The Maze Runner Review

Tweet

First The Hunger Games, then Divergent and now The Maze Runner, a dystopian novel, is being adapted as a film and will be released in cinemas later this year. The Maze Runner is the first book in a trilogy written by the American author James Dashner. The book was first published in 2009. The similarities between The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner are striking. Firstly, the setting is a post-apocalyptic world with an authoritarian regime, secondly a young teenage hero or heroine decides to fight against the rulers, and finally the heroes are being tested in a trial and have to fight for life or death. Right now, dystopias are in. Or at least they are if you’re under 20. James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, the first of a trilogy (there’s also a prequel), joins The Hunger Games and Divergent as the latest futuristic Young Adult thriller to get its own film franchise. Given the recent proliferation of series in which teens are pitched against a mysterious, all-pervasive power – it’s easy to see why “fighting the system” is such a tempting prospect for the genre’s prospective audience – there’s a risk of fatigue sitting in: one dystopia too many. But The Maze Runner manages to feel remarkably fresh. It’s punchy, tense and, crucially, original. The book opens with a boy. He can remember his name, Thomas, but that’s all he can remember: everything important has been wiped clean. He finds himself in “the Glade”, a farmstead and camp at the centre of a towering stone maze. A group of teenagers, all males, have made a makeshift life for themselves there. Like Thomas, none of them have any real memories of their previous lives, although there’s a barely spoken, horrific suggestion that the lives they’ve come from might have been even worse than the ones they’re living now. At night, the maze grinds shut. Vicious monsters known as Grievers – semi-mechanical “gigantic slugs”, covered in deadly spikes and needles – prowl its twists and turns. The priority for the boys is to survive, and to find a way out of the maze. Dashner's clean, vivid prose gives the action passages a video-game like intensity, although there’s enough visceral detail to stop things ever feeling too artificial. Language itself also becomes vitally important: the boys' speech is peppered with made-up words – “klunk”, “shuck” and “shank” – that highlight their isolation. Even their names are revealed to be a clue – albeit an unguessable one – to the secret behind their predicament. A great deal has been written about the importance of female role models in fiction, and rightly so. But writing believable young male characters is just as important, and just as tricky to get right. Dashner has done a good job with Thomas. The character discovers a capacity for extreme bravery, but he's no alienating, impossibly tough hero. Instead, Thomas is convincingly vulnerable, with an all-too-believable awareness of pain and horror – at one point, he simply breaks down and cries. Given the “boys' isolated from the world” theme – there’s only one real female character, and her arrival is a sign of impending crisis – the obvious comparison is William Golding's The Lord of the Flies. But, despite some moments of brutality, The Maze Runner is nowhere near as bleak as Golding’s novel. The book ends with a devastating final twist, but still manages to leave readers with the tentative impression that, this time, friendship and resourcefulness might just win out. Anyone looking for "the next Hunger Games" would do well to get lost in Dashner's maze. Rating: 8/10