Bookplanet: the Minotaur and the Internet

The Tangled Web
In Victor Pelevin's reinterpretation of the Minotaur myth, eight people trapped in hotel rooms go online to find out where they are, who put them there and how to get out.
By Jon Fasman

The classical story of the labyrinth begins when Minos asks Poseidon for a sign that he should ascend the Cretan throne. Poseidon agrees, and sends a flawless snow-white bull to Minos, on the condition that the king sacrifice it back to him. So beautiful is the bull, however, that Minos sacrifices another in its stead, leading the enraged Poseidon to cause Minos' queen, Pasiphae, to fall madly in love with the bull. Daedalus, whom the British mythographer Thomas Bulfinch calls, with typically bluff Victorian understatement, "a most skillful artificer," builds for Pasiphae a hollow wooden cow covered in hide, which she can enter in such a way that the bull can, in turn, enter her.

Pasiphae produces a fierce half-man, half-bull creature, which Minos imprisons in the center of a labyrinth. The Minotaur (literally "Minos' bull") receives a steady stream of Athenian youths to devour -- 14 a year, seven boys and seven girls, sent as part of a continuing war tribute from the Athenian king Aegeus -- until Aegeus' son, Theseus, travels as part of the tribute to Crete, wins the favor of Theseus' daughter, Ariadne, and finds his way to the center of the labyrinth (and, with Ariadne's gift of a long string, back out again), where he kills the Minotaur.

Labyrinths have since proved irresistible to sculptors, gardeners, architects and, of course, writers, particularly those of a postmodernist bent and with a proclivity for puzzles and gamesmanship (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco). "The Helmet of Horror" is Victor Pelevin's reinterpretation of the Theseus/Minotaur story; it is part of Canongate's wonderfully ambitious series in which contemporary writers retell classical myths. At first glance, Pelevin and Theseus seem an odd match. The author of numerous story collections and novels, most notably "The Blue Lantern" and "Omon Ra," Pelevin is a satirist, though more in the Don DeLillo-Donald Barthelme vein than in the classical Russian style, and the Theseus story seems a classic man-finds-monster, man-kills-monster hero's journey. But Pelevin, committed postmodernist that he is, squares the circle with admirable efficiency: He almost entirely eliminates the monster, the labyrinth and Theseus (the hero has two lines: "MINOTAURUS!" and an unprintable expletive), as anything other than metaphors. And rather than a hero proving his mettle by traveling abroad in search of quests, we have eight protagonists trapped in hotel rooms, communicating with each other through online chats and identifiable only by Internet monikers (Nutscracker, Ariadne, IsoldA, Monstradamus, Organizm(-:, Romeo-y-Cohiba, UGLI 666, and Theseus/TheZeus) as they try to figure out where they are, who put them there and how to get out.

Just as the mythical Ariadne gives Theseus the string that shows him how to backtrack, so Pelevin's Adriadne begins the discussion thread in this book with a question: "I shall construct a labyrinth in which I can lose myself, together with anyone who tries to find me -- who said this and about what?" In an instance of characteristically frustrating narrative playfulness, nobody ever answers that question; instead, we see the characters gradually come online and start asking each other basic questions: where are we, who brought us here, and, most important, what can you see. All of the characters find themselves in similar surroundings: a small room with green walls, a desk with a keyboard "attached rigidly" to it (the translation by Andrew Bromfield has too many such clunky phrases) and a monitor behind glass above it, an open wooden door leading to a bathroom filled with toiletries "marked with a strange symbol -- something like a little cogwheel" and a locked bronze door inlaid with an engraved double-headed axe. The cogwheel symbol, one of the characters announces, is an asterisk, aurally cognate to Asterius, which is the given name of Minos and Pasiphae's bull-human son, and the double-headed axe is, in Greek, a labros, the original root, of course, of "labyrinth."

Ariadne returns to announce that the question that began the thread was asked of her in an odd dream by a strange little dwarf who then showed her a diagram of the titular Helmet of Horror. Describing the helmet is difficult for Ariadne and would be impossible for a reviewer. Essentially it collapses various states of perception into an epistemological reification machine; it is, in other words, like so much in this book, a rather complicated, overwrought and opaque metaphor.

The ensuing discussion of the dream -- that is, the rest of the book -- unfolds like an end-of-party bull session among eight glib, highly educated and extraordinarily stoned grad students. A few things of narrative consequence happen -- two characters, Romeo-y-Cohiba and IsoldA, fall in love and try to make their ways through their mazes to meet, a few other characters go to sleep and resume discussion (the same one, in the same way) the next morning -- but almost everything in this book that happens, happens from the neck up.

Pelevin lays out the game, and the tone, in the introduction, the clearest and most accessible part of the book. A myth, Pelevin explains, can refer either to an explicative, time-honored story or to "a widely held but false belief or idea." From that telling dual meaning Pelevin draws the twin premises of his book: first, that progress naturally harbors hostility to the lessons and belief systems contained within myths, and that "the concept of progress has been around for so long that now it has all the qualities of a myth. It is a traditional story that pretends to explain all natural and social phenomena. It is also a belief that is widespread and false." The second premise reminds you that Pelevin, for all his literary pyrotechnics, has a background in science (he was trained as an engineer); for him, myths function as the mind's "shell programs: sets of rules that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex events to endow them with meaning." Hence this novel, in which technology and myth conspire to trap and disembody eight people, who end up returning to humanity's primal drives -- love, religion, storytelling -- in order to make some sense of their surroundings.

If this sounds like the premise of an intelligent meditation, it is: Pelevin belongs in the same category of hyperintellectual wizards as Richard Powers or Colson Whitehead. Yet unlike these two, there remains something rather chilly and off-putting about this work (his weakness for showy, juvenile puns does not help matters). The characters, for all their intellectual struggles, remain flat and undifferentiated; perhaps this is intentional -- Pelevin's way of showing how technology flattens our humanity -- but if so, it seems a strange and sadistic point on which to hang a novel. Like everything Pelevin writes, this book contains its share of inventiveness and wonders. One wishes for just a bit more soul to go with it.

(Jon Fasman is the author of the novel "The Geographer's Library" and a former online editor for The Economist. He writes about books, food and travel for a variety of publications.)