The Labyrinth

by Amanda Lohrey

Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for a monstrous act of revenge. Trapped in her grief, Erica retreats from Sydney to a sleepy hamlet on the south coast, near where Daniel is serving his sentence.

There, in a rundown shack by the ocean, she obsesses over building a labyrinth. To create it—to navigate the path through 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 story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children. It is also an examination of how art can be ruthlessly destructive, and restorative. Mesmerising yet disquieting, it shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Book Club, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Amanda Lohrey is a novelist and essayist. She was educated at the University of Tasmania and Cambridge. She lectured in Writing and Textual Studies at the Sydney University of Technology (1988-1994), and since 2002 at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Reviews

[Colin Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proof I should persevere with some novels.
This is my third attempt - the first two left me cold after a few pages.
Given its literary accolades, I was probably expecting too much from the start, a mind-blowing reaction after the crack of the starter’s gun.
I persevered this time and it paid off.
The text still left me a little cold; the characters were blunt, seeking answers to their fragile backgrounds, connections and aspirations. The author offered up only tit-bits to all this. Likely intentional to isolate the reader and make us want to know more. If so, I say well done Amanda Lohrey.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd, dreamy book that feels loaded with complex meaning. The central character has left the city to live in a small coastal community near where her son is imprisoned and has a hard-to-explain obsession with building a labyrinth. The book unfolds hypnotically, with a handful of characters and linked scenes rather than any kind of propulsive plot. I was strangely captivated by it - it dwells on grief and family, love and death and the making of things. It's one to puzzle over - it will drift around in my brain for ages.

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Award.

Erica Marsden grew up in an Asylum, Melton Park. Not as a patient, her father was the chief medical officer and their family lived within the compound. Perhaps that is why their mother ran away when Erica was only nine, their father mistaken when telling Erica and her younger brother, Axel, that she would return.

Now grown up, Erica is returning to Melton Park. The asylum is now decommissioned and is somewhat of a tourist attraction. Her father was killed by a patient with a garden scythe, the gruesome story luring lovers of the macabre. Some things have changed, the church now a café, others have remained the same. There are signs of dilapidation, but also signs of restoration.

Surprisingly Erica and her brother were allowed to roam around the compound and what Erica is truly searching for is the labyrinth that she loved as a little girl. She remembers her and her brother playing for hours within its plane. The labyrinth seemed a magical place to the children. However, after searching it appears the labyrinth has disappeared.

A man working in the café, tells her that the labyrinth became overgrown and unruly and that it ended up being dug out.

Erica who has moved to a tiny coastal town in NSW to be able to visit her son who is imprisoned for manslaughter, decides that she wants to build her own labyrinth behind the dilapidated shack that she is living in and thinking of buying.

What unfolds is a beautifully written story populated by some wonderful characters.

Jurko, an illegal immigrant, camping in the forest hiding from the authorities is serendipitously a stonemason, and Erica hires him to build the labyrinth. He is a joy to read and a highlight of the book for me. Equally a joy, but a lesser character, is cantankerous old Ray. A grumpy old timer who helps Jurko, grumbling the whole time.

Much like “Lucky’s” by Andrew Pippos, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin as well. The strength of this novel lies in the narrative and the characters.

Yet there are also parts that I confess may have slipped over my head. There are dream sequences and memories that seem to follow a path and I am sure that the Labyrinth itself has a meaning to divulge. Is Erica’s life a labyrinth, twisting and turning leading to an undetermined goal? Parts of Erica’s life, her relationship with her father, and her son, are never truly resolved and I believe this may also connect to the labyrinth. Are we all negotiating our way through a labyrinth?

The labyrinth of life.

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

I'm patting myself on the back for giving this novel another chance to impress me.
I borrowed the paperback some months ago but I couldn't concentrate so DNF.

Upon seeing the audiobook, I jumped at the opportunity to try it in that format.

I'm convinced Danielle Carter's mesmerising reading has made this novel better.

