- Lohrey's narrator Erica Marsden has had an interesting life as a young woman and mother in inner Sydney but now comes across as quite alone, uninteresting and boring in middle age.
- She moves to an isolated coastal hamlet south of Sydney to be close to where her son Daniel is imprisoned for arson and murder, and interacts with the usual inhabitants, some friendly, some cold. Typically there are village idiots in the mix, one her neighbour Ray. But thankfully he emerges as a helpful blokey type at the end, assisting with the construction of her prized labyrinth.
- Assorted stories of families and estrangement are the novel's central focus. Daniel is a painter yet mentally quite unstable. (Her visitations to him are rendered in italics for some peculiar reason). She hasn’t spoken to her brother Axel 'since he married a woman who judged me'. A neighbour's young daughter Lexie has a loving and supportive relationship with her brother Jesse by contrast. There are lots of other characters dotted throughout, most only tangentially. The stresses and strains of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, and siblings.
- Underpinning this rather ordinary and often tiresome narrative is Erica's obsession with labyrinths. She had a dream and is now its ‘captive’. We're constantly teased about the deeper meaning of it, but never convinced. Is it a rendition of her mother’s womb? An ancient entity with a mystical edge '...as if my body has been laid on the ground in another form…its pattern of sinuous pathways’?
- Normally individuals who are alienated from the mainstream go to the margins, and become thinkers and critics. Erica doesn’t think at all. She is also burning her son’s many books just because he asked her to.
- In Part 2 of the book called The Labyrinth we meet Jurko the itinerant stonemason of Albanian heritage who is an illegal immigrant living in a tent near the town. Erica hires him to build the labyrinth. He is a fascinating character who thankfully invests the story with a bit of life. He hates religion and many so-called civilised things and is a delightfully straight talker.
- So what is Lohrey on about here? Is it about outsiders, marginals, the lost, finding a way, a journey back? She likes the word 'banality': ‘the banality of the everyday’; ‘the banality of the reasonable’.
- The touch is too light though, rendering the book, in my opinion, a lightweight. A huge list of quoted reviews in the preliminary pages of the book however are fulsome in their praise - 'compelling, visceral, deeply moving, haunting, luminous'...etc, etc, etc. I'm totally outnumbered.
- The novel won this year's Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize. Which doesn't surprise me.
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