Day before yesterday I completed reading the book 'Labyrinth' by Kate Mosse. I would give the book a two star inspite of its 500 odd pages!
It had rather been a challenge to complete the hefty book. it did have some gripping quality in its writing style but failed to amaze me with its ending. the book rather had a very poor ending.Extremely throughly researched (as it seemed to be, though I have not followed it up) story with a fairly decent capacity of story-telling the book was rather a disappointment.the book could easily have been three quarter of its length.
It is actually two stories entwined together where the second story is fairly dependent on the previous. first story is about a secret of thirteen century. it was about maintaining the secretiveness of the truth of the holy grail and it conjunct symbol of the labyrinth. the heroine of the present day is the bloodline of her thirteenth century counter part and had similar name as Alice and Alaise respectively.it is their bravery that had kept the secret intact at two points of historical crisis.
the way in which the two different times were intersected was interesting. besides gradual revealling of teh facts was what kept the readers interested. However the lengthy narrative had a certain loopholes which demands an explanation. How did the books all three including the third around which the story centres end up in the hands of Marie-Cecil? Was see blood line of the guardians?
interesting is the fact that the author seemed to be genuinely interested in linguists and different languages of Europe which is either overpowered or made extinct. As my husband pointed out the book had the selling point of Da vinci Code and presumably had close dates of publication.
However, the book gives a modern version narrative of life some 800 years back when the human conditions were no less miserable as now as the divisive forces of religion prevail. impinging on a vary rationalist view over matters of religion, ultimately the imagination triumphed in the fiction. I need not disclose what it is for if some of my readers go back to read the story will be left with no surprise. To me the sole consolation has been sense of achievement of reading through the book and rehash of historical reality of crusades and the popularly called 'Dark Age' which I had read in school books many years back.
