did not seek it out, it’s like being set up on a date by one of your friends and don’t want to admit they were right about who they set you up with, well I’m not marrying Marianne Engel, not that I would marry Susan either, and how badly I want Katniss Everdeen or Anastasia Steele, I could go on.

I liked his whole pornographic history, that right there is the dream, “Second Circle Creations” to me, if I only had the finances and again it saved his life until Marianne Engel, which is perhaps my second dream, I’m no sculptor or painter but to do what she could do with paper as she did with stone, and as the fire does with people. All the stories she told him were awesome, that’s three dreams, a woman who could spin an incredible story and what else were they to do… I think they kissed once in the current era, and sex was off the table but running off with a beautiful nun; fourth dream making love to a girl who was once so righteous. The aftermath, punishment, marriage, money, suicide although I can’t help but wonder how he would get one of his good friends to pull it off… I suppose an arrow head made it some other time period would be impossible to trace.

In my favorite book it was the other way around, the boy had his learning and the girl had her love and she knew that if she stayed he wouldn’t be learning as much about the world… more about her. The narrator calls himself a murderer but if he could have loved Marianne… in that way would it have made a difference, it was never his body she was interested in and her love for him was trumped as she continued discarding her hearts but I agree he could have stopped her. “The problem with people like us is that we don't die properly.” Marianne said, maybe it’s because we don’t live properly but whose fault is that I wonder?

Without a doubt this is a five star book, not my favorite but the second for now… you might want to break out your jar of hearts because you are going to need a few spares. This is the first book in a long time that didn’t involve the world’s destruction to an extent "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire." I heard so I suppose the same could be said for losing one life, loses the world entire, I saw plenty of that in The Gargoyle but I’ll leave you with this thought; nowhere in “1 Corinthians 13:4” did it ever say love was beautiful.

“You are mine, I am yours; you may be sure of this. You've been locked inside my heart, the key has been thrown away; within it, you must always stay. ” The Gargoyle… Marianne’s Last Heart

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Cheryl Anne @ Twisted Knickers

A Fine First Novel

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 18, 2009

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At the start of this book, we have the very mainstream shock and awe first chapter where our unnamed rather loathsome protagonist finds himself at the mercy of a flaming car wreck. His own car in this case, as he was drunk and coked up when he saw the imaginary flaming arrows shoot out from the roadside brush, startling him, and subsequently sending his car crashing down into a ravine. The explosion left our main character with 3rd and 4th degree burns over 90% of his body, including his manhood, which was burned off down to a nub. From that point on, the narrative shifts to our protags trials and tribulations in the burn unit of the hospital. We get to experience his treatment with gruesome and disturbing detail, as the author took a substantial amount of time researching this aspect of the story. During our protagonist's hospital stay, he is approached by a psychiatric patient named Marianne Engle who proceeds to chastise him for burning himself again. She believes that they were lovers in a past life in 14th century Germany.

Now, at this point, I want to make mention that this book seems to have divided readers into the love it or hate it categories, so I want to discuss the "issues" people seem to have with the narrative, and how I personally felt about it, as it is a long book, so you are with it for a while. First off, we have our unnamed protagonist and first person narrator. You just won't have very much sympathy for him. He isn't a pleasant person at all -- arrogant, egotistical -- so he is the perfect mainstream fiction trope. Many had difficulty with the fact that the character itself was an archetype: the nerdy book-worm kid who finds himself being raised by meth-addict relatives, later in life only to discover that he is rather gifted sexually, handsome in his own opinion, and so he becomes a porn star, forsaking love and faith for the pleasures of the flesh. Yup, I can see the cliché, and a lot of readers took issue with that. Then we have Marianne Engle, the psychotic artist who sculpts grotesques in her basement and thinks she was a nun back in 14th Century Germany and the first to translate Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy) into German. She also thinks that our protagonist was the wounded mercenary whom she fell in love with and saved by forsaking her own vows to God. Again, contradictions aside, many people took issue with the cliché Marianne Engle: angel wings tattooed to her back, not to mention, she conveniently shows up to save him. But we can't call shenanigans here, cause that's fate. However, we can mention the crazy artist archetype, even if I might not personally take issue with it. I have known a lot of crazy artists, and I am one myself at times. The real issue for readers seems to be that both of the main characters here have very few redeeming qualities. Their personalities are coarse, and their world-view is jaded, and many readers just couldn't connect with either one of them. Me, I like angry and f'ed up characters who take their cynicism seriously. Those are the sort of characters I like to hang out with, in life and in fiction.

Secondly, the narrative itself was a bit disconcerting for some readers, and the convenient pseudo-autobiographical meta-fiction just ticked some people off. They found it a trite way to excuse the narrative foibles. The justification does make itself know in an intrusive way, but I just felt "Meh" about it. As for the rest, the book uses a good deal of narrative summary, and so there is very little "in the now" action, and the POV shifts between our first person unnamed narrator to Marianne's first-person account of their past life together told almost exclusively in a second person narrative voice. Since our primary narrator has only to lie in bed and contemplate suicide, the majority of the book is Marianne sitting at his bedside telling him stories. Stories that our protagonist, in the beginning, has trouble believing, but that disbelief begins to fail him as the story moves along. Personally, I happened to like the storytelling and the very elaborate narrative summary. It felt as if the main character and Marianne were moving in and out of an alternate consciousness, though some of it was a bit long winded and indulgent. But my favourite part of the story happened in the end when Marianne attempts to free our protagonist of his cold heart and the morphine. Here is where Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy) comes back into storyline as our protag, during his morphine withdrawal, travels through an inferno all of his own, coming out at the end with love in his heart and a new world view. Some readers also found that a bit cliché too.

