Andrew Davidson’s first novel is hugely impressive – The Gargoyle deals with extreme physical suffering and pervasive mental illness, with history and literature, and with love and loss, and Davidson handles his chosen range of themes with a great deal of panache.

Our nameless narrator is, by his own admission, a moral vacuum, a maker and purveyor of pornography, a serial womaniser unable to form emotional attachments after a crappy childhood, and a serious substance abuser; his only redeeming characteristic is a love of books and knowledge for its own sake. The story opens with the car accident that will transform his life, leaving it (and him) utterly unrecognisable, burned over much of his body. He describes the course of events in vivid detail, and then explains in a very matter-of-fact way the torments and tortures that he experiences in the burns unit in the name of treatment. It’s very graphic and at times hard to read, but simultaneously compelling – and Davidson has obviously done his research in to the recovery process for burns victims.

In to this new existence, Marianne Engel appears one day. A psychiatric patient from elsewhere in the hospital, she has no doubt that she and the narrator were lovers in their former lives, and she installs herself completely in to his life. Despite her apparent strangeness, this is not unwelcome, all former ‘friends’ having recoiled from the charred horror that the narrator has become. Marianne embarks on telling the story of their past lives and their relationship, teasing it out a bit at a time. She also tells a series of other short stories, all focusing on characters from other cultures – an Italian blacksmith, a Japanese glassblower, an Icelandic artisan, and others – and all concerned with the idea of doomed love. Stories become a major part of the currency of their developing relationship, and they are beautifully told.

Marianne Engel is a sculptor of gargoyles and grotesques; as she inserts herself in to the narrator’s existence, it becomes apparent that they are developing a deep bond, tempered only by the narrator’s mild skepticism about Marianne’s past lives. When he is finally ready to be discharged, he goes to live with her, and they in effect become each others carers – she assists with the complicated regimen of compression suits and skin scrubs he requires for healing, while he monitors her health when she embarks on one of her periodic marathons of carving, when she forgets to eat and becomes almost possessed by the need to ‘release’ the grotesques from the blocks of stone in her basement. We also meet Jack, Marianne’s agent, who is utterly unfazed by the narrator’s injuries – as their first meeting she calls him a “Crispy Critter”!

Marianne’s revelations of their past lives continue to emerge, a dramatic story of adventure in Medieval Germany. As that tale nears its climax, Marianne throws herself into a frenzy of carving that drives our narrator to despair, culminating in her near physical collapse. The narrator’s other friendships, forged during his time in hospital, burgeon even under this pressure and affirm his personal progress.

The relationship between Marianne and the narrator is deftly written and touching, standing outside the bounds of sexual love. Whether we accept the notion that Marianne’s guardian spirits and memories of past lives are a result of a mental illness, or genuine; whether we attribute the narrator’s out-of-body experiences to drug withdrawal or spiritual exploration – it does not change the fact that Marianne Engel makes our narrator, who has lost so much in his accident, a better and more likeable person. Like me, the narrator is naturally skeptical, a rationalist, but he is drawn in Marianne’s world – he wants to believe it’s all real, and, I must confess, so did I.

The Gargoyle is a stunning paen to the redemptive powers of love, with a standout cast of characters, making it one of the best books I have read this year so far.

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