The Labyrinth by Gerhard Roth (review)

Vienna's Imperial Palace burns, and a one-eyed psychiatrist questions whether his pyromaniac patient is responsible for its ignition—or worse, whether he and those closest to him may be to blame.

As a Sherlock Holmes–like tale for mature audiences with a taste for Da Vinci Code–esque intertwinings of history and fiction, Gerhard Roth's crime novel Das Labyrinth uses the 1992 Hofburg fire as a backdrop to explore Austria's Habsburg and Nazi legacies, embedding clues in international chases, erotic encounters, and violent crimes.

With a title like Das Labyrinth, one might expect a convoluted narrative with plot twists, intellectual conundrums, and unsolved mysteries. In this regard, Roth delivers. The novel's six books feature five characters' reflections on a suspected arson and an attempted murder following (and potentially related to) the fire. Reality blends into delusion, reason into madness, and self into other as the narrators embark on a quest for truth leading them through Vienna, Madeira, Lisbon, Madrid, and Toledo. Through each subsequent testimony, perverse and interconnected seductions unfold, bringing together the psychiatrist, his two patients (one a pyromaniac student, the other a schizophrenic painter who has mysteriously lost his ability to speak), a promiscuous female speech therapist, and an unnamed author known as "the Writer," who resembles Roth himself. The novel's many unexpected twists unravel like Roth's reflections on the writing process: "Everything he tries disintegrates" (328).

Roth's compelling presentation of plot developments contains an almost dizzying number of testimonies whose subplots only occasionally intersect. Jarring shifts between five narrating voices bring to mind E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann and Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem, while extensive footnotes in passages by the Writer and the psychiatrist resemble those in Freud's oeuvre: frequent, spanning multiple pages, and often bearing little relevance to the topic at hand.

Resembling William James's concept of "stream-of-consciousness," in which thoughts continuously flow like a stream without two ideas reoccurring in the same way, characters' statements often overlap and contradict one another. The structure and content of their written testimonies mimic the flow of unspoken cognitive processes, meandering among plot description, interior monologue, and scholarly analysis. Hazy distinctions between these three modes of thought underscore the novel's (at times exaggerated) fixation on madness.

The novel itself resembles an absent-minded academic's compilation of notes, a chronologically cohesive manuscript that has not yet undergone final revisions needed for clarity. Characters' thoughts, reflections, and confessions unfold through a seemingly infinite constellation of media, including journal entries, letters, psychiatry reports, transcribed interviews, photos, and extensive historical and literary exposés on Karl von Habsburg, Cervantes, and Pessoa. Combined, these documents paint a picture of Austrian history and contemporary society as constantly in flux, at times hypocritical, and forever subject to reinterpretation.

The reader is left to ask, who assembled the novel's disparate documents? Similarities in narrative voice suggest that each narrator may in fact be one and the same. The Writer's fourteen-page analysis of Pessoa's biography and the "hysterical neurasthenia" that inspired his heteronyms gestures toward this possibility (224). Could this byzantine narrative, with its fixation on unraveling the depths of the human soul, also be the creation of an individual driven mad by a deep-seated discontent with modern society? This mode of questioning suggests a conscious and ironic self-reflexivity leading back to Roth: not only does his non-fiction writing explore the novel's central issues, such as Austrian history, national identity, and literary Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but—like his characters—Roth is also a writer, former student, scholar, and son of a medical doctor.

Readers should be warned that the novel's many historical anecdotes and analyses of art and literature often overshadow the plot. Elaborate examinations of Kafka's The Hunger Artist and paintings by Goya and Velázquez often bear perfunctory connections to the plot, leaving readers wondering why these and other works were included at all. The bewildering effect may be...