The main character and narrator is Erica Marsden, who retired and moved to a little seaside town to be near the prison where her son, an artist, is serving a life sentence. She buys a rundown place. She wants to put a labyrinth there. It's fair to say that's a bit of an obsession of hers.
Erica meets some interesting characters in the sleepy town.

I can't quite put my finger on why I liked this novel so much. The lyrical writing and dream like feel come first to mind.
I also liked that there weren't huge life altering realisations.

So, I'm happy The Labyrinth was awarded the Miles Franklin - the richest and probably the most prestigious Australian literary award.

[John Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book, well deserved winner of the Miles Franklin Award as the best work of fiction in Australia for the past year.

There is heaps unsaid or unfinished in this book, there is little resolution of anything. It's the journey and Erica is leading us on the journey. The writing is exquisite, the characters mesmorising.

So many unanwered questions, so much left unresolved. But so much raised, so many things I wanted to know, but was happy in the end, as the resolution was not as important as the journey.

Loved this one.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5★ happily rounded up for the spellbinding narration by Danielle Carter.

I have a hit and miss record with literary award winners, but this one was a big hit for me. Up until the moment I began to read I still wasn't sure it would be my kind of book, but I was swept away immediately. The writing, the imagery, the tone - it all just worked. And although I had never really given much thought to what a labyrinth was, and only vaguely knew how it was different from a maze, I would certainly be able to draw one now that I've climbed back out of the extra-curricular rabbithole that the author sent me down!

It's a fairly simple story, but for me its strength came from the author's restraint from tying all the loose threads into a neat bow at the end. There's plenty of space to sit back and reflect and think about what might have been. Happily this was my first time reading Amanda Lohrey, so I have some exploring to do.

[Josie Hullick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't understand. Someone please help explain why I just read 200 pages about concrete, rocks and how to build things. There were a few pages thrown in about a son in jail, art, immigrants, friendship and loneliness but I just kept waiting on it all to be tied together. Am I missing something? Very talented writing, hence the literary awards, but cannot get on board with the plot.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Why am I here, behind the dunes in this dusty old shack? To be close to the prison, yes, but there is another reason.’

Erica Marsden has moved from Sydney to the fictional town of Garra Nalla on the south coast. She has moved to be close to her son, Daniel, who is in a nearby prison. Full of grief and guilt, needing to find a way out of the quandary she finds herself it, Erica wants to build a labyrinth. A labyrinth was part of her past: there was one at the asylum where her father worked and where she and her brother grew up.

‘The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.’

Erica has retreated to Garra Nalla, hoping that no-one will connect her with her son and his horrific crime. Her relationship with Daniel is fractured, but she cannot abandon him. Constructing a labyrinth may help, but Erica will need help.

What follows is a story about the burden of guilt, about relationships, about trust. Erica is caught up in a world where she cannot be alone. Daniel has asked Erica to destroy his books, a neighbour is annoying, intruders invade her space.

Can Erica find peace? What about her relationship with Daniel? How does a parent deal with the horrific crime of a child? And what about the labyrinth?

I have read this novel once, and I feel that I need to read it again. This is no linear narrative with a neat ending. It is a complex, multi-layered story with several well-developed, flawed characters. Building a labyrinth involves taking advice and building relationships. It also involves being flexible, considering the constraints of nature as well as the human limitations.

A beautifully written, disturbing novel.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful episodic novel, quite possibly my favourite Lohrey in any form (she can do it all: short stories, novels, essays). A woman moves to the south coast to be near the prison where her son is serving a life sentence. She becomes obsessed with building a labyrinth and suddently structure and content are married seamlessly. One can’t help but think of We Need to Talk About Kevin as another book that explores the sins of the mother and the crimes of the son but this is far more subtle and intimate.

[Marchpane]

Winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin award

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed The Labyrinth. The focus is on Erica and her internal struggles with a) her son, Daniel, and b) her desire to build a labyrinth.

