Barely a Book Club #2: An Extension
I am learning so much running this book club. Here is the first, and most important thing: four weeks was not enough time for most of you to source a copy of Hav and read it. I understand! Life is complicated and crowded with obligations. That is exactly why this is barely a book club, after all: no stress, no presh, no questions asked.
That’s why I am giving you—and to be perfectly honest, me—an extension. We have two additional weeks to finish our reading before this club reconvenes.
Do not under any circumstances get me wrong: I am loving my re-read of Hav. I take copious notes (this is not something I’m suggesting you do, I just want to have a wealth of discussion topics), I am constantly googling names and places on my phone, it’s all a great time, but it’s going slower than I thought.
There is one thing I want to talk about, though, before I let you go. In an early chapter, Morris mentions something called a “maze-mallet;” intrigued, I did a web search and came up with nothing. Then, later, in Chapter 16 (“Artistic Cross-Breeding”) I came across this passage:
You may wonder what a maze-mallet is, such as appears in the paws of the bear on the Governor’s emblem, and why a maze should be configured on the fretwork of the House of the Chinese Master. Forgive me. The maze is so universal a token of Hav, appears so often in legends and artistic references of all kinds, that one comes to take it for granted.
She goes on to detail the legend of Avzar, “the first and greatest of the Hav maze-makers,” who legendarily constructed the labyrinth of the Minotaur (not Daedelus!)
[T]he spirit of the maze has always fascinated the people of Hav, and the tokens of the maze-maker, as they have been fancifully transmitted down the ages, are inescapable in the iconography of the city: the mallet, with which Avzar at the beginning of time beat his iron labyrinth into shape, the honeycomb which is seen as a natural type of the maze, the bull-horns which are doubtless a vestige of the supposed Minoan link.
There’s no further description of the mallet, what it looks like, or indeed exactly how this emblem is laid out. I wonder, if any artist types are reading this, if they might want to have a go at realizing their own impression of this striking but vague image, and send it my way, to share with the rest of the members of the club?
That’s all. I’ll let you get back to reading now. If you have no idea what any of this has been about, go read the first installment of this newsletter. You can subscribe here:
