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If you enjoyed the book please vote for it on the SPREAD THE WORD website: |
Titania Hardie is a serious student of esoteria. Creating the riddles for THE ROSE LABYRINTH, she drew on her love of literature, history, music and myth, as well as her far-reaching knowledge of folklore and divination. She has first class honours degrees in psychology and English, and was awarded the Chatterton bursary for post-graduate study at Bristol University, where she is currently completing her MA on the Romantic Poets. While she has written many non-fiction books and children’s stories, THE ROSE LABYRINTH is Titania’s first novel, and is a fascinating departure from her previous work. Like Lucy, the novel’s hero, she was born and educated in Sydney, Australia, but for many years has lived in Somerset with her husband and two daughters. Read about what inspired the author to write the novel Though it’s my first piece of fiction, THE ROSE LABYRINTH had been taking shape in my mind for some years before I sat down to start work on it in 2003. It has been a labour of love, borne of intellectual curiosity, and its roots are in my huge love of British history and literature - especially the work of Shakespeare. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that Elizabeth I’s court placed this exceptional woman at the heart of a cohort of powerful men with restless intellects and new ideas, who were surviving dangerous times religiously and politically: the Shakespeares and Marlowes, Drakes and Raleighs, Spencers, Sidneys, and Walsinghams. One of the unsung heroes of her age, however, was the great astrologer / philosopher / mathematician, John Dee. We undersell him if we think of him only as the man who drew up Elizabeth’s birth chart or advised on the date for her coronation. Much more significantly he was a great scholar and bibliophile whose collection of manuscripts – bought up from the monasteries across Europe as they were being looted and destroyed – formed the core reference library for the Queen’s explorers and men of letters. Dee brought the books and the thoughts that helped usher a late-flowering Renaissance into the Elizabethan age, and Shakespeare honoured him as “Prospero” in his last play, The Tempest, almost in direct contrast to the magus character exemplified in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Elizabeth’s reign was an age of Secrets, when the Inquisition was casting terror in the Catholic south and the Reformation was changing forever the ideology of Northern Europe. Exploration of The New World altered man’s conception of the world he inhabited and expanded his philosophical awareness: it must have been both liberating to the imagination, enlarging to the intellect – yet also unsettling to one’s sense of security to consider that all that was once held as finite was not so. And many secret ideas, strongly concerned with the spiritual and political, endangered men’s lives. Against this background I have woven a modern love story. Just as Shakespeare made veiled statements about the politics and social problems of his own time through plays set in distant times and places, THE ROSE LABYRINTH explores some parallels between Elizabeth’s world of social change and religious anxiety, and our own. I wrote it rather as an homage to Shakespeare - in the form (though not the linguistic style!) of a comedy, replete with elements that teeter on tragedy. Three pairs of lovers enter a labyrinth in which their emotions, awareness, and outlooks undergo metamorphosis. The love story is wrapped around a riddling quest to uncover a legacy left by Dee – a man said to be able to speak to the angels - to one of his descendents. But it is essentially a quest for the spiritual beauty and meaning of the rose, a search for the Brotherhood of Man, for what unites rather than divides us. The route through the labyrinth is fraught with danger: and it is here the novel becomes highly political and current. There are groups who are just as entrenched in their religious outlook in the twenty-first century as there were in Shakespeare’s day. What I have said – what I suggest – will upset some of them: but I felt compelled to write this, as we are so inclined to demonise those who have an alternative cultural/religious viewpoint from our own, in adverse times. The novel’s ‘hero’ is Lucy, a gifted young woman for whom the unusual circumstances of a heart transplant provoke an altered response to the world she knows. It’s a gentle, feminist tale, but it also strongly suggests that the greatest good comes from blending qualities we call ‘feminine’ with those we think of as “masculine”. THE ROSE LABYRINTH is a mystery wreathed in puzzles - and a plea for us to bring different energies and ideas to work together: the male and female, and also those which are spiritually and culturally diverse.Reading Group Discussion Guide Find out more and unravel the riddles on www.theroselabyrinth.com |
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