The Gargoyle

Author: Andrew Davidson

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Reading a good book can produce all sorts of wonderful sensations. Sometimes one becomes immersed and transported, at other times one can be elevated and excited. Then there are the books where at the point I close the last page, I just stare outward and wonder. The Gargoyle had that effect, and I’m still pondering this wonderful but challenging story.

The narrator is never named, and I am still wondering why. I didn’t even realise this until I started to write this review. As he describes his physical agony and despair following a horrific car accident, he also explains the formative events in his life, so the reader comes to know him very well, and perhaps without the name we walk even more closely with him. His story is not pretty, and therein lies the challenge for some readers. He has suffered a childhood involving neglect and enters adulthood an addicted drug addict who earns a living acting in, and later producing, porn movies.

All this changes inevitably with his self inflicted accident in which he is horribly burned. We are treated to detailed descriptions of the experience of being burned, and then confronting details about the long and painful treatment in hospital of burn victims. We meet his physio, psychologist and physician, each of whom tries to offer hope along with their therapies, and each of whom is rejected. He is determined to end his life as soon as he can arrange it. Then a woman walks into his ward. He waits for her gasp of horror at his appearance, but “she disappointed me by only smiling” and then says “You’ve been burned. Again”. And so he meets Marianne. The rest of the book explores the story of her decision to care for him on his release, narrates the story of her own obsession with gargoyles (she is a sculptor) and his own attempt to understand what seems like a serious mental instability in her.

And then there is her claim that she first met him in a Medieval monastery in the 13th Century. A little like Stories of 1001 Arabian Nights she tells him about their former history over a number of sessions. She also tells him several shorter tales about love and passion. Her story is enthralling and unlike many “parallel story” works I simply couldn’t decide which story I was more intrigued by.

As the book progresses we start to see that despite an enormous personal cost, she is working not only to liberate the gargoyles from their blocks of stone, but in a mystical way, is working to free the narrator from the things that have become his “block of stone”… his drug addiction, his inability to love or even care for any other human being, and his loathing of his burnt, disfigured body.

There are no final explanations offered. It is not a ghost story, though ghosts come into it a lot. In some ways it reminds me of The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams, but The Gargoyle has a stunning intensity and a much larger intent. A good deal of the book cross references to Dante’s Inferno and does this on several levels. The narrator can be thought of has having suffered hell in a sense a medieval theologian would have understood, as the fire has attacked the very attributes of his body he had come to be proud of… and the burns result in ongoing torture and permanent separation from normal humanity. However we are not left pondering just this possible link, as we are immersed in both stories and history from Medieval times and meet Dante’s work in that context, and finally a critical point in the narrators story results in him experiencing the journey through Dante’s Hell with his own guide.

Like reading a Douglas Adams’ story, little details are introduced such as the coin necklace Marianne gives him. These details are left unexplained for chapters until suddenly their purpose appears with a sense of inevitability and completion.

Please don’t read this if the graphical details of the life of a pornographer and drug taker will destroy your enjoyment of the complex and increasingly redemptive tale. Don’t read this if gritty and intimate descriptions of medical procedures and physical pain will be too much. Do read this if you are prepared for something like a Pieter Bruegel painting, full of bizarre and confronting elements but with a strong moral theme.

Now back to pondering… I’m sure there are links and layers I have not even begun to comprehend or notice.

Andrew Lack

Cold Comfort Farm

Author: Stella Gibbons

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Cold Comfort Farm was featured recently on the ABC's Tuesday Book Club. I was intrigued and purchased an eBook copy from Amazon. It is an outrageous parody of a type of novel that draws on the vicissitude of English country life and class envy to create a type of depressing drama replete with rural accents and often with cliched characters. Gibbons assaults all this in writing which would easily fit in a Monty Python show... remarkable as the book was written in 1932, not 1969!

We meet a character who I initially did not warm to... Flora. Her parents have annoyingly passed away leaving her little income. She decides to write to each of her relatives and will then pick the one who she would most like to stay with, as she has no intention of working. She gets an intriguing reply from Judith of Cold Comfort Farm, and the rest of the book details her struggles to sort out the lives of the astounding individuals who live there. There is Amos, who insists on cleaning the porridge bowls with a thorn twig but whose passion is fire and brimstone preaching, Shey, who epitomises the hero of the "ripped bodice" type of trashy romance, Adam, who cares only for "the beasts" but is bewildered to find bits of them falling off all the time, and the manipulative great aunt Ada who will not let any of them leave the farm for fear of a relapse into madness, having "seen something nasty in the woodshed" as a child.

In the face of the rage and bizarre behaviour of the rest of the family, I quickly warmed up to Flora who at least has a comprehensible fault in being lazy and wanting to "fix" the lives of others. Gibbons enriches the story of Flora's good deeds with a remarkable scattering of dialect. I was busy looking up words I had never heard of... until I realised nobody else has either. Some of them (a snood used to cook porridge) are good words put to bizarre uses. Others (titty-wren, scranling) are complete inventions.

For readers unacquainted with this genre of English novel, or at least unfamiliar with the mannerisms that are being parodied, this might all seem rather bewildering. I didn't find it laugh-out-loud material when reading to myself, but I found I simply could not read sections out loud to my wife with a straight face. I particularly like the scene where the breakfast porridge heaves and burbles in sympathy with the coarse sexuality being expressed by Seth.

