Matrix by Lauren Groff takes you away to a 12th-century world of nuns and villagers with pitchforks – Laura Waddell

It’s definitely ‘curl up with a book’ weather.
In Lauren Groff's novel, Matrix, Abbess Marie is good-natured and kind but not above sabotaging a rival (Picture: Boyer D'Agen/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)In Lauren Groff's novel, Matrix, Abbess Marie is good-natured and kind but not above sabotaging a rival (Picture: Boyer D'Agen/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
In Lauren Groff's novel, Matrix, Abbess Marie is good-natured and kind but not above sabotaging a rival (Picture: Boyer D'Agen/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

I’ve spent this last week between the pages of Matrix by Lauren Groff. Known mostly for her classics-influenced novel Fates and Furies, her latest is set in a 12th-century cloister of nuns.

They’re headed by Abbess Marie, illegitimate sister of Eleanor of Aquitane, who was sent to this mouldy, starving, poverty-stricken place as a young woman in punishment but who ends up building quite the business out of it.

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It’s not long before she has the sisters selling everything from their penmanship to their pigs, and the estate grows outwards. When alms given to the poor contain noticeably good wool, Marie’s little empire draws the envy of the townfolk; but good job she had the foresight to build a forested labyrinth around the abbey, like a moat of thorns with confounding twists and turns.

There, with the wink, wink, nudge, nudge of myth, she commands an ambush which overcomes, a little too easily, the locals and their pitchforks.

There’s much to enjoy about Matrix and one particular element is that there are almost zero men in it. Stonemasons who arrive for a job are housed separately from the women and largely take the form – bar, gasp, a rounded belly popping up among the nuns – of distant singing and shouting at night.

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That’s enough to make Marie shiver in her bed chamber, which she’s having upgraded. After having a vision for it, she has put the nuns to work building a fancy new abbey with expensive glass windows. Convenient things, visions.

We get to see a lot of sides to the richly developed Marie. Her relationships with the other women, some romantic, evolve with the decades. There are tender thoughts on ageing and seeing others age around her.

By large, Marie is good-natured and kind to her charges, less strict than her predecessors, but the uglier side of ambition lurks within her, too, and she’s not above sabotaging a rival.

The only off note is how much is made of her supposed ugliness: the idea it spared her from a life of marriage doesn’t hit quite right. Still, what an inspiring matriarchy Marie commands, and how enjoyable to spend a few fantasy hours there among the bees, lambs, and nuns.

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