Carol Shields takes the reader forensically into her characters, in this case, Larry Weller. We follow Larry from awkward, directionless teen to a 46 year old, famously successful, garden maze designer. Even Larry wonders how it all happened.
Larry and his first wife, Dorrie, are just clueless kids when she gets pregnant and they get married. Larry went to floral design college (Dorrie thought it was actual college) and gets a job in a flower shop. Larry’s parents give them a tour of England as a wedding gift. That is where Larry becomes obsessed with hedges in general and mazes in particular.
“The hedges were everywhere. Out in the countryside they separated fields from pasture land, snaking up and down the tilted landscape, criss-crossing each other or angling wildly out of sight, dividing one patch of green from another, providing a barrier between cattle and sheep and flocks of geese. … In the towns the clipped hedges served as fences between houses, a stitching of fine green seams, and gave protection and privacy to tiny garden plots. Luxurious and shapely, they seemed pieces of tended sculpture, and now, late in a mild winter, their woody fullness was enveloped by a pale furred cloud of green. Buds in March. It seemed impossible. Young leaves unfolding.”
In Manchester Larry finds a book in the bargain bin – Hedges of England and Scotland. He studies it for the rest of the tour until the last day when they pull up to the maze at Hampton Court.
“The interior of the maze had made him dizzy. … The green walls rose about him, too high to see over. Who would have expected such height and density? And he hadn’t anticipated the sensation of feeling unplugged from the world or the heightened state of panicked awareness that was nevertheless, repairable. Without thinking, he had slowed his pace, falling behind the others, willing himself to be lost, to be alone.”
When Larry finally stumbles out of the Hampton Court maze, his life is changed forever. The obsession leads him to fill his tiny yard in Winnipeg with a maze. That leads Dorrie to hire a bulldozer to tear it out. It is too much for Larry who calls it quits. Although his marriage failed, Larry’s maze career succeeds wildly. He moves to Chicago and acquires a new wife, Beth, a college professor specializing in female saints.
The overlapping chapters of Larry’s life finally culminate in Larry’s party in Toronto. He’s launching his latest most creative maize.
“Larry hopes, and this was the view he presented to the press this morning in a prepared statement – that the maze will incorporate the essential lost-and-found odyssey of a conventional maze, but will allow the maze walker to forget that the shrub material is a kind of wall and think of it, rather, as an extension of a dreamy organic world, with the maze and the maze solver merging to form a single organism.”
Both ex-wives are going to be in town so his girlfriend, Charlotte, convinces him to give a party. She would help. She’s always helping. Larry likes her but can’t love her. She bites too hard at the biscuit of life, he thinks.
Larry is a bit lost at his own party, especially when his second ex-wife shows up 7 months glowingly pregnant. It turns out to be a raucous, illuminating party for Larry. As he tells Dorrie at the end of the evening, he’s discovered he no longer wants to be lost, he wants to be found.
Some run the Shepherd’s Race – a rut
Within a grass-plot, deeply cut
And wide enough to tread –
A maze of path, of old designed
To tire the feet, perplex the mind,
Yet pleasure heart and head;
“Tis not unlike this life we spend,
And where you start from, there you end.
(Bradfield, Sentan’s Wells, 1854)
Field Guide to Garden-Friendly Fiction 