Here's a really brief synopsis...
The book explores her youth where the labyrinth seed is planted, then her troubled adult years and dysfunctional relationships. Daniel is born and they continue living dangerously. She's left with tremendous guilt for having failed him. Years later, she buys a shack on the coast to be close to him in prison. She meets interesting people, including Jurko, a homeless man who builds the labyrinth. When it's nearly done they're told the authorities are looking for him for being in the country illegally. She helps to hide him and lies to the police. The End.

Of course, there's much more to it than that and I really enjoyed every bit of Lohrey's writing. Unfortunately, the book leaves us with unanswered questions including, most notably, Jurko's fate. His character was incredibly interesting! He seemed multi-layered and with a very interesting history (he says he's from the Balkan states). In fact, Lohrey hints at intriguing back-stories for many of the characters she introduced on the coast, so I really hope she'll consider writing a follow-up to The Labyrinth. It was a wonderful story and I'd highly recommend it. Amanda Lohrey is a very gifted writer.

[Moose · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Although I was totally immersed thanks to the beautiful writing, I would have liked something more to sink my teeth into.
The meditative and calming effects the prose had on me kept me going, but when I finished I was pleased that I could move on to something else.

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy to read book that is conceptually very interesting but for this reviewer not that well written. I have read this very quickly and have enjoyed the pace, the characters and ideas behind the story told.

The labyrinth at the centre of the book is the device used to bring patterns to the life of 1st person narrator Erica Marsden who moves to a seaside village to be closer to her incarcerated son serving life in a nearby prison.

Erica tells of her family relationships that have been less than satisfactory and how she deals mentally with this by researching and then building a labyrinth in the sandy back yard of the beach shack she owns and lives in. She is assisted by a drifter stonemason called Jurko who seems to me to be the epitome of the epigraph “The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.” And that is the point of the novel I would suggest.

This is the most contemporary of recent Australian novels I have read and being a winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin award I would expect nothing less than the philosophical depth that this novel offers with that award.

But…… and I suspect I may be in the minority here, I found the first-person narrative at times poorly delivered. At times there seemed to be several passages in a row that began with, for example,“I...". Sentences after sentence was interspersed with that “doing” verb, and that seemed to stand out at certain times.

Recommended nonetheless for the depth of a subtle telling of a very good story.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this is hypnotic and beautiful - I'm copying the blurb but it's entirely true.
The story spirals a woman away from her family members by some senseless and violent losses and then gently and wisely, as the Labyrinth she decides to build takes shape, she gently spirals back again, learning some more wisdom on the way, with some people who seem to become "found" family members. Those people who fulfil those roles that we might unintentionally seek out when the love for a family member has gone astray.
It's elegantly done but doesn't shy away from some good Aussie vernacular and some quintessential Aussie characters.
It's my first Amanda Lohrey book but I'll be checking out her backlist, I think I need more of her writing.
I really hope this does well in The 2021 Stella Prize and in the 2021 Miles Franklin. It deserves to be appreciated by many readers.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that I had much difficulty getting but oh was it worth the trouble. I wanted it in the print but somehow in the three libraries I have easy access to there were no copies. It is Australian and winner of the Miles Franklin Award in 2021 (the top Australian literature award). Finally able to get an e book, my least favorite format but I was determined to read it.

The story is about a mother grieving for a son who has been sentenced to prison. His crime is revealed about 1/3 of the way in. But mostly this is the mother's story, largely about grief, healing and finding a way to reconcile with all that life hands to you. It is relatively short but packs a powerful but subtle message. The making and the lore of labyrinths grounds this story and really completes it. It is a very quiet story, that meanders, like its own labyrinth, but like the beauty of the designs it describes, I came away admiring all it was.
Recommend it highly.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This month’s bookclub choice has been on my ‘to read’ list for a while but perhaps because I’d recently read a book with a similar slightly Gothic rural setting (‘Hydra’ by Adriene Howell) it has a slightly disappointing feel of revisitation about it.

