The Boy Lost in the Maze

Current children’s laureate Joseph Coelho has set himself a challenge here. This verse novel sets out to bring together the modern story of teenage Theo, looking for his absent father, with the tale of the ancient hero Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. Developing an examination of masculinity, and the relationship between fathers and sons, Coelho switches back and forth between the two tales and between free verse and the use of other verse forms. He deploys a part of the Theseus story that may be less familiar than the hero’s confrontation with the Minotaur. These are the trials in pursuit of claiming his manhood before he meets his father in Athens, in which he kills a series of monsters, prompting the refrain in the first part of the novel that ‘Theseus killed them.’ Theo is fascinated by Theseus, and encouraged by his English teacher, is writing his own series of poems about the hero’s exploits. Being a thoughtful, as well as an angry, young man, and aware, too, that a series of killings may make repetitive reading, he seeks to develop a more complex, more vulnerable portrait of Theseus himself, who is as reliant on help from others as his sword arm. He also begins to think about the lives and motivations of the monsters that Theseus encounters and, in particular, begins to identify with the Minotaur, whom Theo gradually comes to see as less a monster himself than a victim of his parent’s monstrous behaviour. The attempt to draw precise parallels between the incidents and characters in the Theseus and Theo stories is maybe strained sometimes, and I am doubtful about the ‘choose your own adventure’ alternatives that are sometimes offered. It is, nevertheless, a daring and powerful text, supported by Kate Milner’s black and white illustrations. It succeeds in both honouring and revising the heroic myth and in convincingly portraying Theo’s own search, both for his father and for his own sense of what it means to be a man.