Labyrinth (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "A single line of blood trickles down the pale underside of her arm, a red seam on a white sleeve..." (more)
Key Phrases: labyrinth symbol, stone labyrinth, labyrinth cave, Viscount Trencavel, Pic de Soularac, Book of Words (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mosse's page-turner takes readers on another quest for the Holy Grail, this time with two closely linked female protagonists born 800 years apart. In 2005, Alice Tanner stumbles into a hidden cave while on an archeological dig in southwest France. Her discovery—two skeletons and a labyrinth pattern engraved on the wall and on a ring—triggers visions of the past and propels her into a dangerous race against those who want the mystery of the cave for themselves. Alaïs, in the year 1209, is a plucky 17-year-old living in the French city of Carcassone, an outpost of the tolerant Cathar Christian sect that has been declared heretical by the Catholic Church. As Carcassonne comes under siege by the Crusaders, Alaïs's father, Bertrand Pelletier,entrusts her with a book that is part of a sacred trilogy connected to the Holy Grail. Guardians of the trilogy are operating against evil forces—including Alaïs's sister, Oriane, a traitorous, sexed-up villainess who wants the books for her own purposes. Sitting securely in the historical religious quest genre, Mosse's fluently written third novel (after Crucifix Lane) may tantalize (if not satisfy) the legions of Da VinciCode devotees with its promise of revelation about Christianity's truths. 8-city author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Kate Mosse's enviable accomplishments include being co-founder and honorary director of the Orange Prize for fiction as well as a respected commentator on the arts for the BBC. Lately, though, she's enjoyed an even more mouthwatering success. Having already published two well-received novels of a literary bent, including 1996's poignant Eskimo Kissing, she turned her hand to what she unabashedly calls "commercial fiction," a time-slip novel that her publishers have billed as a "women's adventure story." The result, a doorstop of a historical thriller, quickly sprinted to the top of the bestseller lists in her native Britain.

Labyrinth is a "women's" adventure story because, presumably, it showcases a strong female cast or, rather, a cast of strong females: two heroines, separated by 800 years, who find themselves pitted against a pair of glamorous, green-eyed female villains. As for the adventure bit, Mosse clearly warmed to her task, packing the novel with swordfights, sieges and massacres. At its heart is a hunt for the Holy Grail across the ruggedly beautiful Cathar country of southwest France.

All this medieval mayhem would be pointless without Mosse's good plot to hold things together. The story starts in the present with Alice, a lovelorn twenty-something on an archaeological dig in France, accidentally uncovering a pair of ancient skeletons and a stone ring embossed with a labyrinth symbol. So begins a fast-paced series of events that not only threatens Alice's life (cue a crucifix-wearing racist and sex offender named Authié) but also duplicates those that befell her medieval counterpart and near-namesake Alaïs, a plucky young newlywed from the nearby city of Carcassonne. The second strand of narrative -- cleverly intertwined with the first -- tells how, in the summer of 1209, as Carcassonne was besieged by bloodthirsty Crusaders, Alaïs headed for the hills with a mysterious book of hieroglyphics entrusted to her by her dying father.

Medieval history and legend are nimbly brought together in this second branch of the story. That the repulsive Authié wears a crucifix should alert us as to how Catholics (who worship what Alaïs calls a "cruel God") will become the baddies of the piece. Mosse shows the Crusaders as bent on stamping out heresy and, while they were at it, colonizing the rich lands of France's southern nobility. Their victims, the Cathars, currently enjoy a place as the most attractive and sympathetic of medieval heretics, and it's not hard to understand their modern appeal: They were, among other things, vegetarians who ordained female priests, believed in reincarnation and regarded Jews and Muslims as their equals. They were, according to Alaïs, "good men, tolerant men, men of peace who celebrated a God of Light." These liberal opinions served to get them evicted from their strongholds in the Languedoc area after a brutal, decades-long military campaign known as the Albigensian Crusade -- an act of persecution whose flesh-burning zeal Mosse recounts in terrifying detail.

Yet there's more to the Cathar story, of course. As every Grail buff knows, the Cathars were supposedly protectors of the Holy Grail, whose hiding place was the mountains of the Languedoc. Mosse duly picks up this legend but gives it a new twist: Early on, we learn how the true Grail (which turns out to have little to do with chalices or, indeed, Christianity) is summoned by bringing together three books known as the "Labyrinth Trilogy." One of these Alaïs has smuggled into a remote place in the Pyrenees; the other two have fallen into the clutches of her evil sister Oriane, a temptress who acquired one of them while bedding Alaïs's handsome new husband. Oriane will commit worse crimes than that, we suspect, to lay her hands on the final copy.

