Unlocking the secrets of the Labyrinth

Kate Mosse is a household name for anyone who love historical fiction. This year marks the 20^th anniversary of her multi-award winning book, Labyrinth, which is the first in a trilogy, set in Medieval France. The book has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been translated into 37 different languages. The story of Labyrinth follows two women, separated by 800 years, both on a quest fraught with danger. To celebrate this anniversary, Kate is holding a series of shows which aren't your average book talk. Kate will be sharing her inspirations behind the story of the writing of Labyrinth, from the very first moment she set foot in Carcassonne in winter 1989 to the inspirational moments of climbing the mountain of Montségur in the Pyrenees six or seven years later and coming face to face with the image of the woman who would become her lead character, Alaïs, though not knowing who she was. Kate will be talking about how the novel took shape, how her characters came to life and about the beautiful landscape of Languedoc, all through lights, music, video, film, special effects, props and photographs. We caught up with Kate ahead of her first show, which opens on 26^th February in Stafford.

Laura - I can't quite believe Labyrinth was released 20 years ago. I read it almost as soon as it came out and still have my battered old copy of the story.

Kate - That was one of the reasons for doing the show. Every night after doing my last one-woman show, Warrior Queens, people came up to me after the show with their old, loved copies of Labyrinth to tell me their stories about their relationship with Labyrinth, when they first read it, and we just started to realise there a lot of people who really love the novel and we thought that as the 20^th anniversary was coming up, maybe it would be great for me to do a show inspired by that and get me back on the road. I thought it would be great for me to celebrate with all the readers who made that happen. In a way, it's people like you with your old copies of Labyrinth who made that happen.

Laura – In reading the story, you can clearly see it's packed with history and incredibly well-researched. It took you 10 years to research and write Labyrinth?

Kate - Well, kind of. The way novels work for me is that I don't suddenly sit down and say 'today, I'm going to start a novel'. We bought a house in Carcassonne in 1989 and that was the moment that I fell in love with the history of Carcassonne, I fell in love with the place. I didn't intend to write anything, we were just there on and off. Over the years I visited all the sites and the history just seeped into my bones. Before I knew it, I was starting to think 'I think there's a story here for me that I could write' and that would be really exciting. I don't really know when I started writing it but there are many points when I can look back and say 'that was an important moment when I visited Montségur; that was an important moment when I read that history' and before I knew it, I was writing a novel. I was writing like most of us when we start out, early in the mornings before the children were up and in the evenings after I'd finished my real job, so when you're doing that big piece of work, you're researching all the time and writing all the time but you can't give it all the attention it deserves until much later when I had the courage to give up my day job and think 'I'm going to do this, I'm going to make it happen'. It's been a wonderful experience and I, like you, can't believe it's been 20 years but the facts tell us otherwise.

Laura - Did you do all that research on your own? Did you have anyone to help you?

Kate - For me the research is part of the joy. I think most writers are curious, it doesn't feel like research, it feels like investigation, it feels like being a detective. I'm reading to discover, and out of the research comes the story. Out of research come ideas. There are some people, I know, who say 'can you go and research the fire service in Devon in 1977'; fine, if there are particular bits of information you need, but I'm an immersive writer, I create an entire world, as you know; an imagined world. And nobody can do that for me. It's not about particular bits of information I need to know, I want to know everything and out of that will come the story.

Laura - Was it always going to be a trilogy or did you start Labyrinth and then have more stories to tell?

Kate - That's a great question; no, it wasn't. I wasn't thinking beyond that novel. But when I'd finished it, I realised I wasn't done with Carcassonne. I felt I wanted to tell other stories about Carcassonne in different periods of history and therefore some of the characters I bought back. If I'd intended to write it as a trilogy I might have done something slightly differently because I would have been planning a great group. My latest series of novels, which is four novels about the Joubert family, I planned that as a four. The inspiration and the first idea is at the very end of the last book and then I wrote all the way up to that whereas with Labyrinth it was one hundred percent Labyrinth, and then I just thought, I'm not ready to say goodbye. So then, Sepulchre is 19^th century France and Citadel is Second World War. And then, of course, in the Joubert family chronicles I managed to get Carcassonne in the 16^th century in, so that's how the books came about but Labyrinth was very much the beginning point.

