I have always been a big fan of love that transcends time and reality. I knew that was what I was getting with this book. It was a little too graphic for my taste & although I love facts in a book, there were times when I felt like I was reading a medical textbook instead of a novel.

The narrator had the right amount of angst and the intellectual snobbery of a person who knew better but who apparently cannot apply it in his reality. Marianne was mysterious and I felt that in their first few encounters that the story was leading up to a startlingly complex and epic twist of fates that set the lovers apart and that would somehow render their seven-year separation more powerful and devastating but when the turn of events were finally explained, I was mildly disappointed. It didn't quite peak as I had expected it to. It was a little hazy how Marianne was connected to all these people & though I enjoyed the side characters' own little stories, I didn't quite find that they all naturally flowed to one great plot.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of subtle things that redeemed the book for me. I loved the quotes. I loved the tug-of-war between the narrator's growing feelings and his logic. I loved that the narrator's character didn't seem overly concerned about being blunt to a point of being offensive.

The story certainly succeeded in holding my attention but I do wish parts of it turned out differently. But then, isn't that what makes an interesting book? Having the ability to cause you to imagine alternate scenarios and emotionally responding to how it eventually turns out, good or not. =)

3.5 stars

The unnamed narrator of this book is a drug-addicted porn star, who is in a car crash and is seriously burned. While in the hospital recovering, he only wants to recover enough to go home, then kill himself. Until Marianne Engel, a girl with an obvious mental illness, arrives with stories of the previous lives they shared together.

At the beginning of the book, I thought this would make my favourites list this year. The descriptions of the car crash itself, then what happens when a human is burned and the healing process, were absolutely phenomenal, and it hooked me! Unfortunately, Marianne then entered the story, and it went downhill for me. I just couldn't get interested in her stories. Some were good, but mostly I just wasn't interested, nor was I interested in the Dante's Inferno hallucination near the end of the book. I did like the parts where they were in the modern time frame, and I also really liked some of the supporting characters and their stories. Overall, I am giving this a rating of "good", 3.5 stars.

In a burn ward a man lays dying. After a horrible car accident he is left covered almost entirely in severe burns. Slowly but surely he signs away his company to pay for his treatment, his friends disappear and his addiction to morphine continues to grow. He's begins to contemplate ending it all when a women appears in his room one day and changes everything.

Her name is Marianne Engel and she claims that she has lived for over seven hundred years. If that wasn't crazy enough she also claims that they first met in medieval Germany, where she was studying to become a nun and he was left at their monastery to heal after a particularly vicious battle. As she begins to tell him the tale of how they met and later fell in love, he is sure that she is crazy. A schizophrenic who has wandered down from the psych ward. But he feels oddly comforted by her presence, so he lets her continue. Little does he know, that this women is about to take him on an incredible journey that will change how he feels about her, life and himself.

I found The Gargoyle to be an interesting premise. I loved the idea of a love that could transcend all obstacles and reunite people after seven hundred years. Unfortunately, however, I had a hard time getting into this book. It moved slowly at the beginning and until Marianne arrives you're only really dealing with the main character and he annoys me to no end. The writing in this early part feels choppy and amateurish. There are so many similes and metaphors it can get a little corny at times.

The beginning was almost enough for me to declare this novel a DNF (did not finish) but this book had been sitting on my shelf for over a year now and since it had been so long I thought I could at least try and finish it. I'm really thankful that I did. The Gargoyle gets a million times better after Marianne shows up. Her stories - both of her own life and those of other star crossed lovers - are absolutely beautiful. The present day happenings of the book often don't even compare to the style and strength of those chapters. It is almost as if they are written by two different people.

All in all this book left me with mixed feelings. I didn't really like it but I also wouldn't say I disliked it. It was definitely a mixed bag. It left me with a lot to think about. Marianne's life (whether real or not) is an incredible one and there is definitely some deeper symbolism going on, which I found incredible. I don't know if that was enough, however, to make up for my dislike of the main character and the occasional over use of literary devices.

What a concept. Great style. Captured my attention within 2 pages! And then I was hooked.

The Gargoyle opens with a car crash, which is strangely fitting. In many ways, this book is like a car crash, because you can't turn away from it.

