One way of looking at Seamus Sullivan’s debut novella, Daedalus Is Dead, is to describe it as a retelling of the myth of the genius builder Daedalus and his son, