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The Gargoyle

Average rating: 4/5

Based on 12 ratings

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The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson
Read by: Lincoln Hoppe

Random House Audio Publishing Group | August 5, 2008 | Audio Book (CD)

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide-for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.

A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life-and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne''s care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete-and her time on earth will be finished.

Already an international literary sensation, the Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.

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Reviews

    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 3/5

    This really varied for me.

    LibraryCin

    • Top Book Reviewer

    3 months ago

    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.

    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 3/5

    Interesting but not quite right

    Christa @ Hooked on Books

    6 months ago

    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.

    This reviewer also recommends:
    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 5/5

    wow!

    Shank

    6 months ago

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

    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 4/5

    great strange and interesting read

    sandy shanahan

    3 years ago

    I love how this book started, it was a page turner. I could imagine what the charater would look like well I was reading it. The burns discriptions was really good, you could tell Andrew Davidson put alot of thought and time into this book.
    I was'nt too sure about the looking back all the time in the charaters past lives. At times it seemed a bit too much. But in the end it all made so much sence. I was moved.

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Details

From the Publisher

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide-for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.

A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life-and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne''s care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete-and her time on earth will be finished.

Already an international literary sensation, the Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.

From the Jacket

Advance Praise for The Gargoyle


"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.

Audio Book (CD)

5.04 x 5.89 x 1.6 in

August 5, 2008

Random House Audio Publishing Group

English


0739328956
9780739328958

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From the Critics

Advance Praise for The Gargoyle


"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

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