You have got to admire Kate Mosse – in addition to being a best-selling author (with thirteen novels, non-fiction and plays to her name) she co-founded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, has been honoured twice (with an OBE and a CBE), has won a clutch of highly respected awards and appears regularly on screen and radio. It makes you wonder how she gets time to write because her books are not short! Despite Kate Mosse being on my radar for a long time (and I would describe myself as a fan of hers) I am ashamed to say I had not read any of her books – I guess I thought that medieval mystery wasn’t for me. But I was prompted to pick up Labyrinth after I was invited to put a question to her on BBC Radio’s World Book Club. I was in the middle of the Booker shortlist at the time and was somewhat daunted to note that it was almost 700 pages long (and about 18 hours on audio)!
It is almost twenty years since Labyrinth was first published and the book has been a sensation, selling almost 900,000 copies – astonishing. And a million readers are not wrong – it is a titanic novel, gripping, accessible, with a remarkable attention to detail and extensively researched. I just cannot believe I am so late to this particular party.
The novel opens on an archaeological site in south-west France, where Dr Alice Tanner, working as a volunteer (because she is a friend with one of the dig’s leaders), inadvertently strays off the permitted boundary of the dig and into a cave where she discovers two skeletons. She is severely reprimanded; the police must be notified, not least because they are trying to solve the suspected murder of two missing persons, and they promptly force work to be halted. When a powerful lawyer, infamous in the judicial community, becomes involved, events take a darker turn.
This part of the novel is set in the early 2000s, but then switches to the early 1200s in Carcassone (though Mosse uses traditional Occitan references and language throughout. This language was widely spoken in the Languedoc region at the time, but suppressed by northern invaders who conquered territories in the south). The young noblewoman, 16 year-old newlywed Alais, daughter of Bertrand Pelletier, a key advisor to the head of the Cite (Carcassone), Viscount Trencavel, considers her life in the chateau where she lives. She is free-spirited but under the yoke of her scheming older sister, the constraints placed upon women of the time and now as a wife.
We learn that Bertrand Pelletier (and some of his friends and allies) is the guardian of certain key spiritual books and objects which together contain the secrets of the Holy Grail. When he believes his life is threatened he entrusts these to his younger daughter, not realising the grave danger that this places her in. Meanwhile civil war is erupting, with the brutal warlords of the north seeking to suppress the Cathar movements in the south and taking the land of the southern noblemen under the pretence of protecting the established church. Alais must use all her wits to keep the books safe.
Alice Tanner has unwittingly stumbled on the Grail secrets and, like Alais, this makes her a target too. The novel tells the parallel stories of both women as they attempt to work out the significance of the treasures they have been trusted to guard and to escape those who want them for themselves and who have no regard for their life, and would, in fact, rather see them dead.
The book is a genuine page-turner, managing to tell its complex historical narrative in profoundly human terms. It is a book about power, money, greed and religion, and the conflicts that these things give rise to, as ever they will. But it is also about the power of love, between parents and children, between friends and comrades, and about the endurance of faith. The research is quite remarkable and I learnt a lot about the period and about this part of France, which I have visited on a few occasions but had very limited knowledge of. The author’s love of the Languedoc is clear. Indeed, she says that it was the purchase by her and her husband of a property in the area in the 1980s that first sparked her interest.
Labyrinth is the first in Mosse’s Languedoc trilogy, and after finishing it, I promptly sought out book number two, Sepulchre, which I also enjoyed. I’ll post my review of that one soon!
Highly recommended.
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