[209] The Gargoyle – Andrew Davidson

“I was born beautiful and lived beautiful for thirty-plus years, and during all that time I never once allowed my soul to know love . . . Only after I was born into physical repulsiveness did I come to glimpse the possibilities of the heart.” [370-1]

The anonymous narrator of The Gargoyle is a pornographic actor who, while driving along a dark road, is distracted by what appears to him to be a flight of arrows. Dodging the arrows, his car skids off the road, crashes into a ravine, and suffers severe burns all over his body. During convalescence he conceives a plan of suicide. But a mysterious visitor who appears at the foot of his bed might convert this cynic to love. Marianne Engel is a sculptress of gargoyles who tells the narrator that they were lovers in medieval times, some 700 years ago.

Hence unfolds is a second narrative, the medieval story, told by Marianne herself, about her being adopted by a priest at Engelthal in Germany in 1315. Her talent in languages established her to be the most prolific scribe whose literary fingerprints had far exceeded that of any of her peers. The arrival of a wounded mercenary (hired to kill for wages) whom she carefully attended became a pretext of the prioress to expunge all her records from Engelthal. Could it also be the copy of Dante’s Inferno, which she secretly undertook to translate, that made her enemy to the Church?

The principal reason, I believe, that her body so thrilled mine was this: her body affected me as if it were not only human, but also as something that approached memory and ghost. [351]

Which is what makes the novel memorable, almost whimsical: Serendipity. Memory and ghost loosely link the two narratives that impose many questions in readers’ mind. Was Marianne Engel really the narrator’s lover in the past life? Or she is just a mad woman, a schizophrenic who holds out too much hope based upon a fictional past? Having lived in moral vacuum, the narrator recognizes love is Marianne’s soul’s natural condition and not “an aberration built on fantasies.” The past life and the wheel of incarnation render this love affair redemptive.

Nevertheless, I was certain that it did have meaning; the more time I spent with Marianne Engel, the more certain I became that all things are inexplicably connected. [144]

. . . I’m not forgetting that this is ludicrous and could not have actually occurred. I’m simply pointing out that, at least, the impossible things were occurring in a possible timeline. This is what I find rather amazing about her mental state: her wild statements were held together by internal consistency. [159]

I cannot make of Davidson’s wide arrays of imaginative tangents, ranging from earth’s four elements to the levels of Dante’s Hell, to literary styles of Nabakov and Bulgakov. One thing for sure is Marianne’s fables that gradually changes the recovering narrator’s state of his heart from one that is forlorn to hopeful, for it was not until he was burned that he begins to feel. The contrived ironies that intersperse with the story within the story bespeak hope in face of adversity. Whereas skin represents one’s whole appearance, an emblem of identity, skin does not constitute who one really is, let alone the essence of the soul. The Gargoyle is both an allegory that renders ordinary laws irrelevant and a love story that transcends mortality.

465 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]