“Molly turned page forty of the manuscript, put it face down on the stack and switched off her desk lamp….the pages of the novel had got under her skin and left her feeling strangely unsettled.”
This is how Chapter Six on page fifty-five of Caro Llewellyn’s debut novel, LOVE UNEDITED, begins and by that stage this marvellous meta-fiction had certainly got under my skin. And the unsettling was a provocation. The hook was well and truly embedded and resistance to read further was futile.
In LOVE UNEDITED, Molly is an Australian editor working for a New York publisher who happens upon a manuscript by an anonymous author via an enigmatic and now dead literary agent. The manuscript tells the story of Edna, an Australian working in American publishing. Edna is motherless and shares the same name as Molly’s deceased mother. This is an intriguing coincidence, the nascent parallelism propelling the story into an even more compelling narrative.
Edna’s odyssey, an epic of obsession and passion, coupled with Molly’s story of abandonment and discovery, is adroitly handled, a tandem of tales that tantalise mystery all the way to the end. A whodunit who wrote it writ large.
Abundance in style, character and plot never becomes a trickle, the narrative stream strong for the duration, teeming with undercurrent and rich in tributaries.
The physical and the philosophical are explored, art and literature, creativity and imagination, commingle. The literary character of Rochester, redolent in Edna’s object of desire, an enigmatic writer, looms large, the paintings of artist Edward Hopper are evoked textually, and there’s an endorsement for the multi faceted comfort of the long tapered bottle of Issey Miyake perfume.
LOVE UNEDITED aims at the heart of the throat and scores repeated bulls-eyes. It is a veritable weather vane of unedited love – a forecast of blue skies, of sun shiny days, and the shock of building clouds and deluge; tempests and tumult.
Llewellyn shows an enviable narrative gift, combining a powerful sense of place with a compassionate understanding of human complexity. LOVE UNEDITED is a love story, a mystery and a quest, glamorous, scandalous and extremely satisfying.
LOVE UNEDITED by Caro Llewellyn is published by Picador