Laura - And you've managed to get Carcassonne in again, in Red Letter Day in The Mistletoe Bride, your collection of short stories.

Kate - Oh yes, absolutely. With short stories you're quite often asked to write something quickly and it's usually for a charity or a particular collection that's raising money. I'm not a short story writer really, but I usually say yes to those kind of things if there's a fundraising or charity element to it. But of course you inevitably write stories that are partly set in the world that you're writing in at that moment. I can't remember exactly when I wrote Red Letter Day but I definitely would have been researching something for the Languedoc trilogy at the time and therefore you can see exactly where that falls in my research. And the Joubert family chronicles; Carcassonne appears in three of the four of them as well.

Laura – Yet in the last two books in the Joubert series I see you leave Carcassonne and end up in Africa. How did that come about?

Kate - Much like Labyrinth, all my fiction - and the Joubert family are the same - it very much starts with place. I was in South Africa at a book festival back in 2012, I was there promoting Citadel and I had that moment of not knowing any of the history of the region, having no idea there was a French history in the Western Cape, and discovering this piece of Huguenot history; that 400 Huguenots fled persecution and sailed to the Cape in 1688 when they could no longer live safely in France and had been, in part, responsible for setting up the South African wine industry. This blew my mind, and I thought 'I want to know all about that' and then had this very strong sense, stood in the Huguenot graveyard, of a woman in 19^th century dress, leaning forward and rubbing the lichen from a gravestone. I remember thinking 'oh no, I'm going to have to write a whole load of books to discover who that woman is and who's buried in the ground'! And that's indeed what happened and once I'd realised that had got its hooks into me I thought I'm now going to have to go back to the beginning of the wars of religion in France which are 16^th century; I don't know anything about this at all, I've never really studied the Huguenots so where am I going to go? Well, of course I'm going to go to Carcassonne and see if there were any Huguenots there at all! So, it's exactly the same with Labyrinth. It was arriving in Carcassonne and the characters started to speak to me. I never choose a place, I never choose history; it's being somewhere where what I call the whispering in the landscape, begins.

Laura – Everybody rightly loves your character Alaïs in Labyrinth but for me, Minou from the Joubert chronicles, which starts with The Burning Chambers in Carcassonne in 1562, is my favourite character. Your 19^th century lady leading over the gravestone in Africa; do you start with an image, a feeling, a characteristic perhaps, when you start to create these strong female characters?

Kate - I do all the research, I know the sort of story that I'm going to tell, I know the sort of person that I need to tell that story and then I start writing and let them find me. I never make decisions about what they look like or what type of person they are. I start writing and then they emerge. Of course, that's just the first draft and I'll go back, and I'll make the character work and by the time I've got to know her I'll realise 'she would never do this, she would never do that', but with Alaïs and Minou, they're similar sorts of women in a way, in that they're both self contained, they are very dutiful daughters who love their fathers. They both have no mothers and my mother always used to say 'none of your characters have got nice mothers' but the problem is, often in periods of history, if a girl is very loved and has a mother and is being held in that kind of environment, quite often the girl who hasn't got a mother but has got a father who cares for her, is given more freedom than most girls in her period of history. Because I have active heroines, I need them to have that freedom to be out and about in a way that they otherwise might not. I think of all my characters, Alaïs and Minou are most like each other. They're brave, they're not foolhardy, they're principled, they get to grow old and they have children of their own and they live full lives but do extraordinary things in the course of them. So that's why I let the characters develop themselves rather than me trying to force them down one route or another. For me, I almost inhabit almost all of my characters and write from the inside out.

Laura - In Labyrinth, Alaïs ends up with her companions in a village called Los Seres which is a safe haven for the Cathars. Is Los Seres a real place?