Following the extraordinary sales of a certain other bestseller, it would be tempting -- but unfair -- to attribute the success of Labyrinth to its scheming Catholics and reworking of the Grail legend. Nor is Labyrinth, as a work of commercial fiction, a cynical half-measure or crude attempt by a "serious" writer to pander to a wide audience. Mosse's writing does occasionally lapse into the clichés of the ripping-good-yarn genre. She provides plenty of what might be called cardiopulmonary hyperbole (pounding hearts, gasping lungs), as well as one too many cases of a character blacking out after an unexpected encounter between her skull and a blunt object. Still, the novel distinguishes itself by juggling two compelling story lines, unscrambling (and making digestible) chunks of medieval history and offering a pleasing wealth of information about the Languedoc, a region whose landscape and history Mosse loves deeply and knows intimately. Her contagious enthusiasm for the subject and dexterous handling of her material make for an open-throttle narrative drive across 500 pages of white-knuckle twists and turns.

A women's adventure novel? Labyrinth is a thumping good read that men, too, will surely enjoy. Why should the girls have all the fun?

Reviewed by Ross King
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; 1st ed/1st printing edition (March 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399153446
• ISBN-13: 978-0399153440
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (192 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #405,448 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

153 of 177 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Twist on the Story of the Grail, October 3, 2005

By	J. Chippindale (England) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Labyrinth (Hardcover)

I approached this book with mixed emotions. I am not an advocate of the format this book takes, i.e. switching between the present day and then back several hundred years. This style has a tendency to make the story disjointed to say the least. However in this particular book it seemed to work quite well and I cannot think of any other way the story could have been told.

The book begins on July 4 2005 at an archaeological dig in the mountains in South Western France. Alice a volunteer at the dig has decided to do a little work away from the other members of the dig. She finds something (either by chance or destiny) that will change her life and the lives of many of the people around her. She has unearthed a time bomb that has been ticking away for centuries. . .

This book is a unique twist on the much told tale of the Grail and to go too deeply into the plot would be to spoil the book for the reader. As I have said the plot twists and turns, backwards and forwards through the centuries. It involves a family in the early 13th century, who have been given the task of helping to protect ancient books and symbols that will allow the grail to be used, for good or evil.

There are people in the 21st. Century that are drawn back into the past by blood ties with the Pelletier family. They become involved in a sequence of events that they have no control over and become inextricably tied up with the fate of the Cathars 800 years ago.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It was totally unlike anything I had read about the subject before.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to like this..., March 27, 2006

By	sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I was very much looking forward to this book. I know it has been a big hit in England, and I am a fan of this type of fiction. Saying that, I was very disappointed.

Brief summary, no spoilers:

The book starts off in the present, with Alice Tanner working on an archaeologic dig. She is our stereotypical heroine, spunky and smart, with a bit of a temper. Alice stumbles on a discovery - a hidden cave which contains 2 old skeletons along with some bizarre old relics, including a ring with a labyrinth pattern on it.

The police come to the site, and we meet some of the characters that inhabit the present day sections of this novel. There are questionable police officers, a malevolent and mysterious official named Authie, along with Alice's friend Shelagh, who is also working on the dig. Shortly we will meet a strange (and wise) old man named Audric Baillard.

We then are introduced to an obviously evil (and wealthy and beautiful, of course) woman named Marie-Cecile and her equally rotten-to-the-core son, Francois-Baptiste. No shades of gray here, these characters are almost cartoonish in their one-dimensional evil.

The story goes back and forth in time. We meet Alice's counterpart, a heroic (and spunky and smart) woman named Alais, starting in the year 1209. She is a noble woman, and finds out her father is part of a mysterious sect that is entrusted with keeping the secrets of the Grail.

This is a long book, and though I do admit that I found *parts* of it a page-turner, a lot of it was not. I found myself looking forward to finishing, because I figured with all this detail and action, the ending would be spectacular. It wasn't.

Pick up this book and read a couple of chapters. If it grabs you, then this may be the book for you. If not, don't expect it to get any better.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars DaVinci Code meets Outlander and has an ugly child, December 6, 2006

By	Ellen Goode (Georgia) - See all my reviews

With the reviews this ponderous book received I was expecting something worth reading. I was disappointed and then some. The chapters were choppy and irritating. The premise is ridiculous. The characters were tiresome. Too complicated for a mindless beach read and too trite to enjoy otherwise. Many things about it irked me as you can tell. I guess the cover is pretty but otherwise a total waste of trees.