If you had ever wondered what part of the English sensibility could have produced "The ministry of funny walks" or "The Knights that say 'Ni'", then this book will at least provide a glimpse of an earlier and equally frolicsome writer.

Andrew Lack

Time Travelers never Die

Author; Jack McDevitt

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While this is undoubtedly Sci Fi, the author has chosen a voice far removed from standard yarn telling. In some parts it is presented as mystery writing: the reader is not always made privy to the thoughts and all the actions of the players, so various events are deliberately made the more mysterious by this device. At other times I am forcibly reminded of an old book of my mother's... Van Loon's Lives. This wonderful book adopts the pretext of a fantasy where spirits of the past are allowed to become corporeal once more and visit the author for a meal. He agonises over the correct food and entertainment, and what combinations of guests will work well. In fact his ulterior motive is to recount some of the history of each character. So in McDevitt's book it almost seems at times that the story about time travel and even the drama of the events that confront the main characters are of less importance than his imaginative recounting of various historical events. I freely admit to a bit of page flicking here and there while waiting for the main narrative thread to re-engage.

This is far from "hard" Sci-Fi. The object that allows time travel has been invented by one of the character's father... but there is little attempt to dress this up in pseudo science. He does adopt one convention critical to the plot: if anyone actually interacts with another iteration of themselves some mysterious rule dictates that a violent adjustment will be made possibly leading to the death of one of the "versions". This leads the main players into an intricate web of movement in time and space as they try to recover from problems they cause, and come to terms with the potential of the tool they have been given.

I found this entertaining enough to read to the end, but with some reservation about the intermingling of drama and historical recounts. The inventiveness is certainly there, and this at least is an antidote to those weary of the space opera brand of sci fi.

Swamplandia!

Author: Karen Russell

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The book jacket is charmingly illustrated in a style deliberately old fashioned and strongly reminiscent of children's book covers. This just the first in a series of mental challenges awaiting the reader. This is not a children's book. It is a story about an unusual family, who live on an island in the Florida swampland. Here they have created a complete theme park (the Swamplandia! of the title). They are socially isolated... none of the children go to school, and their sole focus is on presenting the alligator wrestling shows daily. Though they are not actually of American Indian descent, they have assumed some vague Native American persona as a family.

The story is partly told by Ava, a fourteen year old daughter. Her narrative voice is in the first person, and we come to understand the events that overtake the family through her eyes. It is a little bewildering, then, when Kiwi (her older brother) leaves the island, and we follow his adventures via a third person narrative voice. In between the two siblings is Ossie, who has responded to her isolation by becoming obsessed by spirits and who believes she has fallen in love with a ghost of a former dredge operator.

The story is about the dissolution of the dream world that the parents created on the island. Illness, senility, ambition, competition and delusions all create a seemingly unsolvable morass. Kiwi exits to the mainland and painfully has to learn how to fit in with foul mouthed companions with meager ambitions. After Ossie disappears, Ava is befriended by someone who promises help to find her... and through her eyes we are swept up in a seemingly supernatural adventure.

Russell's language is poetic and lyrical at times, perhaps too much so for a story about a bewildered fourteen year old. The characters are richly drawn, with a impressionistic skill that illuminates much more than the incidents we are invited to witness.

This is far from a comfortable book to read. While we start in a young teenager's idyll, we are soon witness to disturbing events, including a sexual assault and the apparent shattering of Ossie's sanity. Despite the dark events there is a declaration of hope. Kiwi, despite his carnal acquaintances, maintains an inner innocence. Each of the three siblings is offered a way through, and together are able to help their father, lost in the impossibility of his dream, to step towards the a more realistic outlook.

This is not a book for those who find sexual assault or puerile language too confronting. It is complex and demanding of the reader, though very satisfying in parts. I thought a centre section reflecting on some historical aspects of the area was intrusive and not central to the involving narrative, but I'm glad to have read it and keen to look for other books by the same author. This is not quite a Magic Realism book in the sense that there ultimately seems to be rational explanations for everything that happens... yet the experience is very similar as we are taken on a journey through Ava's mutable perceptions. If there is one book it strongly reminded me of, it is Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"... a book that I passionately admire.

Andrew Lack

Written Out

Author: David Armstrong

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Armstrong sets up the reader by opening with some apparently disconnected stories. It is a safe assumption that connections will be found by the end of the tale. This is really not a case of  three story threads. One is an incident that later turns out to be of great interest... then there is the main story line. We meet Tom Oliver, who is a writer perhaps a little past his apogee. He has been invited to a somewhat bohemian  English country house where he is to be writer in residence for a week, providing guidance to a group of hopefuls. Things get complicated rather quickly, and the services of the police are required.

The police involved are Kavanagh and Salt, whose partnership extends beyond the office. They feature in several of Armstrong's novels, so there is a slowly developing back story here as well.

The book is a quick read. It has some interesting plot twists, though it is hard to escape the feeling of being manipulated by an author who devised a linear plot then deliberately told it in a non-linear fashion. Tom Oliver has his points of interest, but is a somewhat sad character, and the pair of Kavanagh and Salt would probably require me to read another "Kavanagh and Salt mystery" to start to become more than roughly sketched characters.

There is little to perturb the sensitive reader, though various sexual encounters are referred to. All in all a mild detective mystery read.

Andrew Lack