The Helmet of Horror
Victor Pelevin Canongate, 288pp, £12
ISBN 1841957054
Canongate has acquired some interesting writers to dream up versions of ancient myths. Already Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson have contributed to the projected collection of 100 myths "retold in a contemporary and memorable way". Now the Russian postmodern prodigy Victor Pelevin gives us his version of Theseus and the Minotaur. In his casually grandiloquent introduction, he compares myths with the "shell programmes" of a computer: "sets of rules that we follow in our world processing". Information technology reveals the elemental habits of the human mind, so he turns the myth into a tale of the internet. The labyrinth in which Minos placed the beast - half man, half bull - becomes virtual.
True to his pursuit of an electronic thread, Pelevin writes his novel entirely in the form of a chatroom exchange. Each character who participates is in a cell-like room with a door opening on to what seems to be a personal labyrinth. No one knows where they are or how they got there. The characters are themselves extracted from different myths. The dreamy female is IsoldA; the Latin lover is Romeo-y-Cohiba; the Christian is UGLI 666. They exist only to type their questions and answers.
It is a very bare kind of conversation. There are no stage directions, no actions. Beckett could no doubt have turned the chatroom into a bleakly comic ante-chamber to extinction. The book's best moments are indeed Beckettian, as the characters type away, desperate to prove that, at the very least, they still exist. It would need a more brilliant writer than Pelevin, however, to turn the convention's removal of tone and information into a creative opportunity.
The characters offer not stories but fantasies and explanations. They keep talking about the myth that Pelevin is supposed to be retelling. One professor opines that "the labyrinth is a symbol of the brain . . . The Minotaur is the animal part of the mind and Theseus is the human part." Another takes the myth as a psychotherapeutic parable: "The only way to defeat the Minotaur is to stop thinking of yourself as a victim . . . Everyone has his own Minotaur." This is not narrative, but chat about narrative.
Pelevin's title refers to a "virtual-reality helmet" whose strange powers one of the voices, Nutscracker, explains. It is programmed to give the illusion of free choice, prompting the decisions to which it seems to respond. How do we know that we aren't all wearing such helmets, if they can simulate even the sense of helmetlessness? asks one voice. The exchange keeps arriving at such pseudo-profundities. The form that Pelevin uses is potentially well adapted for testing ideas (think of the philosophical dialogues of Hume or Berkeley). But while Pelevin likes to raise a question - is myth the opposite of progress? - he does not like to stay with it long enough for it to acquire any weight. Ditto with his satirical sallies. He inserts references to contemporary politics randomly, but without force.
Pelevin throws in every mythical association he can, as if connecting on his narrative thread the founding stories of our nature. But it is only "as if". When Ovid did this sort of thing he made narrative delight from the way that one story could generate another: his Metamorphoses showed not just how mortals turned into beasts and plants, but also how one myth turned into another. There is no such organic connection here. New threads of dialogue are picked up by mere association. When momentum is lost, the compulsion of one of the leading characters, Ariadne, to narrate her dreams allows Pel-evin to introduce any mythical archetype.
Pelevin has acquired a reputation as a clever writer, but the turn to myth has freed him from too many responsibilities. This is a clever man writing self-indulgently. He in fact borrows his myth of Asterius, the true name of the Minotaur, from a story by Borges, "The House of Asterion" (in ancient myth, Asterius was Minos's stepfather). However, he then feels he can borrow or embellish at will. Asterius, according to Ariadne, creates "pure super-fluity, the empty play of the mind, a counterfeit golden flourish on the border of the void". Could one put it better?
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