In this car crash, the nameless protagonist is horribly and painfully disfigured. It is from this accident and during the narrator's long rehabilitation that we learn his past. is a self-centered, utterly repugnant creature, a man of great physical beauty and utter moral worthlessness.

While in the burn unit, planning an elaborate suicide, he meets a sculptress, a psychiatric patient who claims to have known the narrator in a previous life. For reasons unclear at first, she cares for him and becomes the driving force behind his rehabilitation. As he begins to learn more about her, he doubts her sanity. For reasons he cannot adequately define (even to himself), he moves in with her and allows her to take care of him.

As he continues to heal, he learns more about his new partner, and their previous life together. Her mental illness resurfaces, as does his substance abuse, and somehow, the strength of that narrative keeps them together and helps them grow.

The narrator must finally decide if his newfound love is real or a delusion.

This is a well-crafted story, written on several levels. It is a story of redemption and of love, written in several eras, modern and historical.

The author took several flawed characters and weaves from them a story greater than the sum of its parts. Although it is far from perfect,it is well worth reading. This is a story that will stay with you long after you finish the book.

This book was so intresting and so well written...it was very had for me to put down...the beginning was really graphic and i had to skim the words a bit...but besides that it was excellent!!

I loved this book, and couldn't but it down once I started. It is a unique story that I guarantee you haven't read anywhere else. The characters, story and plot are wonderfully well written. The book can seem a bit odd at times, but it just adds to the overall amazingness of the book.

Great cross between historical fiction, fantasy, mysticism and so much more. Very well researched and well written book. There is so much that could be interpreted in a variety of ways that this would make a great book club selection for a broad base of people with eclectic reading habits. Filled with allegory, irony, parallelism, symbolism - call it what you will it would make for great discussions. I enjoyed this novel and look forward to Andrew Davidson's next endeavour.

Let me begin by saying that when I purchased my copy of 'The Gargoyle', I had absolutely no idea what it was about. In fact, I only bought it because it seemed everywhere I went, this book followed me, always in view, begging to be picked up. I found the cover quite striking, and I'm not really sure what I imagined it would be about, but I WAS WRONG!
This is hands down the most original love story I have ever read. Please note, I said love story, not romance novel. This is no Nicholas Sparks book. Davidson grabs his reader by the throat on page one and by page four, you are completely absorbed, and committed to this story. He takes you on a 700 year odyssey, literally to hell and back, wrings you out emotionally, and
leaves you begging for more. A MUST read, and one of my top 5 reads of 2010.

This book is interesting because for the first hundred pages or so I wasn't even certain I could continue with it, the descriptions were so full and so stomach turning.

However now, even though I'm not sure I like it it is one of the most interesting books I have read in the last year. The prose are at times completely comical and just the little bit ridiculous but the almost overly descriptive nature ensures that you can envision absolutely every image in the novel.

The main character is one who does evolve, from a depression, angst ridden pornographer to a man who actually learns how to feel love, despite the fact that his lover is in a single word insane. Or she is the sanest of all.

There are certainly moments which drag in this novel, such as when Marianna is attempting to finish her statues, which then become numbered. There is language and moments which will make you cringe as a reader but yet I think this book is one that needs to be read.

At the heart of this book is something which annoyed some readers but I appreciated and that was the stories of the past, The Lovers' Tales.

In the end of the book I felt exhausted, as I knew their tale was coming to an end, the final life these two would live together and it was bittersweet. Also, the reader is left with an interesting quandary, wondering who is telling the truth, Marianna or the narrator.

All in all I am really glad I didn't give up on this novel even though I wanted to at times, especially with the heavy nature of the religious elements.

I founf the overall story lovely to read, however the "concept" was very similar to "I Know This Much is True". Definitely would read again

This book was a little strange but the characters were very interesting. I enjoyed it.

A man drives off a cliff and gets trapped in his car, burning in the fire until his car falls into a river extinguishing the flames. He has third degree burns over most of his body and is taken to the hospital where he becomes very depressed. The book's unnamed narrator was used to getting by on his good looks and now that he has nothing but burns over his body he has to learn to live differently.

