Customer Reviews

Labyrinth

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(57)
2 star:		(36)
1 star:		(34)

 

 

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.

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.

I was really excited about Labyrinth when I first heard about it - finally, a great historical adventure with **women** as the protagonists! Medieval heretics, Grial legends, historical accuracy, lots of suspense - I settled down happily to enjoy a thumping good read. Unfortunately, the novel fell far short of my expectations.

It's not a bad novel by any means, and I really liked the parallel structure of the modern story featuring Alice Tanner and the medieval one featuring Alais and the Cathars. But - where was the editor?? Far too much of Labyrinth drags horribly as Mosse describes every single tiny little thing that her characters can see, smell, taste. I love sensory detail in novels, but there's waaaay too much here, and the novel keeps stopping dead while Mosse gets carried away in description.

At the same time, the characters aren't described in anything like as much detail as I wanted. Alice remained a complete cipher to me to the last page. She's far from being the strong, capable protagonist I'd hoped for, and I was intensely irritated when she meets Will - another main character - by complete coincidence. Important plot points should not turn on coincidence.

The writing is - over-done, to say the least. Lots of over-wrought similes which I had to go back and read again as they didn't make much sense, many disjointed sentences and fragments, and lots of untranslated French, which didn't bother me but which would probably irritate readers who don't understand the language. The ending is a huge disappointment that falls totally flat.

For me, the best aspect of the novel was Mosse's depiction of Southern France, which made me want to jump on the next plane to Carcassonne. A career with the French Tourism Board beckons for Kate Mosse, perhaps?

With a damn good edit to tidy up the language and the numerous plot holes, this could have been a truly excellent novel. Very disappointing.

WARNING: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse blatantly ignores the following standards of fiction:

1. That the human characters resemble human beings in their thoughts, speech, and actions and thus allow the reader to identify with them in some way. The human characters in Labyrinth: a) rarely carry through a thought to its logical conclusion; b) habitually abandon conversations halfway through, and; c) unless they decide to do something supremely stupid such as ride alone at night through a war-torn countryside populated with armed thieves, never take action of any sort unless forced to do so by a cackling villain.

1a. That each character has a distinct personality. Upon reading a piece of dialog or a reaction, the reader should reasonably be able to guess at who said or did that thing based on the personalities presented. The reader shouldn't have to struggle to the realization that Authie and Audric are different characters, nor be forced to puzzle out that Raymond-Roger and Trencavel are in fact one and the same man (who is called by both his first and last name seemingly at some random whim of the author). The main personality traits of a Mosse character are blandness and forgetfulness, in that order. We can add to that apathy and stupidity, if the character is good, and a fondness for sex and/or torture, if the character is bad.

1b. That the characters, once established, act in a manner consistent with the author's description. For instance, a girl described as "brave" and who is volunteering at an archaeological dig should not be tremendously upset upon discovering some skeletons. Nor should a medieval, married girl described as "fearless" and "independent" quake in fear at the sight of a distant corpse and then go running to her daddy.

2. That the story progress at a healthy enough pace that if the reader turns 100 pages ahead, he does not see the characters doing the same things they were doing 100 pages ago. Let's say that on page 119 a man hands you a phone number, then is immediately run down by the bad guys in front of your eyes. What do you do? Call the number to find out what's going on, or wander France for 200 more pages before thinking of the number again, and then only after it is told to you a second time? I bet you can guess what Kate Mosse's heroine does.

3. That the historical references and the researched facts be a natural part of the story and presented only as necessary to the plot. The reader should not have to maneuver around them like orange barrels at a roadwork site. Kate Mosse continually violates this simple rule.

4. That the author should regard the reader as a thinking human being with a memory. It's enough to mention once or twice that Pelletier has gone to Montpellier. After five mentions even the most forgetful reader will have acquired this information; by the ninth or tenth mention the reader will become annoyed, and by the twelfth mention the reader may want to throw your novel across the room.

5. That the phrases "suddenly" and "straight away" should be used sparingly, not well over 100 times in 500 pages. It's not necessary, for example, to describe Alice ordering her meal "straight away"--would it not suffice to say she ordered food? Kate Mosse tends to use "straight away" to begin sentences, which makes this even more distracting. Straight away, I noticed that Mosse has an obsession with the term "straight away."

6. That an English language book be mainly in English; that foreign words be used appropriately--such as when the English word will not do--or occasionally for flavor. We don't need entire strings of conversation in French, especially not when the conversation consists of someone telling their secretary to make a phone call. And we don't need to be patronized by having words like "allo" followed immediately by the English "hello" by way of translation. Kate Mosse believes she's the only person in the English-speaking world to ever learn French, and she is darn well going to teach it to us.

