Labyrinth (The Languedoc Trilogy)

Enjoyed this book. The second is even better!

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 m

Labyrinth has everything one can ask for in historical fiction. Lessons in geography, theology, medieval history and a bit of philosophy. Mosse's dual-era mystery is a transporting story of thought provoking possibilities. The historical elements of Catharism, crusading and inquisitors are topics vividly brought to life. As a reader who cares about nothing more than character development, I was surprised to read some of the earlier reviewers criticize Labyrinth on that aspect. The protagonists are all either compelling or repulsive enough for me to choose turning the page over putting the book down. There is some asymmetry of character development; the characters of the modern men were not well explored. Perhaps that was a sequel set-up? There are several dusted-off themes present; Cinderella, Grail Search, Indiana Jones all come to mind. In the end however the three things that carry Labyrinth to five stars are the compelling development of the main characters, a whole new (to this reviewer anyway) spin on "extreme longevity", and a fabulous animation of real-life medieval historical people and places. My number reason for taking a break from reading this was to google some of the people, places, events and politicoreligious themes discussed. I recommend it highly for those who like good history and immaginative, thought provoking fiction.

Presently a fascination exists with European history that is manifested perhaps most visibly on the fiction bestseller list. There are a number of books that namedrop Da Vinci, and if the Templars were still a viable entity (and yes, I know, they may well be cloistered in a monastery somewhere in France, biding their time), they would be collecting royalties right now, or at least suing for the same. The latest entry into the U.S. fray has been a bestseller in Europe for the past year or so --- an ambitious, sweeping work titled LABYRINTH, spanning centuries and continents in its scope. Kate Mosse treats her subject matter with a calm, steady and confident hand; her narrative approach is unhurried and methodical. LABYRINTH begins in the present, at an archeological dig taking place in the Pyrenees. Alice Tanner, a volunteer, literally stumbles into a hidden cave and makes a discovery that sets into motion a frantic, intense, and subversive search between opposing forces who have been searching for hundreds of years for the very objects that Tanner comes across by accident. Meanwhile, Tanner is stunned to discover a link between herself, the objects, and Alais du Mas, a woman of the 13th century whose father is one of three individuals entrusted with a book connected to the Holy Grail that has the potential to rock civilization. The novel runs along parallel paths as Tanner finds herself in the middle of tug-of-war between forces she slowly and belatedly comes to understand, while Alais struggles against culture and family to assist her father in preserving the knowledge that he has secretly possessed for decades. Mosse weaves an extremely skillful tapestry that connects the past and present --- not only Alais and Alice (the most obvious links), but also a number of characters whose connection between two eras is subtly hinted at throughout. Part of the enjoyment of the novel is detecting who is linked to whom, while Mosse slowly parcels out the mystery and importance of what the opposing forces so desperately seek to acquire, and why. Readers should not expect explosions, revelations and ripped bodices from Page One --- Mosse's style is decidedly European in that her tale and its pacing proceed in their own time --- but the journey here is as important as the destination, and patience is more than amply rewarded on all counts. With LABYRINTH, Mosse has produced a fascinating and engrossing link between two eras, blending and blurring genres while creating two memorable heroines who become as one across the ages. --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

It's a rare thing in publishing history for an author to take a geographical location and reinvent it for the pure pleasure of the reader, and that is what Kate Mosse has done for South West France. The heat comes off every page of this extraordinary tale set both in ancient Carcassone and present day France, and will no doubt have airlines rescheduling to meet the likely reader demand to see for themselves where these wonderfully imagined events are set. If you like split-time stories with gripping mysteries and strong female protagonists this book will be your read of the year. Unforgettable.

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.