Books: In the Minotaur’s Cave

THE KING MUST DIE (338 pp.)—Mary Renault—Pantheon ($4.50).

The best excuse for retelling a myth is to be unfaithful to it. When Joyce reworked the Odyssey, turning Ulysses into the Jew Leopold Bloom and the wine-dark sea into Dublin, the structure came from the past but the sense of it was all in the present—which is the essence of parable. To re-create the past as past is merely archaeology or entertainment, or both. Author Mary (The Last of the Wine) Renault’s The King Must Die (a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club choice) is both, but she is a better literary archaeologist than an entertainer. Her myth is the Theseus legend and she is all too faithful to it.

Into the Maze. The heart of the story is known even to schoolboys. Theseus, recently acknowledged son of the King of Athens, one morning finds the city draped in black. He is told that the city must send a human tribute of seven young men and seven maidens to Crete, where they are to be put into a maze called the labyrinth and devoured by a fearsome creature, half-man, half-bull, called the Minotaur. Either by lot or insistence, Theseus becomes one of the seven youths and sets sail for Crete. There he wins the love of Ariadne, a Cretan princess, who gives him a magic sword with which to kill the Minotaur and a spool of cord with which to thread his way back out of the maze. On the way home to Athens, Theseus puzzlingly abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos. He also fails to change the ship’s sails from black to white, so that his father, King Aigeus, thinking Theseus dead, plunges heartbroken to his own death from a high cliff.

The whole myth, with all its subplots, is a good deal more labyrinthine than that, and Author Renault threads her way as skillfully through it as Theseus did through the Minotaur’s cave. Much of it is a sheer adventure yarn, full of javelin-play, wrestling, bull dancing (the Cretan version of bullfighting) and those gory sudden deaths and bloody double dealings to which the ancient Greeks were so prone that they probably invented the serene idea of the “golden mean” as an antidote.

Out of the Bronze Age. Theseus’ character, as Author Renault develops it, is much like that of a modern adolescent gang leader, ready at any moment for a rumble with the neighboring gang. This rings truer to the spirit of the Bronze Age than Theseus’ self-conscious habit of consulting his destiny every 15 minutes like a watch. While the heroes of the classic tragedies inevitably yield to their fate, Author Renault’s Theseus seems a proto-conformist in his anxiety to learn and submit to the will of the gods.

Author Renault ably dramatizes the cultural clash between Mycenean Greece (masculine, simple-souled and semiprimitive), and Minoan Crete (effeminate, sophisticated and decadent). She has obviously lived her period, which is the closest a historical novelist can ever come to making a period live.