A young man is fighting for his life.
Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him.
Their journey will have you believing in the impossible.
The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over - he is now a monster.
But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life - and, finally, to love.
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Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.1
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(@canongatebooks, 9 April 2008, ebook, 482 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc)
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I've wanted to read The Gargoyle since it was featured on the BBC's Between The Covers. I expected to enjoy the book but I loved every word. This is an incredible book that focuses on love, death, sin, redemption and hope. The book has clearly been inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy especially Inferno. I loved the way the love story develops between the unnamed narrator and the strange Marianne. It's so brilliantly written I didn't want to stop reading. I preferred the chapters set in the present between the narrator and Marianne rather than the chapters about Marianne's presume past life 700 years ago but the book is so well written, rich and engaging it got completely absorbed reading it.