7. Finally, and most importantly, that the story and/or characters entertain the reader. Judging by other comments here, Kate Mosse has a rival in Dan Brown. Dan Brown's novels suffer from some of the same mistakes as Mosse's do--infodumps, wafer-thin characterization, repeated words, excruciating dialog, etc. However, Dan Brown, for all his human failings, knows how to create a story and move it along, and thus ENTERTAINS the reader. I'll take an over the top, ridiculously implausible Holy Grail story over a meticulously researched, deadly dull Holy Grail story any day of the week. Et toi, Kate Mosse?

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.

Like The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, Mosse brings to life geography and history combined. In Mosse's case, it is a small French region, the Languedoc, in the beginning of the thirteenth century. Mosse's love of place and time is obvious in the accuracy of detail and the way she's woven the lives of her characters into real history.

Like Kostova's story, it's just about the only thing there is to recommend this novel. The writing is surprisingly pedestrian and stale for someone so intimately involved with the writen word. Her characters, especially her two female protagonists, are mere sketches, with fuzzy outlines. Their motivations are often left unexplained, creating confusion. The crux of the story, the search for the Grail, is a series of dead-ends that eventually lead us to where we started, but without the sense of inevitability a story such as this should have. In fact, the ending remined me of an Indiana Jones-type story, down to the opening chasm and the loss of the Grail.

The story is basic: two parallel lives, one in 1209, one in 2005, with "memories" linking them. Alice, as a volunteer archeologist, unearths a cave with two skeletons and a labyrinth, which begins a series of events where one faction wants to find the Grail for the power and immortality it will give, while the other, a staunch Catholic, wants to destroy it. Woven through it are the lives of the original Alais and her family during the Crusade against the French. The life of Alais will impel Alice to stumble through until the supposedly climax of the story. Unfortunately, the climax is so clichéd, it is easy to guess it several hundred pages before the end.

To cap it all off, the writing is riddled with typos and contradictions, evidence that the manuscript was given only a cursory edit. (For instance, Alice says that her parents died in 1993 then, barely five pages later, she says they died in 1982.) There are words missing, and spelling mistakes that could have been caught with a simple spellcheck. This proves to me, once again, that publishing houses have become simply clearinghouses.

Unless you are interested in the Cathars and 13th Century history, I'd bypass this book.

Inevitably any religious thriller that comes out now will face the daunting task of being compared to the Da Vinci code...right or wrong it is a shadow that looms very large for any writer who wants to tackle that particular genre. That's a shame really because while a lot of these have been pure junk trying to capitalize on the Da Vinci bandwagon, some of them, such as Labyrinthe, are quite good and can stand on their own merits. This is one of those stories that shuttles back and forth between eras. This used to bother me but I've read so many books and seen so many movies that employ this plot device that I'm used to it by now and it doesn't bother me.

The modern day story begins as Alice Tanner, a volunteer on an archaeological dig in the Pyrenees mountains of France makes a curious discovery in a cave. She finds some ancient skeletons, a worn leather bag, and a ring with a labyrinth design on it as well as some strange writings on the wall of the cave. The backstory takes place some 800 years earlier at the time of the mysterious Cathar sect whose beliefs have them labeled as heretics by the Catholic Church and Crusaders are sent to massacre the sect. A young girl named Alais is given a ring and a book by her father to keep safe from the marauding Crusaders. Her own sister Oriane has her own evil intentions on the book and ring. The secret is soon revealed that the ring and book can lead to the true Holy Grail. Back in the future, Alice soon finds that there are others who covet the information that she has found and will kill to get it. Much like in the Da Vinci Code there are those that want the information and those that want to keep it hidden so its secrets are never revealed to the world.

While Labyrinthe doesn't move with quite the frenetic pace of Dan Brown's thriller, it won't put you to sleep either. Mosse's story is slightly more thoughtful and cerebral than Brown's book. Mosse takes more time to develop her characters which becomes necessary with the switching of time eras back and forth. Labyrinthe is an exceptional thriller with great characters and an interesting, although now well-known plot.

Time-slip novels are dicey things, with many pitfalls to avoid on their road to success. The author must be accurate and interesting about two historical periods, two sets of characters, of settings, of the cultural trivial necessary to bring any plot to life. Mosse navigates brilliantly between errors of omission and commission in both her twentieth- and thirteenth-century stories.

As a picky reader of historical fiction, I often find that massive bloopers - or even relatively minor misrepresentations - can spoil my pleasure in a novel. None of that here. True, the history of the Cathars is told from a decidedly southern perspective, but fair enough. The main characters are residents of the Languedoc and the Occitan view is logcially consistent for them. Some of the reviewers here seem to forget that all history is told from someone's viewpoint, generally the winners'. The Cathars were big losers, so there's lots of white space in their history.

