Beauty And The Beast

The nameless hero of Andrew David­son’s first novel is a pornographer and cocaine addict who runs his car into a ravine one night while he’s high, thinking a shower of arrows is coming at him.

The car catches fire but he survives, suffering horrific burns to most of his body. While recovering in the burn unit of a hospital he is befriended by Marianne Engel, who claims to have been born in 14th-century Germany, but who the hero has reason to believe is ­really just an inmate in the hospital’s psych ward.

(In what we have to hope is an inaccurate depiction of mental health professionals, the in-house shrink tips him off that she might be schizophrenic or obsessive compulsive.) Marianne and the hero become close, and during the months of his recovery she reconstructs the story of their long-ago love affair, which the hero has forgotten. She also tells him stories about other lovers. Set in 14th-century Italy, Victorian England, medieval Japan and Viking Scandinavia, these passions always conclude with the death of one or both parties.

As straight-up entertainment, “The Gargoyle” is so-so. It’s not exactly unputdownable, but it has enough unexplained details to remain interesting. Could it be true that Marianne lived in the 14th century, and how did she get to the present? Why does she now compulsively carve stone gargoyles in the basement of her house, and what have these grotesque physical forms to do with the hero’s own disfiguring burn scars? All fine questions, which build to a moderately satisfying conclusion.

“The Gargoyle” asks to be read as a profound love story. Romantic love is posited as a feeling so powerful that it endures through time and space: people who fell in love in the 1300s can turn up again in 2008 and still feel it.

Far-fetched though the idea is, Davidson does persuade us that, in the universe of this novel, it could logistically happen. What he doesn’t do is persuade us that the particular people in question love each other.

The lovers in “The Gargoyle” have the intimacy of roommates who hook up when they get drunk, not a time-defying passion. Their thoughts, feelings, conversations and affections are so unformed, so hampered by sentiment and under­powered awkwardness that the courage, endurance and under­standing ascribed to them seem silly. Davidson’s lovers are dysfunctional and quirky, qualities that can look a bit like profundity from a distance, but they don’t have emotional or imaginative depth or range, which at the end of the day are the only things that can make a love story deep and wide-ranging.

“The Gargoyle” has literary pretensions, offering a crude revisiting of the “Inferno” (it begins in a wood, it ends after a journey into hell). The “Inferno” text features in the story, too, but in a mawkishly overdetermined way: a soldier with a copy of Dante tucked in his shirt pocket is shot with a flaming arrow; the arrow hits the book instead of his heart, but the pages don’t burn and both volume and soldier survive.

Behold the power of the written word. The reworking plods along heavily: Charon “stepped to one side and swept an arm to indicate that we were invited to board. Francesco nodded. ‘We deeply appreciate your generosity.’ ” And the prose can be cringingly baroque. The hero, in his porn days, had “buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt.”

Like most first novels, “The Gargoyle” does some things well and some things badly, and it does lots and lots of them because the author hasn’t yet figured out which ones will work. There are passages to indicate that Davidson has a real talent for close physical description and tight storytelling. The problems come when he lingers on describing feelings and thoughts, which end up sounding thin and unconvincing.

Which leaves us with this novel’s back story. “The Gargoyle” sold for $1.25 million in the United States and is to be published in at least 26 other countries. If those figures are anything to go by, then an awful lot of people are going to be reading “The Gargoyle” this summer. And so far the bloggers and booksellers have been enthusiastic, going along with the Doubleday editors’ claim that it is “a tale of unbearable suffering and ultimate redemption, a love story that spans centuries and renders the ordinary laws of probability … irrelevant.”

There’s no doubt that readers want a tale of unbearable suffering and ultimate redemption, and a whole lot of people in the publishing industry (not least the author himself) hope that Davidson’s novel is going to fit the bill. “The Gargoyle” ought not be mistaken for a depiction of unbearable suffering or ultimate redemption, however; it is simply an entertaining novel straining to feel like something more substantial.