Review originally posted at Christa's Hooked on Books -- http://christashookedonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/07/gargoyle-by-andrew-davidson.html

In a burn ward a man lays dying. After a horrible car accident he is left covered almost entirely in severe burns. Slowly but surely he signs away his company to pay for his treatment, his friends disappear and his addiction to morphine continues to grow. He's begins to contemplate ending it all when a women appears in his room one day and changes everything.

Her name is Marianne Engel and she claims that she has lived for over seven hundred years. If that wasn't crazy enough she also claims that they first met in medieval Germany, where she was studying to become a nun and he was left at their monastery to heal after a particularly vicious battle. As she begins to tell him the tale of how they met and later fell in love, he is sure that she is crazy. A schizophrenic who has wandered down from the psych ward. But he feels oddly comforted by her presence, so he lets her continue. Little does he know, that this women is about to take him on an incredible journey that will change how he feels about her, life and himself.

I found The Gargoyle to be an interesting premise. I loved the idea of a love that could transcend all obstacles and reunite people after seven hundred years. Unfortunately, however, I had a hard time getting into this book. It moved slowly at the beginning and until Marianne arrives you're only really dealing with the main character and he annoys me to no end. The writing in this early part feels choppy and amateurish. There are so many similes and metaphors it can get a little corny at times.

The beginning was almost enough for me to declare this novel a DNF (did not finish) but this book had been sitting on my shelf for over a year now and since it had been so long I thought I could at least try and finish it. I'm really thankful that I did. The Gargoyle gets a million times better after Marianne shows up. Her stories – both of her own life and those of other star crossed lovers – are absolutely beautiful. The present day happenings of the book often don't even compare to the style and strength of those chapters. It is almost as if they are written by two different people.

All in all this book left me with mixed feelings. I didn't really like it but I also wouldn't say I disliked it. It was definitely a mixed bag. It left me with a lot to think about. Marianne's life (whether real or not) is an incredible one and there is definitely some deeper symbolism going on, which I found incredible. I don't know if that was enough, however, to make up for my dislike of the main character and the occasional over use of literary devices.

rtc

Epic story drew my right in. I'm pretty sensitive, so the graphic descriptions of his accident, injuries, etc.,were, rough, but I'm glad I persevered.

Read 8/3/2008 (guessing)

This was a tough book to rate. I loved the stories which were woven into this novel and the fantastical elements of the plot and the characters. I was often exasperated with the author for spending so much time describing minute details about food, burn patients, 13th century book production, etc. Those details, while interesting in a way, tended to detract from the pace of the novel and almost felt like Davidson was trying to show off how much research time he spent while writing the novel. I had to laugh when he actually told us the Viking word for snow...um, who cares? The audio narrator was very good and kept me listening through 16 CDs, so it was worth the effort. Okay, recap...good story, almost like a favorite book your parents read you as a kid, suspend belief, get past the sometimes gruesome detail, and enjoy the love story.

4.5 stars. This is a love story stretching over thousands of years. It starts with a porn star escaping from a car accident in which he is burnt beyond recognition. While recovering in hospital, he is visited by a woman who claims they were lovers in his past life. He assumes she is not quite right-in-the-head, but she persists in visiting him and telling tales of their 'past' - as well as of her various friends. This book sucks you in and is really hard to put down. In the end, it is a tale of a lost soul trying to find itself and meaning. There are enough elements to keep one guessing as to what might be reality and what might be imaginary. There is also a nice mix of factual and fairy-tale - although some may find the parts relating to the accident and subsequent medical treatment of his injuries quite gruesome.

I don't know. It took me months to read this book. A lot of them time because I just didn't want to. I also don't think the "side stories" did enough to connect the dots. Just wasn't for me.

This was a great book of short stories, but the overall story that wove them together sometimes bored me. In the end it pulled together, but sometimes I had to do a lot of skimming of the present day to get to the stories from the past.

I really like the bones of this book - the intertwining of mysticism and death, the inclusion of the manuscript and sculpture work, the concept of physical versus spiritual beauty - but I feel like the narrative of the story got all jumbled. All the ancillary ghosts get all jumbled up with The Inferno and it doesn't quite make all that much sense.

I keep thinking this was about 100 pages too long, that a great deal of the narrative meandering could have been streamlined. In the end, the major denoument of the story wasn't that hard to guess but it does leave more questions than answers. Not that satisfying. This book was supposed to be one of my favorites of 2008, a great story about a horribly burned porn star who becomes entangled with a questionably-sane woman who believes the two knew each other in 14-century Germany, but it just kept languishing on my TBR pile with a bookmark sticking out of the top, marking where I'd last gotten distracted.