Threading The Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus
Publisher – Luna Press Publishing
Published – 8th March
Price – £13.99 paperback
American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.
What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.
Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees in the corner of her eye.
A beautiful testament to the power of memory and space, Threading the Labyrinth tells the stories of those who loved this garden across the centuries, and how those lives still touch us today.
Literature tends to focus on the houses more than the gardens. The attics have madwomen; what is in Hill House still walks alone and there are many many tales of what happens both upstairs and downstairs. But as I’m fining finally having access to one again after fifteen years, I realise gardens are often as important as the rest of the home – reading outside is bliss! In Threading the Labyrinth Tiffani Angus weaves a magical historical tale of a single garden and its many incarnations over four hundred years and its impacts in particular for the women who owned and worked in them.
Toni is an american in New Mexico who is seeing her life fall apart. Her art gallery is struggling; and she sees debts mount so is quite surprised to be she told following a death in her family she is now the sole owner of land in a rural area outside London. Seeing the chance for a new source of income she travels with her last few dollars to the UK to find a dilapidated and partially bombed stately home; lands gone to seed and a strange walled garden beckoning her. She opens the doors and sees lush flowers, amazing sights and then very quickly seems back in the world she knows. As Toni starts investigating the house and its history we also get to see several figures whose lives have crossed that garden’s walls and the impacts it’s had on the past and the future of each other from a wounded soldier returning to find his lover married to his brother; a disgruntled lady increasingly abandoned by her husband, a duplicitous gardener, a struggling Land Girl and a would be photographer and artist. These figures all feature strangely in each other’s lives crossing paths very subtly up and down the history of the garden just as Toni gets to decide its fate.
A bit like a garden through the year Threading the Labyrinth is never one thing for very long so the reader never knows what is coming around the corner. Angus has constructed a multitude of different types of stories around the garden that no-one really knows the origin of. Impressively each one works on its own yet compliments the other. Toni’s story is one of a woman very lost in her life and finding this strange house pulling her in; one story deals with lost loves and manages to be incredibly sensual as passion meet in the garden; another tale is a mystery of lies and magic while we get hauntings in wartime and a servant finding she can be so much more than anyone expected. I was really impressed how Angus creates a new suite of characters for each story and the tones shift to match the story. In many ways this echoes how gardens have shifted roles though the years too – sometimes crucial for food and at other times a toy for presentation and showing off. This brings in interesting relationships between the owners of the house and the family that owns the garden – power flows between these two groups – equals, servants or just strange remote employers to escape.
But throughout there is a disconcerting feeling that this garden is more than what it seems permeating the novel. Characters on the edges you can’t fully see; the constant feeling at being watched and yet also a garden that is full of growth and life – its plays with old folklore and I respect the story for not giving away all its secrets. The garden is there for its own purposes. The garden has mysteries that we get to understand a bit better but never fully understand as the stories get told. I think trying to bolt a full SF or fantasy explanation would be cheating so liked this approach in the story as sometimes you just like the idea of the uncanny just being itself.
As we are currently confined to our homes and gardens this would be a great read for people who would like a mix of the weird and the historical. I really enjoyed Angus’ approach to stories and themes and felt by the end I knew this place and its inhabitants very well across the centuries. An accomplished debut and a storyteller who I will be looking forward to future tales from. A perfect summertime read awaits you!
