The Labyrinth

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.