Nov 4, 2008 Posted by booktiger on Nov 4, 2008 in Fantasy, Requested Reviews | 0 comments

The Gargoyle – Andrew Davidson

I received this book as a Goodreads reviewer. Unlike many proof copies that I have received in the post, this book was beautiful with a magnificent dust jacket and black edged pages. I suspected it wasn’t going to be your average story, and I was right. I am not so sure what I felt about this book. Did I love it or did I hate it? I couldn’t put it down. I read it in about three days. I was particularly gripped by it, so I think I loved it. But it was very unusual, graphic in some parts and left you wondering. It also bordered on sickly sweet in parts, and descended in to evangelising in other parts. But as soon as I started thinking ‘oh, please’, it switched again. Perhaps that is why I was so compelled by it.

The story starts out with a horrific accident. The nameless and beautiful narrator, wealthy from a career in the porn industry, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and resigned to the fact that sex was a conquest and love did not exist, hallucinates a shower of flaming arrows after a long night of no sleep, too many drugs and too much bourbon. He drives his car off a steep embankment and finds himself burning. He doesn’t die. Rather, his life becomes the inside of the burns unit and his beautiful body becomes the body of a monster, inhabited by a snake in his spine determined to drive him to despair.

One day, a strange woman arrives – Marianne Engel – who is either mentally ill or supernatural. The narrator never fully understands which. However, her arrival marks his about face from dreaming of suicide to discovering life. She does this by insisting that the two of them had been together 700 years before, and she had been waiting for his return ever since.

This is a dark, twisted modern interpretation of Dante’s inferno mixed with fairy tale, horror and fantasy. The initial descriptions of the narrators burns and the treatments he goes through are sickening to read about. I was physically cringing. But I think they were important to the story – you had to fully understand the suffering of the narrator to truly appreciate where he arrives in the end. Marianne Engel is a mysterious and fascinating character. She carves gargoyles as part of her penance. Yet she brings to the narrator the one thing he had never had – unconditional love which ignores surface appearance.

Andrew Davidson has an unbelievable imagination and he has demonstrated it in a way that very much appeals to adults. This is not a childrens book, and yet many of the themes come straight out of fairy tales. Admittedly there are passages which betray this debt, and I do feel his ’stories of love’ were a little bit contrived. I also couldn’t tell whether he was trying to convince you in the existence of God as the defining line between good and evil – if he was, he didn’t do it very well. If he wasn’t, he certainly seemed to be trying. Nevertheless, he has bridged that gap between fairy tale and real tale in an original and unusual way that may not appeal to all, but to those which it does, will create some lifelong fans.

Rating: 7/10
Publisher: Canongate Books
Year: 2008
Date Finished: 26 October 2008
Pages: 502

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/28/fiction1

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-gargoyle-by-andrew-davidson-926531.html