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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Heart
Andrew
Davidson’s debut novel, The
Gargoyle, weighs in at 480 pages, and that almost led me to take a pass. I
assumed a lack of discipline or editing. I was wrong. Davidson’s writing is
crisp, and he has bitten off a huge and complicated structure for his debut.
Modern characters are paired with medieval ones, and the story bounces back
and forth between the two, under the care of a skeptical narrator, who leads
readers toward suspending disbelief while enjoying fine writing and great
storytelling. A central theme involves hearts, and on multiple levels, this
is a love story that crosses the centuries. Here’s an excerpt, from the
modern story, from chapter 2, pp. 28-31: Dr.
Edwards had warned me that the first time I was conscious during a
debridement session would be painful beyond the ability of the morphine to
alleviate, even with an increased dosage. But all I heard was "increased
dosage," and it brought a smile to my face, although no one could see it
under the bandages. The
extra dope started to take effect shortly before I was to be moved, and I was
floating on a beautiful high when I heard Dr. Edwards' clipped footsteps,
from sensible shoes, coming at me from down the hall before she arrived. Dr.
Edwards was, in every way, average looking. Neither pretty nor ugly, she
could fix her face to look adequately pleasing but she rarely bothered. Her
hair could have had more body if she'd brushed it out each morning, but she
usually just pulled it back, perhaps out of practical concerns, as it is
hardly advisable for loose strands to fall into burn wounds. She was slightly
overweight and if one were to make a guess, it would be a good bet that at
some point she'd simply grown tired of counting calories. She looked as if
she had grown into her commonness and accepted it; or perhaps she'd decided
that, since she was working among burn survivors, too much attention to her
appearance might even be an insult. Dr.
Edwards gestured to the orderly she'd brought with her, a ruddy chunk
of a man whose muscles flexed when he reached out for me. Together, they
transferred me from my bed to a stretcher. I squealed like a stuck pig, learning
in a moment just how much my body had grown to accept its stillness. The
burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn
victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from
other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the
chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. The debridement
room, I could not help but notice, was in the farthest room of this farthest
wing. By the time my session was finished, I realized this was so the other
burn patients couldn't hear the screams. The
orderly laid me out on a slanted steel table where warm water, with medical
agents added to balance my body chemistry, flowed across the slick surface.
Dr. Edwards removed my bandages to expose the bloody pulp of my body. They
echoed with flat thuds as she dropped them into a metal bucket. As she washed
me, there was disgust in the down-turned edges of her mouth and unhappiness
in her fingertips. The water flowing over me swirled pink. Then dark pink,
light red, dark red. The murky water eddied around the little chunks of my
flesh that looked like fish entrails on a cutting board. All
this was but a prelude to the main event. Debridement
is the ripping apart of a person, the cutting away of as much as can possibly
be endured. Technically, it is removal of dead or contaminated tissue from a
wound so that healthy skin may grow in its place. The word itself comes
intact from the French noun dibridement, which literally means
"unbridling." The etymology is easy to construct: the removal of
contaminated tissue from the body—the removal of constricting matter—evokes
the image of taking the bridle off a horse, as the bridle itself is a
constriction. The debrided person shall be set free of the contaminant, as it
were. So
much of my skin was damaged that removing the putrefying tissue meant more
or less scrubbing away everything. My blood squirted up onto Dr. Edwards,
leaving streams of red across her gowned chest, as she used a razorlike
apparatus to take the dermis off my body, not unlike the way a vegetable
peeler removes the skin from food. Dr.
Edwards made long— No, that's too formal. Our situation made us more intimate
than the cruelest of lovers, so why not use her given name? Nan made
long swooping passes over my back. I could hear the blade as it slid along my
body, disengaging the skin. The only way she'd know that she'd reached the
good tissue was to actually slice into it. If I screamed in pain, she had
burrowed deeply enough to find functioning nerve endings. As Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell: "You never know what is enough unless
you know what is more than enough." Nan
deposited the thin sheets of my flesh in the same metal bucket that held my
dirty bandages. It was like seeing myself disappear, the flags of my
existence being blown away a millimeter at a time. The pain, mixed with the
morphine, caused the most interesting images to flash through my mind:
Senator Joe McCarthy bellowing "Better dead than red"; a carpenter
assembling the crosses upon which the crucified would be nailed; dissection
in biology class, with eighth-grade scalpels cutting into frog stomachs. Once
I was fully debrided, the exposed sites needed to be covered with grafts, be
they cadaver or pig. It never mattered much, because my body rejected them
all. This was expected, as the grafts were never meant to be permanent; they
were there mostly to prevent infection. During
my stay in the hospital, I was skinned alive over and over. In many ways
debridement is more overwhelming than the original burning because, whereas
the accident came as a surprise, I always knew when a debridement was scheduled. I would lie in the skeleton's
belly and dread each future sweep of the knife, previewing it a hundred times
in my imagination for each actual occurrence. The dispensing of
morphine was self-regulated—to "empower" me, they said—and I worked
that button furiously. But there was a goddamn block on the overall amount so
I couldn't overdose myself so much for empowerment. Davidson
is a talented writer, and those readers willing to take a chance on a debut novel
will be rewarded richly after reading The
Gargoyle. Steve
Hopkins, September 20, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Gargoyle.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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