He is visited by Marianne Engle who was treated in the psychiatric ward of the hospital and she believes that he was her lover in the 1300s. She was a scribe at a monastery and he was a mercenary that was burned and brought to the monastery to try to save him. The two fall in love and try to make a life as a stone worker and scribe.

Marianne tells him their story while he recovers, along with some other stories of lovers in other times. Every so often she would disappear to work on carving out gargoyles from stone, which should could work on up to 70 hours straight. The two continue their relationship as he narrator is discharged from the hospital and the narrator finds that there may be some truth in Marianne's stories.

This is one of the very few books I've read where you are never told the main character's name. Every so often I would flip back pages to see if he had been named, thinking he had and I just hadn't remembered, but it wasn't there. This was a unique book though at first I wasn't understanding the different stories that Marianne told about lovers in other times but eventually it all wrapped up together. A bit odd at times, it was still worth it in the end and was an interesting book.

A twisted love story! I love the miniature stories told in between this book. Looking for something different to read? Definitely go for this book. I would say 16+ though. I Absolutely loved it! My Favourite!!!!!!!!

Manages to balance skillfully between romantic, disturbing, beautiful and disgusting.

It's not that The Gargoyle is bad. There are a couple of exquisite moments in the story that even my natural cynicism can't reject, and Andrew Davidson is a competent (if overly self-indulgent) writer. The pacing of the story is good, the idea is entertaining (and could make an excellent HBO Mini-Series), the two main characters are believable (which is a feat) and the way the story deals with mental health feels genuine, so I can see why people love this book.

My problem, however, is as deep as it is simple. I spent the entire book wishing I was reading someone else. But it was worse than that. I didn't just want to be reading another author, I wanted to be reading the same story written by another author.

It started as a desire for Michael Ondaatje. I wanted his poetic prose for the story of the narrator's burns and rehabilitation. I wanted The Gargoyle to be a sort of pop-culture English Patient. Then I found myself pining for early Hemingway, back when Papa was cutting all the "good lines" from his work because clever turns of phrase call too much attention to the author and detract from the narrator (and there were so many "good lines" in this story that I started to see Davidson sitting on his laptop like Narcissus kneeling over the pond*). My desire for Hemingway lasted throughout. But I also wanted Irvine Welsh because he's an author who can take an idea like the "b***h-snake" and make it more than precious (read Filth for the perfect expression of a manipulative parasite). Then I longed for Margaret Atwood to write Marianne so the nun-sculptress-manic depressive would be imbued with feminist power. And I wound up wishing I was reading Dante's Inferno rather than the narrator's blah morphine version packed into a chapter.

Ondaatje, Hemingway, Welsh, Atwood, Dante. Five authors I'd rather have been reading; five authors who could have told this story better.

If that's not enough to explain why this book was never more than okay for me, I've got two more little peeves: the bizarre font choices for the voices in the narrator's head (completely unnecessary), and the extra eighteen pages of drivel that were tacked on to the story's natural end. Where the hell are the Scribners and Pounds when authors like Andrew Davidson need them? Mouldering in their graves while today's "editors" are busy tweeting their days away and rushing the next big thing to press without proper care and attention.

For the record: those moments I mentioned earlier were Marianne Engel's perfectly fitting demise and the love story of Sigurd Sigurdson. Both exquisite.

*yes, this was on purpose.

Personally this book has replaced the time traveler's wife as my new all-time favourite book. I will admit I had some issues getting started.. It was slow moving for me near the beginning, but it soon picked up and I found myself reading well into the morning! It's a wonderful mix of adventure, history, and of a strange, otherworldly romance. I recommend it to everyone who loves a good read! It's a book that keeps you thinking well after you've flipped the last page!

I love this book. My boss gave it to me and I could not put it down.
It really has a little bit of everything, its intense, funny, religious and best of all a love story. I loved how the author went back to different times, how well he describes feelings and experiences.
It was such an amazing book that I've recommended it to 3 different people. They were not disappointed. If you looking for a good story this is it.

Read this book if you are looking for a creative story with fascinating characters and a very cool plot.

I have to say I was dubious when I picked this up, but it certainly proved to be an intriguing read. Great characters, history and storylines make this a definite page turner.
The first part of the book is a little hard to get through , as it is very graphic, but be patient.
An admirable debut novel.