FICTION
The Labyrinth
Amanda Lohrey
Text, $29.99
Amanda Lohrey first imagined the coastal hamlet of Garra Nalla in her 2009 novella Vertigo as a young couple’s escape from the stresses of the city. The older narrator of The Labyrinth, Erica Marsden, chooses the sleepy settlement because her artist son is in prison nearby.
She also has much to leave behind in Sydney, and another more creative reason for choosing to buy a fibro shack on a flat piece of land behind the sand dunes: she wants to build a labyrinth.
While there’s no explicit link between the two books, this quietly urgent novel seems to be set four years after the bushfire that raged through Garra Nalla in Vertigo. Erica is fire sensitive, partly because her son’s crime involved lighting a fire that killed people.
Amanda Lohrey when she won the Patrick White Award in 2012.Credit: Kate Geraghty
As she settles into the character-filled shack, she begins burning Daniel’s books as he instructed – “They have deceived me” – and takes him pastels and paper in the hope that a return to drawing will break through his mute fury.
The Labyrinth is an impressive addition to Lohrey’s body of fiction, which always has philosophical foundations for its warmly human stories. Here the characters and ideas are deftly integrated into a short novel of deep wisdom about nature and art, men and women, motherhood and home.
As always, Lohrey expresses people’s inner life through the physical world around them. The many-layered symbolism is clear from the epigraph, “The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something”; and the opening sentence, “Let me begin in my father’s house”.
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Fathers are a problem for many characters, starting with Erica and her estranged brother, Axel. Their father’s house was the asylum run by psychiatrist Kenneth Marsden, a strange place for children to grow up, especially after their mother ran away from the barely suppressed violence of the “manicured madhouse”.
“The use of the hands is a powerful medicine,” Kenneth said, setting inmates to work in a craft studio while his children played on a red-brick labyrinth in the grounds. When the adult Erica needs to untangle her past troubles, planning a labyrinth gives her both a hands-on project and a shape for her psychic journey.
Once a student of Greek and Latin, Erica reads her way into the meaning of labyrinths as she considers the design of hers. Unlike a maze, which is “a puzzle of mostly blind alleys designed for entrapment”, a labyrinth is “a single path that leads in a convoluted unravelling to its centre, and back out again”.
By the end it’s possible to see that the narrative itself is shaped like a spiralling labyrinth in an unforced and satisfying way. Elegant sentences move with the mindful pace of footsteps on a pathway. Erica circles inwards to seclusion, vivid dreams, and examination of her life; and then, though she sometimes seems stuck in a maze, works her way out again into new understanding.
Lohrey describes landscapes and weather in sensuous detail, rich with mythic and biblical implications. To visit her son – an italicised monthly nightmare – Erica must drive through a narrow mountain pass with 36 hairpin bends surrounded by fire-scarred sclerophyll forest. On the far side the jail sits in a hellish valley damaged by coal mines and unemployment.
But her coastal haven is no paradise, as anyone contemplating a sea change should note. There’s nature to contend with, and there are the locals. Among her neighbours, skilfully sketched, she finds friends and enemies, all softened with problems of their own.
Most important is Jurko, a stonemason with a mysterious Balkan past, who helps construct the labyrinth. He and Erica share a profound understanding and some comic scenes, such as a visit to a New Age labyrinth, where they are invited to light a candle, ring a bell, or “burn a smudge-stick of wild sage”. Jurko is a great character, brusque and sensitive, an uncompromising vegan ascetic like Stephen in Lohrey’s 1995 novel, Camille’s Bread.
Again Lohrey depicts domesticity with clear-eyed realism. Houses reveal much about their inhabitants: a couple in their “brutal cube of concrete”; an architect’s “two-storey mud-brick rectangle”; and Diana of the red kimono hovering above the water in her glass house.
After her transient youth, Erica seeks a safe home in her shack and draws others into its authentic loveliness. Perhaps the ultimate lesson of The Labyrinth is acceptance that life is more like a weathered old house than a neat mandala, perfect in its imperfections.