Setup to be an Epic Romance that Just Didn’t Do it For Me

Apparently this book is a little divisive among my circle of friends: some loved it, some really didn’t. And unfortunately I am falling on the side of it not really being for me. Which is not to say I don’t love epic romances (The Song of Achilles is one of my absolute favourite books, after all!), but the story here wasn’t selling me beyond the initial concept. It’s a shame really, I found the premise to be so intriguing, but the overall experience quite lackluster overall.

The Gargoyle is told from the point of view of a nameless protagonist, who is involved in a car accident that leaves him severely burned on the majority of his body. This opening hook immediately drew me in and then left me cringing as the experience and recovery was written in intense detail. As our protagonist recovers, however, and in the midst of wanting to end his own life, he meets a woman from the psych ward of the hospital named Marianne, who tells him that they know each other and were in love once: as the protagonist slowly recovers, Marianne continues to visit and care for him, all while telling the story of their past life together in 14-century Germany. Marianne also recounts several other tragic love stories, and we feel a sense that perhaps Marianne is not just a woman who believes in the lies she tells herself, but perhaps she really did know our protagonist all those years ago.

Switching between the story of the characters’ “past” and their present is intriguing as a concept, though I definitely found that the past sections were a lot stronger for a number of reasons, largely in the actual presentation of the characters themselves (though more on that later). But despite having an interesting premise that drew me in, one of the big problems I had with this novel is that it’s pacing is just so sluggish: there are far too many pages for the story being told here, and around half-way though the novel I was already growing tired and wanted some sort of tone change to occur that never really happened in a significant way. And then after all that time spent over so many pages, the ending just didn’t feel fulfilling to me: it was very expected and perhaps it was supposed to be poetic in a way but I really felt like it was just a drawn-out inevitability.

But more than anything, while I was enjoying the tale of the romance in the past between Marianne and her love, the present-day left so much to be desired as her character ended up being pared down to little more than an exhausting manic pixie dreamgirl (literally, she is diagnosed with manic episodes?). Her existence is to be quirky and to care for the protagonist, immediately in love with him and perfect and sexy in almost every way: her flaws are quirks, and while our protagonist does come to care for her and want her to be well, ultimately I find that he gives her little in response to the overarching care and attention she gives him. Their dynamic did not work for me, and perhaps it is also that I didn’t find much compelling about the protagonist, which is a shame because all the framework is there for an interesting character given his back-story and life, but it ended up quite off-putting to me. I mean, it was an uphill battle after he describes himself unironically as a “fuck artist” and I rolled my eyes so hard after checking whether the novel was written by a woman or not. Yeah, I guess I would say there is definitely a heavy male-hand to this writing that I felt, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but really came out feeling like a story that the author thought women would want to hear due to their inherent nurturing nature (and love of… bad boys? Men with troubled pasts they want to “save”?), but ultimately did nothing for me. I mean sure, Marianne thinks she recognizes her past love and that is the draw, but I really didn’t get the two of them together until right near the end where suddenly the whole story undermines itself in a way (at least, in my opinion).

All that said, I did enjoy the other little stories of different characters interspersed throughout the novel as Marianne told them to the protagonist: I mean, they were all pretty tragic and hitting the same emotional notes as one another, but I really thought that ultimately these characters would be more meaningful in regards to the outcome of the story than they ended up being. Perhaps I just got my hopes up or had other ideas of what I would have wanted that the author didn’t think would work. Who am I to say!

So in the end, while The Gargoyle started off strong, it really hit a wall and suddenly became a drag for me about a quarter of the way in, or so. It had a great idea that I would love to see perhaps play out in a different way, but ultimately didn’t do much for me in this iteration.