Beauty and the Beast
The Gargoyle has been a most pleasant surprise. A surprise because the book was given to me with little advance press, it being a galley copy made available to librarians and book sellers prior to hitting the shelves. A surprise because this is a first time author and a Canadian one, to boot. Mostly, it is a surprise because, for all intents and purposes, it is a love story that men can enjoy right out there in full view. You don’t have to worry about being drummed out of the union because you’ve been caught at a matinee of He’s Just Not That Into You.
The Gargoyle, published by Doubleday, is the first effort by Andrew Davidson. And it is an extraordinary one. This is a book that successfully slips and slides between realities and magically transcends time. Of course, it is the acceptance of time as non-linear that enables you to define what is and what is not reality.
In other words, if you can suspend disbelief, as the principal character does when Marianne Engel, a beguiling schizophrenic, transports him to a past they supposedly shared together, you will be open to the paradoxes and parallels that run throughout.
In their previous, fourteenth century lives, he was a mercenary felled by a flaming arrow who became a stonemason. She was a novice in the Engelthal monastery; her talents for language found their fullest expression in the stifling Scriptorium. He is now the ex-porn star whose budding career was cut short by a car accident in which he was horribly burned; he becomes a writer telling of a sculptor/temptress whose madness and mastery over stone bring gargoyles to life.
“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole…It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time …They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces, the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment.”
Of course, she also brings him back to life, subtly but relentlessly chipping away at a cynical and contemptuous veneer.
There is always the story behind the story, the underlying message, the over-arching theme that ties a string of apparently disparate tales together. Characters, at least the main ones, are fully developed. And yet they remain inscrutable. They are hardened, yet vulnerable. They are intertwined, yet separate. They are all gargoyles.
In short, this is a book with a remarkable depth.
Parental Guidance: Unless you are into burn victim physiology and psychology, you might find the book a bit of a struggle for the first 60 pages or so. Just a warning.
