Author: Andrew Davidson
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
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