Lohrey’s writing is powerful, with a tendency to examine emotion and interiority over plot and substance. But this seems to be very much the way of current creative fiction right now wherein the organic experience of actually feeling one’s way through a work takes precedence over mere involvement and/or identification with it.

A range of unremarkable but competent characters accompany the protagonist’s journey, with the enigmatic Jurko arguably the most compelling and strongly drawn.

[Dillwynia Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable read, but I fear a forgettable winner of the Miles Franklin Award. I doubt it shall be read in 20 years unlike other past winners.

The themes of grief and sudden, unexpected loss run strongly, and they are covered well. However, other aspects within the novel are either borderline clichés or fanciful, and have been explored numerous times already.

The strained relationship between Erica and Daniel (the attempts Erica goes to ensure Daniel gets stimulation in the prison, and the efforts she makes to hide her life), is well presented and I found interesting. This is strong parental love, that may or may not be borne out of guilt. We are allowed into a portion of the back story of Erica being a sole parent: was she neglectful? we can’t know for we strike the problem of her being the narrator. It doesn’t truly feel so, but then there is Daniel’s behaviour towards her during the prison visits.

Something Erica & Daniel share is the obsessive love for a love that is lost: for both, an absent parent. Erica is somewhat obtuse in her feelings towards her lost mother, but then she has had a longer period to process it, and had the responsibility of her own child. Conversely, Daniel, being younger, his obsession is just that. Lohrey portrays this well – both in how Daniel achieves this, and in the way Erica discovers it. There is raw emotional pain here for Erica, which she hides as per her character.

It is also well to note how Lohrey describes the other young adult – parent relationship, where alternatively there was been no obstacles unlike what Erica experienced. I enjoyed how it was described and played out. For me, it highlighted that relationships are always much more than what a parent can give their children, but rather the expectations of the individual – both child and parent.

Erica and her interactions with the village is an interesting topic. When mature aged people uproot and retire in a new area, one is likely to have to commence new friendships and relationships. There is no shared history of growing old, but rather a group of people, now with set ideas and behaviours coming together for the first time. Lohrey accurately portrays coastal village life with its mix of old established and recently arrived people. Such as in rural living, it is often not where to go, but to who to go to for requests such as repair and supply people, or the generosity of strangers who will give excess be it food or stones in this instance.

I felt the Ray conversion miracle a little difficult to believe. I just couldn’t see that the activity observed by him would generate such a radical twist from misanthrope to altruist. The society party and the groping host was unnecessary, although it did help advance developing the relationships of Di and Lawrence. The incompetent immigration investigation was also clumsily done compared with other aspects of the novel.

Finally there is the Labyrinth itself. The metaphor often used in western pagan and religious beliefs is well explained and Erica explores the options of what it shall mean to her (and in a sly way, what it means to Lohrey). The new-wave scene and the canvas painted Labyrinth is a very funny scene and I wondered if it was based on personal experience. I enjoyed the musings of Erica and in particularly to a labyrinth symbolising life’s journey and possible religious or personal fulfilment in reaching the centre. The famous one is on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral is mentioned, and the pilgrimages in previous centuries using it to help find fulfilment. Lohrey’s repeated observation that in contemporary times, the labyrinth is often covered in chairs, could be an interesting response to how the Catholic church has in recent decades performed in its pastoral and devotive care. The process of how the project develops from plan to actuality was honest and I was reflective on the same emotions I experience along similar large projects. Just sometimes the planning stage is what one desires rather than a final outcome, and thus ending.

I seem to have been one of the few that observe the similarities between the labyrinth described in the early part of the novel and the final pages. I read some significance into the parallels.

I personally enjoyed the length of the novel – it’s tight, well scripted, and avoids waffle. I am glad it hasn’t been padded.

