2018 non-fiction, Charlotte Higgins explores the maze and labyrinth in
fiction and their influence on the world.
Higgins is a journalist; she "blogs [for The Guardian] on the
latest developments in the arts, classical music, theatre and books".
She is not an historian. And this book, at least this Book of the Week
abridgement, feels much like what you'd get if you told a journalist
to write down everything they could think of on the subject of mazes,
and paid them by the word.
The writing is pleasant, but it rambles. Things are mentioned in
passing but never referenced. The neurological basis of an
understanding of place is pulled in, and so is a long anecdote about
an old woman on the farm near where Higgins grew up (?), and in the
end it's much more about Higgins' experience of and reaction to mazes
and labyrinths than it is about the things themselves or their
influence on the world in general.
Which is fine, but she's still a journalist, and still not an
historian. So while she's delved a little into the classics, and loves
coming back to Borges, she doesn't have (or this condensation doesn't
show) the richness of mind (or the research) that would let the
labyrinth echo backward and forward in time, the connections with
mystery cults, the spirit trap, the pilgrimage, the meditative angles…
I'm much more interested in these than in "I didn't grow up in London
so it was hard for me to learn to use the Underground".
Eh. It's all right, it's not offensive, but there's just very little
to it. Not helped that it's read by Higgins herself, who has some very
distracting consonant sounds (an S is somewhere between "sh" and
"sss", while a terminal L is completely absent).
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