Sharp Words

7 out of 10

Fate, not for the first time, has taken a hand in my choice of reading material – and hence, my choice of what I review. Susan mentioned The Gargoyle in a post a couple of weeks ago, and piqued my interest. I saw it in the airport bookshop last Wednesday, dithered about buying it, but didn’t; and then when I got to my parents’, my mum had taken it out of the library on the librarian’s recommendation, and it was a brand new copy that NOBODY had read yet.

Which meant that I was the first person to break open the pages, which are dyed black on the edges and tended to a) stick together and b) shed little black bits everywhere. Looks nice, but not the best of ideas.

Anyway, The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson’s first novel, although as some of the blurbs say, it’s rather hard to believe. It opens with the unnamed narrator describing a car crash in which he suffers horrendous burns. Everything that’s done to heal his broken body is described in sometimes grotesque detail during the first third of the book, and it’s not hard to understand why the protagonist starts to contemplate suicide as the alternative to living as a damaged monster.

However, Marianne Engel – a beautiful, mysterious, probably mentally ill sculptor – comes into his life. And slowly, through her attentions and her stories, she helps the narrator want to live again.

There’s an awful lot more to this novel than that. As well as the four stories of enduring love that Marianne tells – one each set in Italy, England, Japan and Iceland – she tells a tale of being a nun in a scriptorium in 14th century Germany. This tale she tells as if it were her own, and she clearly believes that it is. It’s the story of how she met the protagonist for the first time, she claims, when he was a burned mercenary brought to her convent for healing.  Over more than a year of the narrator’s healing, during which time he comes to live with her, she tells him this story in parts, revealing more and more of what drives her to sculpt gargoyles. And her story’s conclusion is tightly bound up with the conclusion of the book and the redemption of the narrator.

On the whole, I liked this novel. It took me quite a few chapters to really get into the story though. As mentioned, the first part of the book has a lot of grotesque detail, and the main character himself is pretty unsympathetic – he’s a star and producer of porn films, with a very shallow sort of life, and although his initial self-pity and selfishness are understandable, they can also be a bit annoying.

My mum tried to read this after me, and didn’t get very far in before she gave up. Her librarian doesn’t score any points on this occasion, unfortunately, although I do think if Mum had stuck with it, she might – like me – have found herself coming to like the story.

For me, The Gargoyle was more an uncomfortable read than a difficult one. The way in which the sub-stories are interleaved with the main one happens very naturally, and both the voice of the narrator and that of Marianne as she tells her stories are strong and distinct. And these stories themselves are interesting peeks at love in possibly its most devoted and self-sacrificing forms.

I did get a bit annoyed with the novel though when it took the narrator off into his own subconscious to meet the characters from Marianne’s stories while battling his own (rather literal) demons. It didn’t seem to fit with the way the rest of the novel went.

The central characters of the narrator and Marianne were sufficiently well-written for me to like and understand them – as much as Marianne can be understood, anyway; is she telling the truth or are her mental illnesses deceiving her? I liked the secondary characters a lot though, who play the roles of the narrator’s healers. There’s Nan, the doctor who saves the narrator’s life; Sayuri his Japanese physical therapist; Gregor the psychiatrist, who the narrator refuses to let treat him. And I especially liked Jack, Marianne’s agent, who’s a far more sympathetic character than she first appears.

This novel can be hard-going in places, and to be honest, I’m surprised that it’s been picked for Richard & Judy’s book club since it seems a bit too heavy-weight and fantastical for many readers. [Note to non-UK readers: Richard & Judy present a chat/magazine show, and run a book club; their approval can have a similar effect to that of Oprah in the US.] But still, it’s worth a read if you fancy a decent romantic story that’s well-written enough to really get your teeth into.