Any reader who has got lost in a book knows that it involves a strange mixture of surrender and control. You are carried along by a story you could leave at any moment simply by raising your eyes from the page, and by staying within the confines of a space just a few inches square you could end up anywhere. Books are both containers and escape hatches. Perhaps that is why some of the most popular stories involve characters being lost and found again. Whether they are fairy tale children following trails of breadcrumbs through the woods, or Oliver Twist being rescued from the bubbling confusion of London’s streets, we are always likely to sympathise with individuals who are in a similar position to ourselves. As readers we too find ourselves making our way through an unfamiliar world.
Many of the most influential stories don’t involve being physically lost. From Dante’s narrator losing his way in a dark wood “in the middle of the journey of life” at the start of The Divine Comedy (the world’s greatest midlife crisis poem), to Milton’s Satan tempting Eve in Paradise Lost after he enters the “surging maze” of a serpent’s body, choosing the right path to take has always been a particular feature of religious writing. However sinuous or devious their narratives, what all these stories share is the promise that there is a route out of the maze, whether this is thought of as a way of life or merely an end to it. (The idea that the only guaranteed way of escaping from life’s temptations is by dying has long been a popular one in some religious circles.)
Yet one of the peculiar pleasures of reading is the discovery that even when you solve one maze you are still happily caught in a much larger one. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, in which Sherlock Holmes was first introduced, the detective tries to explain the nature of his work to Watson: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” Three further novels and 56 short stories later, it had become clear this was a scarlet thread that would run and run. Each adventure opened out on to another, meaning that Conan Doyle’s allusion to Ariadne’s ball of red thread, which she uses to help Theseus out of the Cretan labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur, didn’t exactly capture how reading worked, even if it was a possible model for Holmes’s patient detective work. As Jorge Luis Borges famously suggested in his 1962 collection Labyrinths, no scarlet thread can lead you out of one book without leading you into many others, because lines of print are like threads that are all connected. A library is a labyrinth.
Any bookshelf would be graced by the presence of these books by Charlotte Higgins and Henry Eliot. On the surface, both appear to be cultural histories of mazes and labyrinths, whether constructed above or below ground, and out of materials that range from hedges to stonework. On closer inspection, both also turn out to be books that ask readers to surrender to the unpredictable pleasures of getting lost.
Follow This Thread is the simpler of the two. It is also a triumph of book design. Eliot’s text is not remarkable in itself: a short history of mazes from Hampton Court’s hedges to modern examples involving mirrors and spurting jets of water. What turns this book into something extraordinary are the illustrations by French line-artist Quibe, which encourage the reader to follow a single red line as it surges and zigzags from page to page, sometimes making us read upside down or back to front. It turns reading into a game in which the book is both a puzzle and its own solution, and the results are variously enticing, frustrating and addictive – not unlike a real maze.
According to Higgins, labyrinths “seduce you into contending with them, dallying with them, wasting time in them”, and the same is true of her playful and gorgeously written meditation. Beginning with a childhood visit to Crete, she continues by dipping into a rich set of materials from history, archaeology, art criticism and memory. We learn that a maze is “a map we can really walk on”, and that walking a maze means pitting your wits against the designer, in a game where one of the participants is absent. But the text is choppy and digressive, with footnotes that work like little narrative cul-de-sacs. In effect it is a literary maze, where the nearest thing to a line of argument is a delicate series of allusions to the colour red. One moment Higgins is describing the “red-rope barrier” in Rome protecting Michelangelo’s statue of Moses; then she is negotiating passport control, where “for some, the light blinks red”. It is like a series of clues – a word which, she points out, comes from the Old English “cliwen” or “cleowen”, meaning a ball of yarn or thread.
If there is one thread that links these books together, it is the original legend of the Minotaur. Both tell the story with a pleasurable shudder at its human drama, from Ariadne’s betrayal by Theseus to the labyrinth designer Daedalus’s escape with his son Icarus using wings fashioned out of feathers and wax. Higgins also delves into the ruins of Knossos, where the labyrinth was supposed to have been constructed. She investigates the life of Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who succeeded in conjuring an entire ancient civilisation out of the earth there, mostly by taking little shards of fact and sticking them together with generous globs of fancy. As Higgins points out, many of the ancient artefacts he uncovered are now thought to be fakes, or at least imaginative reconstructions, such as a sculpture of a firm-breasted goddess that was once described as “a magnificently perverse bit of 1930s pornography”. But, as she also notes, something similar has happened to the legend of the Minotaur over the years. It has been restored and updated, becoming a model of “the endlessly generative nature of art”.
In addition to popular works such as Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth, the legend has surfaced in more unexpected places. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea learns that her dry academic husband is “lost among small closets and winding stairs”, like a Minotaur sadly trapped in a labyrinth of his own making. Picasso painted a whole sequence of images in the 1930s featuring the Minotaur, and in 1959 was photographed stripped to the waist while wearing an artificial bull’s head. Even the London Underground is a kind of modern Minotaur’s lair, a subterranean hive of looping tunnels and hidden chambers, something that drew the attention of artist Mark Wallinger when he installed a series of plaques depicting a labyrinth at each station in 2013.
In fact, the closer you look, the more it seems that the human brain is hardwired to enjoy the mazes and labyrinths that its own structure resembles. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Wendy and Danny explore the hedge maze outside their hotel, wandering in and out of dead ends. Then, as Jack broods over an architectural model of the maze, the scene cuts to a bird’s eye view of mother and son as they arrive at the centre. “I didn’t think it was going to be this big, did you?” asks Wendy. She could just as easily be talking about the amazing history these books dig up and put on display.
• To buy Red Thread (Jonathan Cape, RRP £25) for £18.49 and Follow This Thread (Particular, RRP £16.99) for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
