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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Erica Marsden's son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.
There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it-to find a way out of her quandary-Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.
The Labyrinth is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. It shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.
Reviews (2)
Bookseller Publisher Review
Devastated when her son is convicted of negligent homicide, Erica Marsden cuts all ties to her former life and retreats to a lonely coastal hamlet near his prison. Moving into a rundown shack, she avoids the company of her few neighbours. In between visits to her son, who suffers from an undefined mental illness and takes pleasure in teasing his mother as a cat might a mouse, Erica conceives a project: the planning and construction of a labyrinth in her backyard. Despite her reluctance to engage with the community, a small group of locals--including a possible illegal immigrant with very definite ideas of his own--soon gathers to help complete the project. As she works, Erica examines her past life, attempting to exorcise her own feelings of guilt and shame. Veteran writer Amanda Lohrey's writing is excellent, and she mixes pastoral and gothic tropes beautifully. Erica's sheer doggedness in the face of the continual setbacks that plague her life makes her a compelling and sympathetic character. However, many other characters remain somewhat unexplored, appearing and disappearing without explanation, almost as functions of Erica's need. The Labyrinth is a puzzle of a novel that teases out several promising narrative strands but frustrates readers' curiosity with too many dead ends. Angela Elizabeth is a freelance writer and critic based in Brisbane with 10 years' experience in bookselling and publishing.
Guardian Review
In the midst of a self-described "fugue" state, Erica Marsden buys a half-forgotten windswept shack along the south coast of New South Wales. She moves to be closer to her son, who is incarcerated in a nearby prison, and to undertake a project that has captured her imagination almost to the point of obsession. Driven by a dream and childhood memories, Erica sets out to build a stone labyrinth in the sandy earth behind the shack. As she explores the design and history of the labyrinth, Erica remakes and reimagines herself and the lives of those around her. The Labyrinth is a deeply meditative book: the eighth novel from Tasmanian novelist Amanda Lohrey, whose previous works - including A Short History of Richard Kline, Reading Madame Bovary and Camille's Bread - have been widely acclaimed. Her latest is ideal for the meandering uncertainties of 2020. The characters who wander the pages are searching for meaning beyond the various trappings of their lives. Although Erica's story is at the core of the novel, she is surrounded by people who are equally unsettled. To call them lost would be a misstep though: The maze is a challenge to the brain (how smart are you), the labyrinth to the heart (will you surrender). In the maze you grapple with the challenge but in the labyrinth you let go. Effortlessly you come back to where you started, somehow changed by the act of surrender. The novel captures these acts of surrender, as the labyrinth weaves its way around the lives of everyone nearby. Garra Nulla, a hamlet with only a hundred or so dwellings and no shop, pub, or anything that might mark it as a town, fosters the intimacies and connections between characters who might otherwise be left to the periphery. The remote setting allows their lives to intersect and overlap in the way that busier cities often don't. The structure of the labyrinth also provides definition to the narrative, which might otherwise find itself lost in memories of the past. As the story itself follows the winding paths of memory, the act of conceiving of and building the labyrinth grounds Erica, and the narrative, in the present. Erica reflects on her relationship with her father, and her experience of motherhood - both unsettling - and while neither strand reaches a finite resolution, there is a peace in the physical act of construction. She frequently returns to the echo of her father, who "believed in the mind as a divine engineering project designed for the invention and use of tools. Homo faber: man the maker. The use of the hands is a powerful medicine, he would say." And while she is unable to reconcile her relationships with her father and son, in creating and constructing the labyrinth she draws people to her: Lexie, who wants to leave the trappings of the hamlet to start a life in the city; Ray, a brooding miser trapped in his own torment; and Jurko, an illegal immigrant running from the memory of an unhappy childhood. Each are lured to the project for their own reasons, although Lohrey avoids the sentimentality of allowing their shared goal to spring unlikely (and unbelievable) friendships. Instead their paths intersect in solitude - there are brief moments of connection and recognition, but ultimately each traipses the sandy pathways alone. Lohrey, a deft and poetic writer, was awarded the Patrick White literary award in 2012. Her writing here is beautifully layered, rich in imagery and meaning, without ever being laboured. The themes of isolation and incarceration are reinforced in the various locations of the novel, which range from the large echoing mansion in which Erica raised her son, to the dry sheep paddocks and grassy headland of Garra Nalla. These places of relatively peaceful solitude are juxtaposed with the prison, where everything is "steel and concrete; even the air has a metallic taste". Erica's interactions with her son, Daniel, are similarly disruptive, the crude coldness of his rage towards her disrupting the maternal comfort that threatens to stereotype her. The Labyrinth offers a pull towards the unknown and a comfort in solitude. It is a sharply tuned novel, a sprawling narrative that resists rigid expectations, instead allowing those who inhabit the pages to surrender themselves to the mode of "reversible destiny" that it is constructed around. Despite sometimes eerie loneliness, the book is quietly compelling, a carefully planned reflection on the many ways that we might retrace and remake ourselves and our relationships.