Kate - No. But it could have been, in that there are many little hamlets in the Pyrenees, lost villages that were there and then everybody left and all the buildings fell down and they don't exist any more. But what I've learned is that you have to be very careful about putting your imaginary characters into small places. Its fine to have your imaginary characters in Carcassonne or in Toulouse, or in Paris, anywhere that's more substantial. But if you choose a tiny place then people go looking, and that's not really fair for people who own the houses there. I did learn that as I went on. If you're going to set a horrible murder somewhere, don't do it in a real house! Unless it's inspired by a real murder that happened in that house. You know, respect the person who lives there now. So Los Seres is one of those that's made up but it's a village that could have been real.

Laura - Can you speak Occitan? It's included quite a lot in Labyrinth.

Kate - No. I could if I tried to; it is the old language of the south. My husband is bilingual in French and Spanish and Occitan has a mixture of those things. I can translate well enough with a dictionary but I certainly wouldn't speak it. There is a bilingual Occitan-French school in the heart of the city and it's rather like people in Wales learning Welsh. It used to be seen as the language that was spoken in the countryside by the farmers and anyone sophisticated wouldn't speak it. Now, in the modern times its seen as a heritage language and there's quite a lot that happens in Occitan and lots of Occitan music which is wonderful. The reason it's included in the book is because language is political. The eradication of language is political. It's a way of one group getting power over another group and therefore its important to have Occitan in the book. The fact that if you owned a copy of the New Testament written in Occitan you would be executed means that it's important to respect the power of that language and put it on the page. Because French is the language of the oppressor, so that's why it has to be there; its part of the historical voracity and the danger of it. The irony is, when one comes to write about the wars of religion, several hundred years later, to possess a copy of the Bible in French will have you executed. So, this is why these things are important, this is where the research comes into it. It's fundamental to the world in which my imagined characters are navigating.

Laura - Going away from the stories themselves, you were awarded an OBE in 2013 and then a CBE just last year. How did that feel?

Kate - It was lovely to get the CBE because its an acknowledgement that the Arts matter. I think in a world where there are a lot of challenges, and it's quite a complicated and ugly world at the moment, I think celebrating good things that people do... When you look down the list, they're people who have given years to campaigning against domestic violence or promoting sport for youngsters who don't have any access to sports ground and so on. A lot of the people who are being awarded MBEs, OBEs, CBEs - you meet such incredible people. So for me it was an acknowledgement that books matter. Also, it's not just my own writing, its the women's prize, it's supporting other women, that women's voices matter and deserve to be heard and seen. It felt great to be there. It was Princess Anne who gave my CBE to me and we had a lovely chat; I admire her very much, she's an incredible woman who does an enormous amount of good in the world so I was thrilled to get it from her. We had a jolly nice day out and my only sadness was my parents weren't there to see it.

Laura – And so, to finish, let's speak a little about the new show.

Kate - Yes! From the moment people come into the theatre they will feel they're in Medieval France. I want that shiver to go down the back of their spine. It's music, film, lights, video; a really immersive experience and we'll all be going on a journey together about my inspirations and how I came to write Labyrinth and the characters, but also the real history behind it from the Nazi Grail hunters in the more modern period right back to the Grail legends from the Bible and much earlier. I just want people to come and have a great night out and celebrate the anniversary with me. I'll be signing books afterwards as there's a new special edition of Labyrinth available so bring your book and come and say hello.

Kate will be performing her show, Unlocking the secrets of the Labyrinth, at the Exeter Northcott on 16^th March, and at Queens Theatre, Barnstaple on Wednesday, 19^th March.

Tickets are available from https://www.nlp-ltd.com/labyrinth/ or from the venues themselves

https://exeternorthcott.co.uk/events/kate-mosse-labyrinth-live/

https://www.queenstheatre-barnstaple.com/event/kate-mosse-unlocking-the-secrets-of-the-labyrinth/