The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Accidents ambush the unsuspecting,

 often violently, just like love.

Opening to The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson.

The narrator ought to be sympathetic.  We should feel for him.  He has no parents.  No close friends.  He is recovering from a terrible car accident that left him severely burned.  So severe that toes, fingers and other appendages were burned completely off.  He spends weeks in a coma and months in the hospital recovering.  One by one, those who knew him stop buy to visit  never to return after seeing how grotesquely deformed he has become.

We should feel bad for him. 

But he's repulsive.  He made his fortune producing pornography, first as an actor then as a director/producer.  He never formed a real relationship with anyone. He was high on cocaine at the time of his accident, so he has no one to blame but himself.  He's mean to the hospital staff who  try to help him recover.  Ungrateful at every turn and angry at the world around him. 

We should believe the story.  The narration of recovery is exact, detailed.  It reads like the author is writing something he once lived.  The medical procedures and the psychological states of mind the narrator goes through are harrowing reading, but every moment rings true.  Even the fact that its narrator never becomes sympathetic adds to the novel's realism. 

Enter Marianne Engel, a former patient in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital.  She begins to make regular visits.  She claims she knows the narrator, that they share a history he does not remember, that he has been burned twice before.  She claims to have met the narrator when she was a scribe in a German convent, sometime in the late 14th century.  The narrator was hidden in the convent while he recovered from his first set of burns, received in battle.  His cohorts, mercenaries sworn never to leave the group except in death, thought him mortally wounded, but under Marianne Engel's care he recovered.  The two fell in love and left the convent together trying to escape the mercenaries and start a new life together.

Hard to believe.

But it all works.  Mr. Davidson's The Gargoyle draws the reader into the story the way an excellent thriller does, but without car chases or cliff-hanging escapades.   The Gargoyle takes its time.  Before we meet Marianne Engel, we have accompanied the narrator through his accident and the early stages of his treatment and recovery.  We have come to empathize with him even though we don't sympathize.  Marianne reveals her history, or what she believes is her history, slowly, through flashbacks, as she tells the narrator the their life together.  He always suspects she is delusional, as do we, but neither of us can help but become involved in her tale.  Both his narration and hers could stand alone and hold the reader's interest without fail.  Together each tempts the reader to skim one alternating chapter to find out what happens next.  Will the couple in the past find safe harbor?  Will the couple in the present find a way to life with each other's medical conditions? 

Unfortunately, The Gargoyle falls short in the end.  Once an author has his readers completely hooked temptations loom.   Just how much are we willing to believe?  Once everything is firmly grounded in reality, can the book enter the fantastic?  Had the novel stopped twenty pages earlier, maybe even ten pages earlier, I would be singing its praises without reservations.  But Mr. Davidson just went that little extra step too far.  From point A to point N, when he should have stopped at point M.  A minor quibble maybe, but endings are as important as beginnings.  Whether or not we sympathize, we need to believe.