[Text Publishing]

The following reviews are shared by Text Publishing - publisher of The Labyrinth

‘A beautiful, brutal book that I experienced as both earthy and unearthly. I loved it.’ Laura McPhee-Browne

‘Not a book to be analysed but a book to experience. It is compelling, visceral and deeply moving…It is delicate yet strong. Painful yet regenerative.’ Fiona Place

‘This quietly cerebral, emotional and atmospheric story is a gift of hope at a time when so many are struggling with seemingly insurmountable challenges.’ Good Reading

‘[Lohrey’s] storytelling is masterful: honed to pleasing plainness and assured in its measured tempo, her novels would take multiple readings to unpick her craft, which is deft to the point of invisibility at times.’
Mercury

'In this fine, sensory work Amanda Lohrey spirals imagination, ideas and humanity into a refuge.’
Joy Lawn, Paperbark Words

‘Lohrey’s writing is typically supple and luminous, her spare narrative counterpointed with vivid, detailed, often enigmatic dreams. By the end…the reader [is ready] to go back and relish again at leisure this author’s precise and shining prose.’
Advertiser

'The release of a new Amanda Lohrey novel is always a moment to look forward to and The Labyrinth looks set to be one of her most successful yet – mystical, earthed and beautifully told.’
James Boyce, Age

‘Fluid, dream-like…Lohrey’s novel is beautifully written and compellingly personal.’
Otago Daily Times

‘My novel of the year, full stop…A story told without a syllable of excess sentiment or false feeling, yet which sails full square into the mystic.’
Geordie Williamson, Australian

'Lohrey brings all her skill to this compelling and contemplative novel, which will linger in your mind long after you read the final page.’
Claire Nichols, ABC RN

‘A fine novelist…Her expertise, observant eye and ear, and sense of story are fully present.’
Conversation

'The Labyrinth has a gravity that outstares everything that may seem grey or gaunt in a literary endeavour where autumn seems to sink to midwinter. It is a work of considerable literary artistry.’
Judges’ comments, 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

‘Superb: thoughtful, socially astute, and engaged, in a most sophisticated way, with literary form…Takes the gothic and remakes it in a tough and tailor-made form for our time and our place.’
Brenda Walker, Australian Book Review

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Labyrinth (Text Publishing 2020) is a gorgeous literary novel by author Amanda Lohrey. Written in exquisite prose, the novel leaves so much white space for the reader to imagine what is going on in those spaces. Lohrey gives us a complex and intimate story, with great characters, authentic dialogue and a lovely ethereal quality to the shimmering sentences, but she also leaves much unsaid, and as readers we are asked not only to imagine the absences, but to ponder questions about the characters’ actions, motivations and histories.
Ostensibly, the story is of Erica Marsden, whose son Daniel, a gifted artist, is imprisoned for an horrific act of revenge. Erica moves from Sydney to a sleepy coastal town, close to where Daniel is serving out his sentence. The dynamics of the relationship between mother and child are extraordinary, bleak, heartbreaking and strange. She visits him once a fortnight; he is mostly unresponsive, occasionally cruel. Their relationship is devastating to witness. A mother’s most instinctive response – to protect her child – is unable to be fulfilled. And there is a blurriness about her feelings for this young man, her son, who has done monstrous things and yet is of course still her flesh and blood. I found this the most interesting aspect of the novel – this duality, this contradiction, this damaged boy and his grief-stricken mum.
Erica lives in a run-down shack by the ocean where she obsesses over building a labyrinth. She has no idea how to go about this plan – what resources she will need, how she will design it, what she will build it with, whether it is even possible. And so she must turn to the strangers in the town who gradually become … well, sometimes friends, sometimes merely people she must decide to trust.
The landscape and environment are depicted with haunting beauty. Themes of loneliness, desperation, guilt and reparation are featured, and the unique dynamics between a parent and a child – disquieting, unsettling, fragile and yet somehow unbreakable – are explored with nuanced empathy.
Erica’s father (a psychiatrist; she grew up in ‘an asylum, a manicured madhouse’) had often quoted Jung: ‘the cure for many ills is to build something’ and she hopes that building her labyrinth will complete something in her that is missing.
This is a quiet novel that will draw you in and encourage you to ask questions about your own life, and the choices you might make if you found yourself in different circumstances.

