This is a very definite change of style for Llewellyn. This intriguing story of love, unquenchable desire and uncanny intergenerational connections is her first novel. Readers will be comforted to know that Llewellyn’s talent easily traverses that genre bridge.
The story begins with the narrator, an editor and reticent writer, Edna, meeting up with her old lover, an unnamed, extremely successful fiction writer, in a Melbourne café. She needs him to understand the disruption her love for him caused in her life. After first meeting him in Australia on his book tour, Edna left home to follow him to NYC, although he tantalisingly remained just out of her reach. Soon, a parallel storyline emerges, with Molly, an Australian editor working in NYC (just like Edna had been) receiving the first 40 pages of this same narrative: in a book-within-a-book, both the reader and Molly are reading Edna’s novel. Molly is disturbed by the similarities between her life and Edna’s. Molly’s compelled to read the remaining chapters but is thwarted by the death of the person who sent the initial pages. Her investigations lead back to Australia where the narrative threads converge.
Llewellyn’s writing is assured. If there’s one quibble, it’s that the alliterative naming of characters for each generation (‘E’s for Edna’s, ‘M’s for Molly’s) is unnecessarily quirky. Regardless, this is a wonderful literary mystery centred on the different forms love takes.
In Love Unedited Llewellyn uses dance and fishing as metaphors to describe Edna’s journey with her mysterious writer. He pulls her close, then spins her away; he hooks her, then releases her. All the while her desire for him remains undiminished.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caro Llewellyn is CEO of the Wheeler Centre and the author of four works of non-fiction including the 2020 Stella Prize shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass, which is about her father’s polio and her own MS diagnosis. She’s also the former artistic director of several large-scale literary festivals, including Sydney Writers’ Festival, the PEN World Voices Festival chaired by Salman Rushdie in New York, the New Literature from Europe Festival also in New York, and the Paris-based Festival des Écrivains du Monde for Columbia University. She is on the Board of the Summer Foundation and is Chair of the Suburban Review.
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