My own prior knowledge of the Cathars was limited to a small sub-set of my mental files, "heresies, medieval," and to the famous, but variously attributed, line: "kill them all; God will know his own." (Mosse assigns this to the on-site Papal Legate, a more likely attribution than Simon de Monfort, that now-shop-worn bogey-man of grail conspiracies.) Having been taught to call this the Albigensian Crusade, I spent a long time expecting Alais and her companions to travel to Albi. Finally, I looked at a map and realized that Albi is even farther from Carcassonne than is Beziers, to which it took her days to travel. Duh.

But Mosse is a generous author: she gives you what you need to know to appreciate the actions and events on the pages. She does, however, do this on her own time-table.

Maybe it's my school-teacher's mind-set, but I was at first frustrated by Mosse's seeming assumption that I knew the main tenets (let alone the details) of Cathar theology. But I wanted to judge the book on its merits, so I put off Google-ing "Cathar," and let Mosse inform me. She waited until the mid-point of a nearly 700-page text to begin this process, but by doing so she conveyed the essence of living a good life - that putative goal of all major and minor religions - in this particular manifestation of non-canonical medieval Christianity. In many historical novels you get pages of background information too-little modified from the author's research notes, veritable down-loads of facts and figures. Mosse makes the background information a fundamental part of her characters' thoughts, actions, and conversation. This takes longer, but it follows the venerable dictate that it is better to show than to tell.

I liked the medieval story better than the modern narrative, unusual for me. Carcassonne itself, a place I was amazed by, comes through more powerfully in Alais' tale than in the Alice narrative. Alice herself seems less clearly drawn than does the 13th-century Alais, more superficial and more dependant of coincidence. Calling coincidence fate or some aspect of reincarnation does not, for me, make it any less objectionable as a way of advancing a plot. Mosse could have taken a bit more trouble with Alice, better balancing the entirely wonderful Alais.

Grail freaks will read this in vain. No Mary Magdalene, no Merovingians. The best thing about the book is Mosse's refusal to be drawn into the literal, the concrete. She takes the high ground of Plato's divided line and gives us truth and justice as abstracts that can be only imperfectly shadowed on earth. Brava.

(If you like this novel, read The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It's generally tagged sci fi, but -- aside from its time-travel premise -- it's a fabuous time-slip set in Oxford.)

This book not only has dual time periods, it has a split personality--part history book/Michelin guide, part melodramatic novel. The history/guide is very good in places and kept me reading (although this part apparently annoyed many other readers). The melodrama is poorly written. For example: take the use of simile (direct comparison, x is like y).

As one wry literary agent says, "Similes are like jalapeno peppers. They can add some spice, but too many of them and your reader will spit out your novel and run away." Labyrinth has hundreds of similes, a few work OK, many are cliches, some are downright laughable.

Page one gives us: a drop of blood falling on a bare leg "exploding LIKE a firework in the sky on Guy Fawkes night." (I have a problem visualizing the physics of a blood drop "exploding like a firework" onto bare skin, especially when the person is sitting on the ground so the distance from arm to leg can only be a few inches.) Similes and metaphors are supposed to enhance the readers' understanding and draw them into the story not make them hesitate at the comparison being made. It only got worse from there.

A search of the text of Labyrinth on Amazon shows there's a simile every other page. Here's one of many cliches: (p. 13) a body "crumpling like a ragdoll"). But others are funny because of poor grammatical construction: (p. 14) Alice is unintentionally compared to a trapdoor in this sentence "Then, like a trapdoor beneath a gallows, Alice feels a sudden jerk, then a drop and she is plummeting down through the open sky...." After the first few dozen similes, I found myself cringing every time I read another.

Other problems: poor dialogue, melodramatic female villains (if Oriane and Marie had mustaches, they would surely have been twirling them when staring down their victims!), poor plot/character development, excessive exposition (the antithesis of "show, don't tell").

Good parts: a strong sense of place, sweep of history (I could imagine the author writing a riveting history book [...]), females as lead characters.

Conclusion: Could be so much better than it is!

I picked this book up as a time waster after my sister left it here during a recent visit. Now I understand why she left it behind, because I could hardly finish the book.

I swear, pubishers now need to declare a moratorium on books which profess to have the Gweat Sekwet of the Holy Gwail as a central theme. Labyrinth actually made me nostalgic for the Da Vinci Code, and that is quite a feat.

The book centers around two female characters: Alice (modern times) and Alais (13th century) who are both pulled into a conspiracy (there's a shocker) to either expose or hide the secrets of the grail. It doesn't take a genius to work out that these two are connected. The reincarnation is actually kind of a handy device since every preposterous plot twist and coincidence can be written off as a force coming from the connection between the two lives. Reincarnation and the Mystery are injected by Mosse every time motivation is required. As a result, the characters are oddly flat, and often extremely irritating. Alice apparently never meets any normal people who are not reincarnated bit players from her past life.

If you really really like grail fantasy or historical fiction and are stuck somewhere with limited options, then this book would probably get you through a plane ride. I gave an extra star to Mosse for having enough writing skill to keep the pages turning. Otherwise, I would give this book a miss.