[Nathan Creed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not sure about this book. I don’t think I “got it”.

Nothing really happens. The plot is entirely in the synopsis: a perhaps upper middle-class Middle Aged mum moves to the coast and tries building a labyrinth.

I didn’t get her grief. The grief over what her son did. I didn’t understand her relationship with her son, who maybe has 6 very short scenes in the entire book, where they barely talk.

Her upbringing in the mental asylum is useless, as it only introduces the book and kind of closes it out. She doesn’t seem to have ever had a job, so I don’t know where her superannuation - which paid for everything - came from.

She doesn’t engage with anyone, really. Her interactions with the convenient illegal immigrant Jurko (forgot spelling) was mostly her begrudgingly tolerating him and judging him.

The author can obviously write. But I have no idea how this won the Miles Franklin. There was nothing pioneering here. I don’t feel it spoke to wider Australia. It read like a book that would be at the Salvo’s in a decade and no one would buy.

I don’t know. It just left me generally frustrated.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and interesting storyline

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tasmanian author Amanda Lohrey won the 2021 $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her seventh novel, The Labyrinth — praised by the judges as "a beautifully written reflection on the conflicts between parents and children, men and women, and the value and purpose of creative work".

The central character, Erica, settles in a coastal hamlet on the South Coast of New South Wales to be near the prison and her son, who is serving a sentence for negligent homicide. The coastal environment is bleak, sterile. So are the lives of the characters who have settled there.

Lohrey writes about how we can ground ourselves in space and time. She noticed people using labyrinths as a path to meditation.
"My aim was to write a narrative that felt like a meditative walk into and out of a labyrinth,"she told Claire Nichols on ABC RN's The Book Show.
"And so — to get technical about it — it takes a lot of very careful control to do that.
"You really cannot afford a loose word or a spare word: the prose has to be very tight and you have to kind of hit your mark.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-1...

So she has Erica dream a labyrinth and decide to make one of stone to sit on the sand beside her run-down house. She muses:

‘I have learned that a simple labyrinth can be laid out by anyone, unlike a maze, which is a puzzle of mostly blind alleys designed for entrapment. 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. In this way the labyrinth is said to be a model of reversible destiny. (p.37)

And she feels the time is right: from her classical studies she retrieves the word Kairos , ‘meaning not time, but timeliness … the right or opportune moment for doing’, kairos as distinct from chronos, ‘which is mere arithmetic’.

Richard Neville, Chair of the judging panel, describes it as "an elegiac novel, soaked in sadness". It seems to me to be steeped in misery, and led me to think about the differences between misery, melancholy and sadness. Misery somehow seems a more active state than either of the others.
By the end of the novel there are signs that the bleakest blocks in relationships are beginning to open, and perhaps there can be hope for at least some of the characters.
It’s an intellectual novel, meticulously crafted, replete to overflowing with metaphor. As one reviewer remarked, it’s long on ideas and short on story.

A review by Morag Fraser in the Australian Book Review helps to see some of the deep ideas with which Lohrey works. As a non-specialist reader, they didn't jump out at me.

‘Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind’.
https://www.australianbookreview.com.....

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her fascinating new novel, Amanda Lohrey returns to the (fictional) small coastal town of Garra Nalla which featured in her novella Vertigo (2008, see my thoughts here).  But unlike Vertigo's young couple swapping high house prices in Sydney for what they think is a pastoral idyll, the central character in The Labyrinth is Erica, an older woman, alone and very troubled.  Although less naïve than Luke and Anna in Vertigo, Erica shares their belief that the environment significantly affects well-being and this yearning for a salve to her misery seems to be all she has at this time. She has settled in Garra Nalla to be near her only child, Daniel, who is in prison, but she hopes that the small community will not connect her with him because his crime weighs very heavily on her.

