The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson

I walked past this book many times and noted its cover. There was something very compelling about it, but the title was off putting. The word Gargoyle is so connotative and takes me back to childish fears of the dark.

One day, though, I actually picked it up and read the publishers blurb -- actually, the inside back jacket -- and discovered that Andrew Davidson is Canadian AND from Manitoba. I was enticed and took it home.

I have to admit that it took me awhile to become engaged. Firstly, the opening seemed contrived and I didn't appreciate the narrator speaking directly to the reader. Reading about the pain and disfigurement of the horrific burn actualized those childish fears of the dark. The fact that the author was Canadian encouraged me to read on, and I'm so glad I did. Yes, there were times when I rolled my eyes, but I was hooked and couldn't put it down. I guess am truly drawn to aspects of the world that are outside the classical rigours of symmetry and proportion prescribed as beauty. I may come to see Gargoyles as beautiful, after all.

I think this review from the Edmonton Sun sums it up nicely, “A wild page-turner and a boldly impudent work that flirts with the trappings of gothic romances, historical novels and fantasies while skirting their clichés and remaining defiantly unique.”

I would recommend this book to most, and especially to those who enjoyed Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet.

Publisher's Blurb:
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time. On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him - that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him. And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he'd never uttered: love.