The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson

Some novels about love's pains and rewards move far beyond common sense. Somehow, doomed and damnable love is a madness for which we will make any excuse. One reason why poets have been so keen to send lovers to the pains of death or hell is that these are the things we feel love is like. Andrew Davidson does this, and more: his first novel is a fever dream of passion which does not have to make entire sense, because it is a powerful metaphor for deep emotion.

His unnamed protagonist is a misanthropic but gorgeous male porn star hideously disfigured in a car crash. Key parts of his anatomy are burned even worse than the rest because he had a bottle of bourbon in the car with him: Davidson is not shy of the gratuitously punitive.

In hospital, through endless operations, the charred hulk is visited by a beautiful mad sculptor, Marianne, who claims that all of this has happened before. Once, she says, he was a mercenary and she a nun; their great love ended in disaster. She tells him of other doomed lovers - a Victorian widow, an Italian couple divided by plague, a gay Viking. In dreams, he meets them as they assist his traversing of Dante's Hell.

Though completely crackers, this is a powerful and engaging book, partly because the narrator has a robust capacity to get past self-pity and a good eye for people around him. If, at times, Marianne can be too Little Miss Perfect, Davidson cuts the saccharine with astringent commentary by others not caught up in the romance. If he is going to make us eat high-falutin' near-nonsense, he will do so most effectively by having characters tell us we don't have to. This is an insane but well-crafted book, as grotesque as its heroine's carvings.