I'm never sure how attentively anybody examines the front page of my blog, but if there are any very attentive people out there, they may have noticed that this novel has been on my 'What I'm Reading' list for a very long time. Now, I'm not a slow reader, as you will also have noticed, so what happened here? Well, this novel came to me as a Kindle edition and I don't have a Kindle (and never will, I hope). Of course there are other ways of reading online, and I'd already read two of Linda Gillard's novels -- House of Silence and Emotional Geology -- on my laptop and/or my iphone, and enjoyed them both a lot. But my life has been ridiculously busy and complicated lately, and once I'd put this latest one aside, it always seemed easier just to pick up a book. But I finally got back to Untying the Knot a couple of days ago and once I had, I whizzed through to the end in record time and now I'm going to tell you why you should read it, if you haven't already.
Linda Gillard, as I'm sure most people know by now, has been a bit of a publishing phenomenon. An established author, she found herself suddenly blocked by an unenthusiastic publisher and decided to bring out House of Silence as an ebook. She has followed its extraordinary success with other titles, of which this is the most recent. Although all three of the novels I've read so far can loosely be described as romances -- not a genre I am particularly attracted to on the whole -- they reach out beyond that rather confining definition and deal with issues of great interest.
I could describe the plot of Untying the Knot fairly simply -- a married couple have separated, the wife has begun a new and fulfilling life as a maker of beautiful textile artworks, the husband is living with a new and much younger woman. But it becomes clear that they still have feelings for each other -- will they ever act on them? And yes, that is the bare bones. But the novel is more than that, because what complicates their relationship, and has, essentially, destroyed it in the first place, is the fact that the husband has been a professional soldier and is still, after many years in civilian life, suffering from post-traumatic-stress. Linda Gillard has studied this terrible and disabling syndrome in great detail and writes extraordinarily convincingly about its destructive effects both on the individual sufferer and on his family. Several inter-related complications within the extended family of these two people make one very unsure of the likelihood of them ever reaching a happy outcome, and, indeed, what that outcome could possibly be. I wasn't sure myself until almost the very end, and I'm certainly not going to tell you.
So -- if you like the sound of this very readable novel, go for it, whether or not you have a Kindle. Good intelligent comfort reading with enough discomfort to make it interesting -- what more could you ask?
