VICTOR PELEVIN OPENS his version of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur with a quotation from Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths. “No one realised that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.”

He has brilliantly made his chosen myth into a metaphor for all myths and their workings in the mind. His own mind is elegant and complicated. In his introduction, he quotes Scott Fitzgerald’s wonderful sentence from The Great Gatsby in which we seek the “green light, the orgastic future” and are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.

He sets up the problem of the myth of progress. He suggests that a myth might be like the shell program of a mind which is a computer. He quotes Borges again, saying that there are only four recurring myths — the siege of the city, the return home, the quest, and the (self)-sacrifice of God. Then he embodies all these ideas in a new form of his own; witty, anarchic, mazy and profound.

His characters are the inhabitants of a reality which is partly at least a virtual reality, made of cell-like rooms. They communicate in a chat-room on screens, reporting forays into differing labyrinths outside. They have many-layered coded names. We meet Ariadne, who is a poet, Organizm, Romeo-y-Cohiba, Nuts-cracker, Monstradamus, IsoldA, Sartrik, and UGLI 666.

Most of these names are, like the minotaur, creatures with double natures (at least) or meanings. Romeo-y- Cohiba is male and oversexed — he represents the myth left out by Borges: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet. Cochiba is Spanish for cigar, and by extension for the male organ — there is a Cuban cigar named after Romeo and Juliet. UGLI 666 is female and dogmatically Christian. No one in the text mentions that 666 is the number of the Beast.

Organizm points out that UGLI is the “Universal Gate for Logic Implementation”. Mind and animal construed differently. Monstradamus derives from the Latin monstrare — to show, to demonstrate — as well as from “monster” and from Nostradamus the universal interpreter.

Nutscracker turns out to be a designer of virtual realities by profession, and explains how the subject (the Helmholz) of experiments inside a virtual reality helmet can be induced to prefer or avoid certain things, or paths, by subliminal stimuli. (Helmholz made important discoveries about the physiology of vision in the 1850s.) Ariadne on one of her forays into the “external” world sees a dwarf “holding a flag with the Merrill Lynch symbol on it . . . that jolly little bull — and the inscription ‘Be Bullish’ ”. He is followed by a figure like a “monstrously overgrown mushroom with a big cap of blackish-green metal . . . On his head he had a bronze helmet, like a gladiator’s mask — a headpiece with a wide brim and a plate with holes in it where the face would be.” This helmet has two huge horns, merging with it “like the silencers of a bronze motorbike”. This is one appearance of a being called Asterix who may be sacrificed, or to whom everyone has been, or will be, sacrificed. Monstradamus says that “Asterius” is the name for the offspring of Pasiphae and the Bull — the Minotaur. We remember the cartoon Asterix’s horned helmet.

The dialogue between these characters is both snappy and moving. They are, as we all are, trying to make sense of the mystery of how they came to be as and where they are, of what is real and what merely a product of the mind. When she goes out UGLI encounters Christian canons and labyrinths from the floors of French and Italian cathedrals, a tree of life, an acrostic with eclesia (sic) as its solution. Romeo-y-Cohiba and IsoldA make a tryst, and are frustrated in a mixture of mediaeval labyrinths of courtly love, Versailles, and fairground sex shows. It is possible that all variants on the labyrinth can be interpreted by running through that modern labyrinth, Google, with its revelations, culs-de-sac and misleading byways. Google could have been used to construct parts of this labyrinth.

The jokes about virtual reality are good. Organizm has a nightmare screensaver with a redbrick labyrinth inhabited by a rat, and a maze which “freezes” and tells him that it has “performed an illegal operation and will be shut down”. He hears voices crying “I am the vendor, I am the vendor. What will you do? What can you do?” Nutscracker asks drily. “Doesn’t Bull Gates ever get in touch?” Organizm says “No he doesn’t”. Note that the name Gates has solidified as a possible (but ineffective) way out. Nutscracker fires off a series of references to mad cow disease, and postmodernism as a culture forced to feed on its own powdered bones. The Helmet of Horror is a brilliant postmodern, eclectic vision of myth, mind and meaning. And of the human dilemma and its horns, ancient and modern.

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