My understanding of what this might mean has been influenced by Margaret Merrilees excellent debut novel  The First Week (Wakefield Press, 2013) which explored the confusion, denial, blame, guilt and horror of a parent whose child has committed a grievous crime.  Erica, however, has moved beyond the initial distraught reaction and is trying to reestablish some equilibrium in her life while also trying to help her son whose mental health is a grave concern.  With no plans to renovate, she buys a rustic old shack built with reclaimed materials on the coastal edge, in marked contrast to the soul-destroying environment of the prison:

The metallic walls of the prison glint above the frost-covered fields.  Along the denuded mining ridge of the hills the wind turbines stand like elegant guards, their blades becalmed in the harsh light. (p. 26)

The walls of the visitors' room are a violent mustard yellow,  On one wall there is a huge mural of crudely drawn trees and boulders in shades of muddy orange and greenish brown.  It has the quality of sludge.  Two warders escort me to a steel table, bolted to the floor, and I sit on a steel chair, also bolted to the floor.  Everything here is steel and concrete; even the air has a metallic taste. (p.27)

But Erica's coastal retreat is no Eden.  There are vandals and louts on the beach, and she plants wattles to screen out an annoying neighbour.  Plagued by horrific dreams, she begins the task of following her son's command to burn his books.

She makes a small ceremony of this, just doing one book a day, and like all booklovers, I know why.  Our books are a mirror of our lives and a window into our souls. Burning Daniel's books is like annihilating him.  Later, when she employs Lexie, a young girl at a loose end who needs to save up the money to make her escape to Sydney (because there is no work for young people in Garra Nalla), she elongates the time for this task by having Lexie sort the books into alphabetical order.  Lexie is a slow and dreamy worker, but even so, there must be hundreds of these books to be unpacked from the boxes because Lexie is only up to the letter M by the time the novel ends...

Time, like different kinds of madness, is a recurring motif in the novel. 

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/13/t...

[Zora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this mesmerising book and I miss it already. I love it when a book surprises me. I was expecting this story - of a woman named Erica who moves to a coastal town to be near her adult son, who is in prison for a horrible crime - to be largely focussed on that, and while it is hardly a sub plot, The Labyrinth is much more than that. I will be ruminating on it for a while.

[Corinne Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I persevered with this book despite not being that drawn to the character/s. I didn't dislike it I guess I just did not understand the characters and reasons for much of what happened. I also found the constant reference to dreams annoying, dreams in books are almost as bad as someone telling you their dreams in real life. This wasn't quite a novella like Lohrey's 'Vertigo', but I did feel it could have benefitted from a little more depth and length; not something I usually wish for!

[Angella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius. 6 stars.

[Noel Pidgeon · Rating 1 out of 5]

A disappointing read. I had to force myself to keep reading as the pace was snail-like and the plot paper thin. The prose was disjointed and it seemed as though flowery phrases popped up at random as if prompted by some creative algorithm. I was stunned to find the novel just faded away at the end and kept double checking my Kindle for some sort of error.
Towards the end it appeared she invited the architect and his son over to look at the labyrinth at the same time she planned to be away visiting her son. In another part she invites her neighbor over for a meal and a drink but after a few awkward pleasantries its all over with no meal and no explanation.
After reading Tim Winton or Frank Moorhouse or Melissa Lucashenko its baffles me as to why this won.

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Erica is a wonderful, strong older woman overcoming grief & guilt over her son. Told in clean, lucid prose, with a deadpan, no-nonsense tone, it propels you forward. Questions about what happened & how Erica will survive drive the story. Meditative & strangely comforting as Erica’s life has slowed down to the present moment so we notice landscape & take each person as they come.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

How this won the Miles Franklin award is beyond me.

Felt entirely self indulgent throughout narrated by a woman holding cards too close to her chest and gloating over it. The idea of being a storyteller without telling a story is irksome. While some revelations and analogies were arresting, most of the quest to create this pet project labyrinth was vague and uninspiring. Two stars for some good descriptive surprises but overall, no thanks.

[jeniwren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just perfect for those who love contemplative works of fiction. Beautiful prose with an interesting cast of characters.