The Gargoyle by Andrew DavidsonAndrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle, begins with a car accident that leaves its narrator, an unnamed, cocaine-addled pornographer, hospitalised with disfiguring burns. While he’s recovering in the hospital he’s visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, who greets him with the enigmatic words, “You’ve been burned… again,” and proceeds to soothe him with tales of previous lives and lost loves.

The Gargoyle has drawn comparisons to authors including Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco… but does it deserve them?

Andrew Davidson’s writing style is certainly brash and confident, and at first, this confidence carries the book, getting the reader past the narrator’s initial unlikeability. The early descriptions of burn treatment hold a certain gruesome fascination, as do the narrator’s fractious relationships with the hospital staff. But within the first couple of hundred pages, as Marianne arrives and begins to tell her stories—short, self-contained love stories and a gradually unfolding one about her supposed shared past with the narrator, stretching back almost 700 years—it becomes apparent that there’s not quite enough going on under the surface.

Perhaps it’s partly the characters: the narrator goes from unlikeable to invisible, as he leaves behind his old personality without really replacing it with anything else. Meanwhile, Marianne Engel, presumably intended to seem mysterious and alluring, instead comes across like a teenage goth’s fantasy, gabbling on about past lives, love, and death, before stripping naked to carve grotesque stone statues. Her stories-within-the-story, in particular, read like extended versions of those “true love” chain emails that used to go around: …and it was only when he died and she found his diary that she realised he had truly loved her. Pass this email on to forty loved ones so that you will receive good luck.

And while Davidson’s prose is confident, he still has some of the debut novelist’s quirks: the use of “interesting” fonts in dialogue, the odd self-conscious comment on the fact that he’s writing. There’s also a propensity for showing off that occasionally lands him in trouble. This is the second half of a list of food that Marianne brings for a special dinner at the hospital:

[...] spaghetti, fettuccini, macaroni, rigatoni, cannelloni, tortellini, guglielmo marconi, (just checking if you’re still reading), bananas, apples, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, mixed nuts, mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas bread, coconut shortbread, pecan pie, chocolates, chocolate logs, chocolate frogs, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, fudge, sugar, spice, everything nice, epiphany cake, fruitcake, gingerbread men, Torte Vigilia di Natale, snips, snails, puppydog tails, cranberry punch, eggnog, milk, grape juice, apple juice, orange juice, soft drinks, coffee, tea, you say to-may-to juice, I say to-mah-to juice, and bottled water.

Was Davidson himself bored when he wrote this? In which case, why didn’t he stop? Or does he think this is funny? There are frequent places in the text where Davidson indulges himself like this, at the cost of the story. Apparently the original draft he sent to the agent was 50,000 words longer, and was rejected for being too flabby and self-indulgent. Neither problem has really been addressed.

The Gargoyle was originally bought by Doubleday in the US for $1.25 million, and has now been published in the UK by Canongate. As a result, it’s had a lot of publicity and press coverage. Davidson would have been better off without so much attention on his debut novel. He’s not quite ready yet, and he can’t live up to the claims that people are making for him. But he’s still worth watching; if he can shake off the self-indulgence, he has the makings of a confident and able storyteller. In The Gargoyle, however, he doesn’t quite have enough of a story to tell.