For those of us weaned on a world of medieval fantasy novels wherein beautiful and independent heroines take on dragons and the odd evil wizard, Labyrinth reads like a familiar bedtime story.

Set in southern France, the novel traces the lives of Alice Tanner and her thirteenth century counterpart, Alaïs, as they battle religious fanatics and overly sexed women in their quest to protect the Holy Grail. Its similarity to bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code, The Rule of Four, and The Dumas Club leads one to conclude that British author Kate Mosse hopes to tap into the evident market for books about ancient texts with untold power.

The novel opens as Tanner, while working on an archeological dig with her close friend, stumbles upon a cave with two ancient corpses hidden inside. A police investigation and near death encounters follow, proving to those not tipped off by the fact that "she can feel malevolence crawling over her skin, her scalp, the soles of her feet" that the cave is not what it seems.

Fortunately, Labyrinth is more than the glorified annals of an archival researcher determining what happened in the cave so many years ago. Though it begins in the present day, the heart of novel is the story of Alaïs, whose actions almost fatalistically determine what happens in the present day.

The parallels between the two time periods are fairly explicit. Alaïs's evil sister, Oriane, who seduces men to obtain the manuscripts of the Grail reappears as Marie Cecil and Alaïs' husband, the handsome but slightly stupid Guilhelm du Mas, returns in the body of Will Franklin, an American who gets caught up in the adventure.

Mosse uses this melting of past into present to transform innocent and sunny southern France into a setting of menace and terror. Half the narrative is situated during the Crusades of Pope Innocent III, which casts the shadow of religious extremism into the present day. When Alice visits the cathedral in Toulouse, she is haunted by a vision of a woman being raped and killed for heresy. That Alice's movement from site to site is being closely monitored manipulates our identification with the tourist experience and compounds the creepiness factor.

If the plot is not quite as labyrinthine as one might hope—moral ambiguity is almost entirely absent and is anyone really surprised to discover that Oriane has seduced Guilhelm?—the actual history of the region that Mosse incorporates into the novel is dramatic enough to make up for it.

Indeed, the best moments of the text come when Mosse abandons the present and allows herself and the reader to access the past through her imagination.

"Each time I fell in love with my medieval characters I had to leave them and go back to my contemporary characters," Mosse revealingly confesses in an interview with her publisher, Orion.

That Mosse comes at the Grail story with an expressly feminist agenda is no problem. It's a pleasure to see Alice working out her roots for herself, without a Robert Langdon-like medium to do the interpretation. Refreshingly, Mosse also uses the Grail as a way to ensure that romantic love is not the ultimate goal for Alice or Alaïs.

But one still wishes that the men the Alices are attracted to were not such idiots. The inability of Will and Guilhelm to see past raven hair and long legs gravely calls into question our heroines' taste in men. Moreover, in a world where people live for more than 500 years is it really asking too much for the heroine to have her own adventure and a worthy sidekick?

Ultimately, Labyrinth is a quick read, a whirlwind tour of a small part of French history told by an engaging and energetic narrator.

 

Natalie Sherman is a sophomore concentrating in Social Studies.