Red Thread
Charlotte Higgins is “no ordinary author”, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday. In this “thrillingly original book” – which “really is like no other” – she offers an exhaustive history of mazes and labyrinths, tracing their influence not only on art and literature but on “virtually every other area of human existence”. Her love of labyrinths began as a child, when she visited Knossos on Crete, the setting (in Greek mythology) for the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. Higgins returns often to this “haunting myth”, gleefully recounting the “gory” details of the story. Yet her obsession takes her to a great many other places, both real and imagined: to Rome, where she deliberately gets lost; to the maze at Hampton Court, where a group of “excited children” lead her around; and to the fictional “labyrinths” of Jorge Luis Borges. This isn’t a book for the “fainthearted”: Higgins’s learning may overwhelm some, while others will find its “mosaic construction” (designed to mimic a maze) off-putting. Yet “on every page there is a sparkling idea”, and Higgins expresses complex points with “precision and grace”.
As well as being a “learned journey”, this fascinating book is often “deeply personal”, said Natalie Haynes in The Observer. Higgins questions why mazes have meant so much to her, and describes a recurring (and disturbing) dream in which a door appears in an “apparently familiar building” and she finds herself wandering through “room after room of ancient stacked-up furniture and cobwebbed bric-a-brac”. But it isn’t all “self-journeyings and self-discoveries”, said Ian Sansom in The Spectator. Higgins, a journalist for The Guardian, also interviews Adrian Fisher, the world’s leading maze designer (builder of “more than 700 of the things”), who tells her that “we’re living in a golden age of mazes”. From him, she learns that a maze is like a game between the maker and the walker, except that one participant – the maker – has made all their moves in advance.
Something else Higgins learns from Fisher is that maze designers tread a fine line between frustration and enjoyment, said Tim Smith-laing in The Daily Telegraph. His job, she notes, is to “bewilder” people enough to create pleasure, but not so much that you decide “you’ve had enough”. I’m not sure that Higgins quite manages this in her own book, which sometimes gets lost in its own “divagations”. For all its “manifest good qualities” – its erudition, the “visual pleasure” of its illustrations – I decided “I had had enough some time before Higgins had”.