Half the time period of the story, our protagonist is in the hospital and the other half he is living with Marianne, bearing witness to her self-destructive artistic mania. She has a very typical story as well, in this life, and in the end she sacrifices herself to save him, just as he had done to save her in his prior life. Many readers found Marianne to be bland, almost motherly in her attitude towards her lover, but she did say in the beginning that she was tired and wanted to rest from life, any and all life for a while, so her exhaustion did come through in her voice and actions to some extent. If giving away all her hearts could give her death, and in death, give her salvation and the embrace of God, who she forsook, well then, her dispassionate matter-of-factness, or rather her detachment, seemed justified.

I did like the underlying thematic principle even though it's as tried and true as it gets: Marianne releases the beasts from their stone cages, and conversely, in our protagonist's case, she needed to chisel the good man out of the grotesque thing he had become, as the fiery wreck had brought his ugliness to the surface so that he would have to confront it. I also like the redemption through love concept. I write about that often myself. I like when the a-hole character finds his inner goodness. I loved the sculptor/grotesques metaphor, and I loved the self-inflicted purgatory moral of the story, but some readers felt the intensity was lacking between the two lovers. In reality, they weren't lovers in this life, so the uncomfortable distance that always seemed to be between them felt appropriate to me. The distance was cautionary. Had they been swooning over each other the whole time, I wouldn't have bought into the idea.

On to the technical stuff: Some readers took issue with the extensiveness of the research and the regurgitation of said research into the narrative. Overwritten and heavy handed are words you might see in many reviews, but I didn't mind it at all and thought the depth made the whole situation more believable. In some areas, a good pointed cutting would have been wise to eliminate some repetition, but other than that, I didn't mind the thick prose. I also didn't mind the rather bland ending either because it was pretty realistic. People, if they change at all, change slowly. There are no grand life epiphanies, no eternal love, no happy ever after, the story ends just like life does in most cases, predictably and with tragedy.

On the whole, I don't normally read Bestsellers: I just don't buy into all the hype, but this was recommended to me by a friend, and I liked the premise he described. I loved the shifting narrative. I loved the lush prose. I liked the detail -- except for the endless lists of food items and other such nonsense -- and I loved the unsympathetic main characters. I loved the romantic vignettes. I loved the ambiguity -- was Marianne a nutcase or was her lovelorn tale real -- and I loved that the story ended badly in that the love would remain unrequited. What I didn't like was the constant interjection by the "snake" in the weird and abrupt font. I got it that his "id" was trying to keep control of him, but it was a bit much. This book also crossed a lot of different genres. If I had to classify it for readers, the bulk of the book is backstory, and it has the look and feel of a historical romance with a spiritual love at its centre more so than a physical one. We are dealing with love as faith here and not love as fleshly passion, so don't expect that kind of passion. The plot is an existential and philosophical one; therefore, the pace is that of a meandering walk through time and not what one might consider a page-turner. Sometimes I like it slow, especially if I am expected to appreciate something ugly.

I didn't hate it, but I certainly didn't think it was the most fabulous love story ever written. The nerd turns porn-star bit really didn't sit well with me; however, Mr. Davidson's adventuresome technique had me applauding more than once. I like an author who waxes unconventional, and I love an editor who agrees to go along for the ride. I thought it was a fine first novel.

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Kenji

One of the best novel's you'll ever read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 13, 2022

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Wow!! What a stunning novel.
Great characters with amazing inner stories.
And no soppy love story. If you like great deep story telling, with some exciting moments. This is a story for you. I can't highly recommend this book enough.
It's in the top 3 list I've ever read.
Thank you Andrew Davidson.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Beautiful and daunting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 17, 2017

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I first bought this when it was first released which is a long point time ago. Its not like anything I've read and I wanted to see if time and maturity had altered my opinion. The answers no. There's no other like out. Captivating, magical and intrigue. Its a story of love but of hope depending on how you view life. It has a sprinkling of magic when you know you've found something special. A rarity.

11 people found this helpful

Mrs Fussy

There's no obvious point to the novel.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 21, 2022

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I tried for over 200 pages to get into this story but just had to stop; I couldn't bring myself to keep opening the book up. There seems to be masses of minute detail that is unnecessary and a drag. It's full of suffering. And I just don't get it. It also seems to be trying to be clever and I'm looking for a story so good that the pages fly by - this doesn't do that.

Lennie Small

Gargoyle is breathtakingly ,strange and totally compelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 11, 2022

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Reading this book is like being transferred to a different dimension or universe while still being on earth in the past and present. At times it's an uncomfortable read as it's weird and a bit crazy. It's like reading historical fiction except that it feels more like an autobiography. Like all GREAT novels t is difficult to define.
I am not lennie small but I was George many years ago.

Traffic

Awesome

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 17, 2013

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I read this book after being recommended (nagged) to read it by a friend, and I am glad I did. It was such a great book and the story has you engrossed from the vary start.

Our main character is a well known porn star who has it all; looks, success and fame. Then one day he has a car crash and is horribly disfigured by fire. During his 8 months or more in hospital he meets a psychiatric patient who claims she is 700 years old and that they have met several times in past lives. She also carves gargoyles out of stone by "listening" to the voices of the gargoyles trapped within the stone.

Have you ever seen one of those old horror movies in which there are several separate stories told within the same movie? This is what that book is like. You have the main story but then this woman tells stories of her past life and others and these sub-stories are so good that you easily forget that they are not the main story of the novel.

Vary well written and a beautiful story; I recommend this novel to anybody wanting a novel that they can lose themselves in.

A note on the Kindle version: flawless, no proplems whatsoever.

4 people found this helpful

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FREE delivery: Friday, May 12 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

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Sold by: Heisenbooks

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