The Maze Runner

[sawyl]

For no terribly good, other than a desire for a short slab of distopian fiction, reason I decided to read James Dashner's The Maze Runner. Despite entertained by it, I wasn't entirely convinced but then I'm not exactly in the book's core audience.

The story begins when Thomas rises up through a lift to find himself in the Glade, a homestead and farm populated by a group of teenage boys, all of whom have no personal memories of their life before. The Glade lies at the heart of a maze filled with monsters called Grievers who appear most often at night. Every day, a group of runners travel through the maze mapping the moving walls and searching for an exit. At sundown, they return to the Glade where the walls that surround it close, better to keep the monsters out.

The first part of the book sets up the small world of the Glade and the Maze and its inhabitants. Like a more organised Lord of the Flies, they hold to a rigid set of rules to keep them from slipping into anarchy, and, unlike the island, they receive regular weekly deliveries of supplies and, monthly, a new boy is sent up in the lift. The group share a common slang and an annoying habit of responding to Thomas' questions by telling him that he's too new to know the answer — an unsatisfactory device that seems only to kick the narrative can further down the road in order to keep the reader in the dark for as long as possible.

Despite having no memories, the Glade seems familiar to Thomas and he feels sure he is destined to be a runner. Sure enough, thanks to an act of rule-breaking bravery, he jumps the queue of potential candidates and finds himself the newest runner on the team, where his innovative thinking leads to a breakthrough discover. Then, a couple of days after Thomas' arrival, the lift delivers an unscheduled arrival: a girl in a coma bearing a message that she is the last one ever. The girl's arrival radically changes the settled patterns of the world: the sun stops rising, the walls stop closing, and the Grievers go crazy, killing one of the Glade's inhabitants every night. It is clear that the group must now solve the maze or die.

For all my complaints about the narrative devices, the story pushes along at a rapid pace and the characters are sufficiently distinct to make an impact. The world is intriguing — although as books with mazes go, it's hardly a particularly deadly example of the species — and there are hints that the abilities of the Creators are closer to magic than science; the boys' world could just as easily be an immersive simulation as a real maze.

Ultimately though, it was unteresting enough and short enough and undemanding enough that I'm probably going to read the sequels to see where we go from here...