'The Labyrinth' by Amanda Lohrey

‘The Labyrinth’ by Amanda Lohrey won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2021. I read it straight after Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Home Fires’. What a contrast. While Kamila Shamsie’s characters are affected by politics, prejudice,  life in cosmopolitan settings with corresponding realities this book is as different as can be.

A woman on her own, buying a dilapidated house somewhere rural close to a beach. She doesn’t know anybody, but wants to be close to her son who’s incarcerated in a local prison.

Encouraged by her father’s words ‘the cure for many ills is to build something’ Erica, the main character, decides to build a labyrinth.

The book is about her building a life and a labyrinth while reflecting back on different phases of her life. Characters come and leave, and the main focus is on Erica, her inner and outer life. A meditation on art, on guilt and denial, on parenting, on the power of creating something.

The Labyrinth is not, like Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires, a must read book. It is quiet, it’s thought provoking. I wasn’t drawn to any of the characters, yet they were well written, and seem to linger in my mind.

‘Not a book to be analysed but a book to be experienced.’ One of the reviewers writes. Appropriate.