The Gargoyle

The Gargoyle is not as good as it wants you to think it is. The author's bio boasts that he spent seven years researching and composing this book, and you can tell. Unlike more skilled writers, who are able to take their researched information and thread it subtly through their work so that it is both an integral and imperceptible part of the story, Andrew Davidson seems to want you to see his work. And for a while its kind of fun reading in large chunks about medieval German nuns and Galileo's theories on the physics of Dante's hell, until you realize that that is actually the meat of this book. Things like the story, the characters and the depth of their relationships are all seriously lacking.

Davidson's narrator, while witty at times, is hardly engaging, despite his many tragedies. He's given a background of potentially rich and complex character, but he just feels flat. His romantic interest, Marianne Engel, has many different sides to her personality - dysfunctional artist, doting lover, sheltered nun - but they don't seem to come together to make a cohesive whole (though she's possibly schizophrenic, so maybe that's the point). And this great epic love that they supposedly have? Not feeling it. They've got some chemistry, sure, but there is no sign as to how they are the long-awaited answer to each other's deep rooted questions. Over and over, this book tries to tell you that it is bigger than it is, that it's an epic for the ages, but it feels more like an amateurish attempt. The narrator's descent through Dante's hell should've been a rich, profound part of the story, instead it felt tedious and boring. The themes of penance and redemption were lost on me because I just didn't see why these characters needed redemption anyway.

That said, this is not a terrible book. I enjoyed reading it, the prose for much of first part of the book, where the narrator was at his most angst-ridden, was really original and beautiful, and I was entertained mostly until the last hundred pages or so. But its not a groundbreaking debut, nor an “Inferno of our time” as the description on the book jacket claims. Its beach reading, possibly the beginning of a great career even. But not anything special.