The Gordian Knot Paperback – 5 Jan. 2012

I love Bernhard Schlink - another good book from this author. A must for anyone who has enjoyed his other works.

Georg is a translater of German birth living on the outskirts of Paris, who is not having an easy time of it, when he meets a gorgeous young woman who he falls for from a great height. She works for a company which he wants to join, and Francoise is happy to be a casual girlfriend, but refuses to move in with him. There follows a time of happy and periodic cohabitation. His boss gives him plenty of work, including some top secret armaments deals, involving a revolutionary type of helicopter. Then he comes upon Francoise copying the plans one evening and their relationship falters. She explains that her own boss has insisted that she get copies of the plans and then suddenly she disappears. Following his instincts he sets out to try and find her. After a period when he feels everyone is against him and the work dries up, he is led to suspect she has fled France to go to New York. He sets out to find her. The above is just an outline, there are complex events and intimations that there are a variety of powerful people interested in the plans. The action is gripping and intriguing by turns as the worrisome question of what has happened to Francoise and Georg’s manipulations of his opponents, some of whom may be CIA, or the undercover agents of Polish and Russian authorities. There is an unexpectedly satisfying denouement. The Gordian knot itself was a unravelled mystery that Alexander the Great had the answer to. He simply cut it to ribbons with his sword. This novel is a marvellous mixture of danger and passion and I found it eminently readable.

This book is so bad it's good. I should have given up and read something else, but kept thinking the author would produce some sophisticated turn of events. It doesn't happen. However, it's one of these books that you just keep turning the pages and somehow enjoy, like a cult B movie. Strange!

Schlink is so acclaimed that this novel was a surprising disappointment. The characters are psychologically inconsistent and bewildering,their behaviour unpredictable and often implausible; they are charmless too, and so one is not bothered whether the outcome for them will be a happy one or not. This distance between character and reader only draws greater attention to the clanking machinery of the plot, the control of which is clumsy and contrived. The strategies for moving him around, from France to America for example, and in pursuit of the girl he has lost, are utterly unconvincing; the scene in the Yankee Stadium is frankly ludicrous. Certainly the action moves pretty quickly in the last third of the book, even breathlessly, but you can't help thinking it's because Shlink knows he had better get a move on after the sluggishness and confusion that precede this sudden take-off. Unfortunately, it's hard to keep up with and make sense of it all. I often wondered why I was bothering at all.