Book review: The Man in the Maze

I found out about this 1969 novel through a friend who heard that it’s going to be adapted for the screen by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, who collaborated on a few of my favorite movies in the past few years (About Schmidt, Sideways, Election).

Although I haven’t seen or heard anything confirming that since the conversation I had with my friend, I went ahead and ordered this book from amazon.com (73 cents!) anyway, since everyone knows I’m a sucker for good science fiction and a little research told me that Robert Silverberg is basically a giant in the genre.
A little research also showed me that The Man in the Maze is essentially the re-telling of the Greek tragedy Philoctetes, which is about a guy who suffers a foot injury that smells so bad to everyone around him that he’s exiled to an empty island and then left there for years before society decides that he’s needed again and has to trick him out of the solitude he’s come to love.
In Silverberg’s novel – set hundreds of years into Earth’s future – that guy is Richard Muller, a famous space explorer who becomes imbued with a kind of reverse telepathy when he makes first contact with the first race of extraterrestrials that humans discover. These aliens do something to Muller that makes his brain emanate waves of discomfort, of fear, of nausea to anyone he comes in contact with. He essentially becomes a leper to mankind.
After realizing this, Muller exiles himself on Lemnos, a distant planet that contains an alien-but-empty maze-like city and stays there, without human contact, for nine years.
But mankind realizes they need Muller when they become aware of yet another race of extraterrestrials, this one hostile to humanity, and realize that Muller’s curse may be the only thing that can save humanity.
So the task of getting Muller out of his maze and convincing him to save mankind falls to a guy named Boardman, the diplomat who tasked Muller with the mission that left him cursed, and a younger diplomat named Ned Rawlins, who was chosen because of his youth, his optimism, and his naivete.
The three main characters end up forming a kind of trifecta that represents the best and worst in people. Muller is an ambitious man who overstepped his boundaries and is paying for it through his curse. Boardman is an intelligent and shrewd person, who while good deep down, is pretty starkly unscrupulous about the methods he uses to get things done. And Rawlins kind of seems like a young version of Muller — at 23 years old, he hasn’t been tainted by the same forces that made Boardman become what he is, or the ones that made Muller into what he is.
The book is fairly short (about 210 pages) and is an excellent look at the things that make people into what they are as they age — how age can turn hope to deflation, and how things can change the other way, too.
So even if the rumor that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor are adapting it for the screen turns out to be false, I’m glad I read this, and I’ll definitely be checking out some of Silverberg’s other work, too. If it ends up happening, though, I think it will match (in a strange way, since the team hasn’t ever written and directed a science fiction piece) their other work in that it highlights some kind of depressing subjects brought up by characters who are more complex than they are likeable. We will see, I guess.