Undoubtedly the power of suggestivenesss of The Man In The Maze lies in the mythic patterns Silverberg is working with, the pathos of the labyrinth from Cretan and Greek mythology, long ago worked into the conscious and subconscious layers of our minds. Zelazny and Delany have been successfully tapping our mythic consciousness in their fiction too, which is why it is successful and significant. It manipulates actual symbols lying half hidden within us, showing them in new lights with new shadows, twisting, forcing us into new patterns and perceptions.
There are faults one could pick with Silverberg's novel if one wanted: the alien menace is dealt with perfunctorily, climaxed uninterestingly and undramatically, especially considering that the threat it poses is what motivates the attempt to get Muller out of his maze. There's an imbalance to the story when the first nineteen-twentieths is prefatory to the last one twentieth and the balance, seemingly, should be the other way around. (But that obviously isn't what Silverberg wanted, so let's take what he wanted.) And the explanation of how Muller managed to get thru the deadly treacherousness of the Lemnos maze: luck, survival instinct or bad luck and not caring, are unconvincing when it's so central to the story that Muller be in the middle of the maze. Yet, tho the premise of how he got there gives us problems in credibility, ultimately what matters is that he's there. Since the Lemnos maze is symbolic of Muller's internal maze, it's immaterial anyways. The fact that he's the only one who's succeeded in getting into it makes the maze, in effect, his maze. And it's chance or luck or lack of luck which puts us where we are, tho it's nigh impossible for another to follow our exact steps and reach the same place. The simple fact that Muller is in the center of his maze proves that it's possible to be there, no matter what the obstacles or how impossible it is to bypass them.
What's important about a book is what it does to the individual reader; and there's a point at which one ceases to care about technicalities as long as the book's effect, otherwise, is powerful or meaningful enough. The Man In The Maze left something, perhaps more a jumping-off point than anything else, but an interesting one at least.
Richard Muller is a misanthrope who has isolated himself from mankind in the center of the alien maze on Lemnos. Muller had served as mankind's first attempt at contact with an alien race (the only living one found in our galaxy; the artifacts of others had been discovered), trying to get together with them to face an imminent meeting with far superior and more alien aliens detected outside our galaxy. After getting nowhere with them for a year, he left, changed by them so that no human could bear to be near him. He emanated all the negative feeligs of man, hate, fear, despair, nausea, so powerfully that it was agonizing for anyone to be near him. Because of this he sought isolation. Now, because these emanations were the only thing that could communicate with the threatening aliens from outside the galaxy, mankind needed Muller again, to try another contact, this contact being simply the emanations of what he was. However, Muller was in the center of the Lemnos maze, a treacherous and deadly maze penetrated by no one but himself, built by a long dead alien race for a totally alien purpose.
Skeleton-wise the story could seem hackneyed. Skeleton-wise there isn't much to distinguish a beautiful woman from an ugly one. It's the flesh that makes the difference.
The Lemnos maze, aside from being vicious, is intriguing and well-detailed; it is also symbolic of a more interesting maze, the maze of Muller's mind, his internal maze, and, by extension, all men's internal mazes.
Muller has lived in the Lemnos maze for nine years and still can't understand what really makes it work. He still doesn't understand where the water comes from that nourishes him, how the bars keep time, how the maze cleans itself except for the skeletons of intruders it wants lying around, what the cages are for (when do they open and close and what are they meant to entrap?) why the treacherous traps leading into the maze exist, and most bothersome of all, what machinery or whatever lies underneath it all making it work? It's alien. He can't comprehend.
The same can be said of one's mind and of its mazes. What lies below it, making it work? How does it nurture itself? Why does it keep what skeletons of thoughts it does keep and how does it clean the rest away? Just how treacherous is it, and why? Silverberg doesn't go into this; he presents us with the detailed alien maze. We have to see the connections and delve into the other. But isn't the other, really, as alien?
At the end of the story, even tho he's now able to associate again with men without affecting them painfully (the emanations are gone) Muller chooses to return to the Lemnos maze, take shelter in it, calling it home.
"The man who went back into the maze is happy... He's following his chosen course... He's beyond hate... Somehow. He's at peace. Whatever he is," says Rawlins, the young idealist who helped lure Muller out of the maze to confront the aliens. Yet Rawlins says "whatever" he is, not "whoever." We and Muller, alien to ourselves, and others; and isn't Rawlins alien to everything and everyone in the end, too?
"My message is that it's a lucky thing for humanity that we're shut up each in our own skulls because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurring non-verbal thing I've got, we'd be unable to stand each other... [Man] can't even take the reek of his own kind, soul to soul!" says Muller bitterly, midway thru the book. And is it so? At the end Muller returns to the physical maze on Lemnos when seemingly he need not. Or could he do anything but, really? Why? "He loved mankind," says Rawlins, and Silverberg adds, "It was as good an epitaph as any," which is ambiguous and labyrinthian enough...
Silverberg leaves us with our own maze confronting us at the end, for the story's maze drives us into ourselves: why does Muller return to the maze? Will he ever come out again? What is happening to Rawlins (and, to us)? The alien is immaterial at this point; whether it conquers the universe or not is irrelevant (and Silverberg leaves this hanging) for the real alienness lies within the human characters -- and ourselves. We can no more answer the why's or what's or will's than Muller could discover what lay under the Lemnos maze. Perhaps we can't see it because what is doing the seeing can't see itself; since it is doing the seeing, it is the sight.
When, like Muller, we return to our own mazes and realize that that's what we do, our maze becomes our home. Realizing this, the best we can do is go back to the center of our maze and think about it (as does Muller). The question as to whether Muller will come out within five years is left hanging at the end of the story, and rightfully so, since Silverberg has taken the reader to the center of his own maze to ponder -- not Muller -- but himself -- and the question of, will you yourself emerge from your maze in any definite time? Really? It's home. Can you emerge; and if you could --
-- could you stand the reek of another man's soul?
--Norman E. Masters
[pp. 4 - 9, NO-EYED MONSTER #14, Summer 1968]
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