YOU'LL BE AMAZED...

Red Thread: On Mazes & Labyrinths Charlotte Higgins Jonathan Cape €28

Who doesn’t love a maze? When Charlotte Higgins revisited the famous maze at Hampton Court last year – the oldest surviving hedge maze in England, planted in the late 17th century – she let a group of excited children be her guide.

While adults tend to view life’s mazes with a mixture of alarm or caution, children find them thrilling, enjoying what Higgins calls ‘the sensation of being lost-not-lost’. Following the whims of her companions at Hampton Court, she ‘marvelled at their fearless curiosity, their lack of hesitation when paths divided, their carefree lack of calculation, their hurried, pounding footsteps and grinning sheepishness when we came up against the same dead ends’.

Above this vivid description, she prints a map of the design of Hampton Court maze, so that anyone sufficiently bookish will now be able to take a copy in with them for their comfort and safety. Furthermore, the next page carries a handy footnote for those who worry about getting lost: ‘As it happens, the Hampton Court maze can be solved simply by keeping one hand constantly in contact with the hedge: you will eventually reach the centre, if rather laboriously.’ Ever the assiduous reviewer, I’m happy to say that I followed these instructions when I set foot in the maze last week and found them faultless. In fact, if they hadn’t been, I might still be there.

Red Thread is an exploration of mazes and labyrinths in art, in myth, in the mind, and in virtually every other area of human existence. Read more than a few pages and, like the sunspots that appear when you close your eyes, you start to see them everywhere, and to conclude that life itself is a maze. Within the space of a few pages, Higgins leaps from the impossibility of navigating the city of Venice, to the maze-like swirl on a snail’s shell and from there to the strange labyrinth of passageways that make up the human ear.

Along the way, she deals with the maze of the detective story, in which the reader is simultaneously confused and reassured, and Freud’s notion of the subconscious as a labyrinth, for which the psychoanalyst bears the red thread.

She zips between ancient and modern, fact and fiction, at one moment examining the series of mazes in Stanley Kubrick’s mesmerising film The Shining, and at the next giving us tantalising glimpses of her own life. ‘When I lived for a month in Rome, when I was in the middle of my life, I fell in love with a statue,’ begins one chapter. This, you will have guessed by now, is no ordinary author.

Her thrillingly original book – it really is like no other – is itself a sort of maze of facts and thoughts, ancient tales and modern phenomena. Like a maze, it requires the participants – in this case, the readers – to remain alert and receptive, to put two and two together and to work things out for themselves.

In this way, Red Thread is not for the faint-hearted. Some may find the author’s absorption in ancient myths and legends too demanding; others may be put off by its mosaic construction, in which the connection between one passage and another can at first seem tenuous. But those who persist in the adventure will be richly rewarded: on every page there is a sparkling idea or a fascinating piece of information. It is also beautifully written, complex notions expressed with precision and grace. It begins and ends with the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. This haunting myth is interwoven throughout: how Minos, king of Crete, ordered the inventor Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the monstrous half-bull, half-man that was the Minotaur; how every year the defeated Athenians were forced to send seven boys and seven girls into the labyrinth, to be eaten by the Minotaur; and how, one year, King Minos’s daughter Ariadne helped Theseus, son of the King of Athens, to kill the Minotaur by supplying him with a sword and a red thread, to help him retrace his footsteps.

As the book goes on, more details of Theseus and the Minotaur emerge, most of which I had forgotten, many of them far more startling or fruity or gory than anything experienced by our lame contemporary superheroes – Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and the rest. For instance, I didn’t remember that the Minotaur came into existence after King Minos’s wife fell in love with a bull, nor that she made Daedalus construct a cow costume for her to wear that was so realistic that – without going into the sordid detail– nine months later, out popped a baby with the bottom half of a boy and the top half of a bull.

And what of Procrustes, the sadist whom Theseus bumped into on his lengthy travels? Living by a road, he would invite travellers to stay the night. He had two beds, one big, one small. He forced tall visitors on to the small bed, and sawed

off their legs to fit the bed, and he forced short visitors on to the big bed, and hammered at their limbs until they, too, could be stretched to fit it. Even the most disappointing stay at a Premier Inn has never been as bad as that.

Within the extended myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and the lovelorn Ariadne, deserted by Theseus at the earliest opportunity, Higgins manages to unravel a multiplicity of meanings. One of the many joys of Red Thread is that, for all her intellectual prowess, Higgins is never afraid to state simple truths, though often she does this, a little irritatingly, under the guise of a mentor called Mrs Grammatiki.

‘Once, in late 2013, when a friend of mine was dying too young, I expressed to her my bewilderment at life’s cruelties, and my sense of the aimlessness of my own existence, my feeling of disorientation. She replied: “We are always in the middle of the labyrinth. This is an inescapable part of our existence. We are in the story but we cannot tell the end or see the shape of the labyrinth. This is one reason we like to tell stories – so as to impose order and pattern on to our existence, which otherwise seems chaotic.”’ Much later on in the book, in a footnote, Higgins reveals that Mrs G is actually a figment of her imagination, a fact that all but the most gullible of readers will already have twigged. The late W G Sebald, who liked to construct free-floating narratives with similar twists and turns, was also prone to such flights of fancy. Where does the truth stop and fantasy begin? Sometimes, Higgins recounts dreams she has had; occasionally she goes perhaps a little too far in finding mazes where none exists, at one point even comparing the ‘red insides of our bodies… contained by their bones and sinews and skin’ to the human longing ‘to be held within a containing structure’. But – unless I am being very stupid – most of the facts and the stories she recounts are perfectly solid. When I first started reading Red Thread, the lost boys from the football team in Thailand were still making headlines, trapped in what amounted to a vast and terrifying subterranean maze. Later, once they were out, and I was coming to the end of Red Thread, I read what Higgins had to say about caves and dreams. ‘These are places between the worlds, between the surface and the interior. Caves lead inwards, towards the Earth’s belly; they are vestibules between the known, familiar surface and the mysterious, uncontrollable regions that lie within.’ Her book is full of such penetrating observations: without affecting any sort of mindless need to ‘update’ or make things needlessly contemporary, she makes ancient myths and buried feelings come alive. And her publishers have done her proud: for the price of a couple of pizzas, you get a beautifully produced volume, full of colour illustrations of sculptures and paintings and tantalising maps of mazes. Red Thread also comes with subheadings in red and a bright red ribbon, to help you keep your place. Between pages 80 and 81, you get a little glimpse of the book’s binding; and, hey presto! – it’s a red thread.