The Knot

   
   

    Jane Borodale's second novel The Knot takes a man's life in the years from 1565 to 1578, with an epilogue in 1607, and examines it in terms of both its important events and its everyday occurrences. It's about a family, but also an academic undertaking - the translation of a Herbal - and the making of a garden, the Knot of the title, and just as a garden needs structure and 'bones' and features together with infilling or 'clothing' with plants, so the focus on Henry Lyte constantly and effortlessly alters from large life-changing episodes to small and beautifully rendered domestic details.

    In keeping with her theme, Jane Borodale's engrossing narrative moves with the shifting seasons and the cycles of growth and die-back, inflorescence and decay, to show the phases of Henry's life, its waxing and waning, periods of vigour and stasis. Subject matter and method of presenting it are perfectly matched.

    Henry Lyte lived at Lytes Cary Manor in Somerset. He was married three times (it's the period of his second marriage which is covered by the book) and had thirteen children, many not surviving to adulthood, but he is remembered as the author of A Niewe Herball (1578), a translation of the French edition of the Cruydeboeck of Rembert Dodoens (1564), made with the express purpose of setting down the properties and uses of medicinal plants so that "knowledge should run freely" and be there for all, and good health should be "a universal possibility".

    His book is a labour of love, taking him many years to complete, and involving careful study and collection of plants in the wild and in cultivation. In tandem with the book, Henry is making a garden, "a perfect Knot: green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses. [...] He hopes to coax from it an exquisite, flourishing entity; something wholly alive and changeable, a place where man and nature can meet and within which he and others will be able to study the riddles of botany". Helped and vexed in equal measure by his wilful gardener Mote who always seems to have the last word, Henry uses his garden - as he does his Herbal - as a means of escape from the harsh realities of an existence in which, despite his ample means, life is precarious and troubles forever beset him. His absorption in his work is both his salvation and ultimately his immortality.

    I loved the book for its meticulous research and its sense of the gentle sifting of historical fact, like dust motes in sunlight, over a story of substance which sets ambition and labour for the greater good of all against a background of travails and personal tragedy. It's a fine work, and one whose atmosphere lingers in the mind; I should very much like to read Jane's first novel The Book of Fires now, and I'll look forward with great interest to what she does next.