Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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129 of 145 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gargoyle, 28 Jan 2009
After the slight disappointment earlier this year from Nick Harkaway's debut novel The Gone-Away World, I was a little skeptical about reading another new writer because I often find too many flaws ridden throughout the pages. However, The Gargoyle is another case entirely. In fact, the book is so well told that I just can't find a single fault. It really is quite possibly the most "perfect" of books I've ever read - and I'm not one to lavish praise on just anything. It's so rare that I will read and not try to change sections for my own personal endeavor, but reading The Gargoyle was refreshing - a strange word to use perhaps considering Davidson's knack for graphic description, particularly on his delineation of how the human body burns. It was refreshing because it was original, and even now a week after reading I am finding it hard to start another book because I am still emotionally involved with The Gargoyle. Our nameless narrator happens upon a vision while being high on drugs and booze where a swarm of burning arrows are heading towards his car as he drives along the cliff edge. He crashes down the gauge and eventually catches fire, leaving him a monster but alive albeit in the care of the burn ward at the hospital.
The story entails the once beautiful man during his hospital rehabilitation after the incredible survival of the burning wreck. Along the way he meets Marianne Engel - a woman who he initially believes to have come from the psychiatric ward. She is a carver of Gargoyles, tattooed, eccentric and scraggy and she comes to visit regularly telling him stories of long ago, from ancient Japan to medieval Germany, Italy and the vikings of Iceland. She also claims that the two of them were lovers in the 1300s - her being a nun at Engalthal Monastery and him a warrior wounded from battle (no wonder he thought she was crazy). As our narrator is brought back to life by his newly found friends at the hospital he is also brought to love and so his story goes much deeper than the tales he "believes" to have been weaved.
I've tried not to give too much away, so that you can read it for yourself because you really must. A truly remarkable piece of work; ambitious and taunting, yet so beautifully told. If you don't believe in love now you will after this, and you might even get the urge to buy a gargoyle... though I doubt it. A modern masterpiece.
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46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A strong debut, 23 Oct 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This was a well written debut novel from a talented writer.
The interesting device of never revealing the identity of the narrator is a quirky plot point.
The Gargoyle of the title is the narrator, a handsome young man who while driving stoned and drunk one night crashes his car into a ravine and is burned in the resulting fire. He finally awakens in a burns unit to find his body has been ravaged by the flames and he has entered his own version of hell. It is during this period that he meets Marianne Engel, a renowned sculptor who stuns him by suddenly annoucing they were lovers seven hundred years ago in Germany and she has been searching for him since then.
The narrator is sure that Marianne is delusional and the fact that at their first meeting she is actually a patient in the physicatric ward does support that but after her release she continues to visit him and their relationship grows.
It is during these time that she begins to tell him the story of their first meeting and also occasionally seems to throw in seemingly random other stories as well. Even after his release from the unit when he goes to live with her the stories continue until finally they all come together and they both complete the journeys they have been on him to self redemption and her to final peace.
The author has chosen a large subject to tackle for his first novel, the question of what is love and how it endures and what one is prepared to do for it, mixed in with self realization and redemption, can one persons love be so strong as to drive them on through endless lifetimes for seven hundred years searhing for the one they lost?
Was this the best book I have ever read? Well no. Will it change my life for having read it? Again no. Is it a well written absorbing read with well drawn characters? Yes. Would I recommend it? A definite yes.
The measure of an author for me is whether they have engaged me enough to want to read other work by them and I can say that Andrew Davidson has done that with the Gargoyle.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Grotesque - and not in the sense the author intended, 24 May 2009
Well, I like a bit of magical realism as much as the next person, and was (I admit) seduced by the gimmicky cover. But I found this book a real chore to finish, and that is saying something as I always like to give a book - especially a first outing like this one - the benefit of the doubt.
But doubt not, this is a first outing that ought to have been shelved, or at the very least edited to within an inch of its life. From the gross-out opening scenario that appears to have been written by a 16-year-old boy with a medical fetish, to the 'characters' who are every last one of them straight out of central casting (Saucy Nurse, Japanese Girl Rebelling Against Tradition, Foul-Mouthed Harridan with Heart of Gold) to the exhausted 'message' (Bad Man Redeemed by Love of Good Woman), I was seriously wondering whether any of the professional reviewers who apparently lavished praise on this book had actually read it. Or indeed what they had read prior to this book to find it such a paragon of inventiveness.
The worst parts, for me, were the little historical vignettes told by Marianne to aid in the spirtual development or whatever of her patient/lover (which really should send you running if nothing else does). These were so full of anachronisms and half-baked research that my heart started sinking as each one appeared. No one seems to have told Davidson that to pull off effective gothic or magical realism, the entire rest of the fictional world has to be absolutely, spot-on accurate. But his little forays into historical fiction are so compromised by glaringly modern people and ideas stuffed into the shoes of medieval Japanese glassblowers and Viking carpenters that instead of coming across as erudite, he just comes across as that guy at the party who lectures you for half an hour on topics he clearly read about on Wikipedia.
My advice: don't even go to the party, unless pompous guys with a dilettantish interest in history, Christian mysticism and hospital dramas are your thing.
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