The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This story has two different themes which are inextricably tied together: love and redemption. That in itself is not so new or different, but the way in which Davidson goes about it is intensely interesting.
While the neutral background characters provide the context for understanding this story as a love story (their background romance is sneaky in the sense that it works well to do this), Davidson also intersplices many other background stories and inherent side chapters to do the same thing. None of these stories by itself is compelling. And while they provide the skeptical narrator interest at first, he soon drops this rhetoric in favor of oh, you get the point. In fact much of the narrator acts as a skeptic for us, so that we can further suspend our belief.
In that sense, it’s quite a good structure.
I did find much of the passionate pleas for love, for unconditional acceptance to be moving, probably because it’s so fantastic. But that is how faith is supposed to work, as Pascal’s Pensees work, Christianity is so inexplicable and unexplanable, we have no choice but to believe! And Davidson’s craft works in much the same way. If you are able to go with it, including the highly contingent and very fantastic characters that provide the fodder for disbelief–that each of these very different characters from very different worlds can connect with one another on such a common basis such as pure presence–in the form of love.
In that way, this book works like a multicultural manifesto, in which people from all walks of life must seek a connection to the unnamed anchor that acts as an absolute reference beyond both life and death. At this point both hero and heroine make their way through all their reincarnated lives in an effort to be redeemed. Not just through their heart, but to give up their heart through each other into the hands of a loving God.
It’s definitely a nice tale that strikes at a complete world view appropriate to the readership of probably mostly northern European/American audiences with a small smattering of Other in the form of polite Japanese discourse. And that’s cool, I guess.
One could always just read Pascal and get the same point. But then you wouldn’t get some of Davidson’s lovely lines.
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