Some marvelous books have origins just as marvelous, and The Gargoyle is one of them.
The writer is Canadian, a young man from Pinawa, Manitoba, who until this book sold around the world last year had been making his living by writing educational materials in Japan for half of each year. The rest of the time he lived in his parent’s house in Manitoba, when he wasn’t in libraries exploring 14th century German mysticism, Dante, Japanese and Icelandic folklore, and the other lineaments of a story he was trying to get out of his head and onto the page. The story involved the love affair between a burned man in a hospital isolation unit and a schizophrenic sculptor named Marianne Engel, who was certain she had loved this man since he was a mercenary in the early 1300s in Germany. The burned man wasn’t so certain, and the novel is a long persuasion.
When the writer, Andrew Davidson, was done (at somewhere around the 300,000 word mark), he researched literary agents, and decided to send his manuscript to one of the best of them, a fellow named Eric Simonoff, who works at Janklow Nesbit in New York. Though the manuscript arrived unsolicited, the cover letter was so witty that Eric actually started to read the pile of pages, and kept reading until he was done. Then he took the time to send Andrew a fix note, telling him that he’d consider taking him on as a client if Andrew cut the book in half. In Eric’s experience, no new writer ever followed that advice, and so he did not expect to hear more from Andrew Davidson. But about six months later, a perfectly bound and typeset copy of The Gargoyle, an edition of one, landed on Eric’s desk.
I happened to walk into Eric’s office shortly thereafter, and Eric impulsively handed it to me as a fellow Canadian and publisher. The short version of this long story is that within days I had made an offer to publish The Gargoyle in Canada. Andrew and I worked then together on the final draft of the book—a total and complete treat for me, and not so bad for Andrew either—which Eric then sent to editors in New York and London in May 2007. Two more English language publishers—Doubleday in the US and Canongate in the UK—soon fell in love fiercely with the book and signed on, and in months 23 foreign languages publishers were also on board, all before pub date. I know why: The Gargoyle is a novel about love written in a way that not only hopeless romantics will adore, but that sneaks past the defences of people who think they will never fall for a love story. I won’t say more, because I hope you will read the novel too.
