First the making – I recalled my father’s words: the cure for many ills is to build something – and then the repetition, the going over and over so that time would rupture and be stopped in its flow … Since my past and my future were hitched to my son’s life sentence, I felt that if I stepped outside the present I risked being turned to stone.
Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for a monstrous act of revenge. Trapped in her grief, Erica retreats from Sydney to a sleepy hamlet on the south coast, near where Daniel is serving his sentence.
There, in a rundown shack by the ocean, she obsesses over building a labyrinth. To create it – to navigate the path through her quandary – Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.
The Labyrinth is a story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children. It is also a an examination of how art can be ruthlessly destructive, and restorative. Mesmerising yet disquieting, it shows the author to be at the peak of her powers.
by Amanda Lohrey
Warren Book Club 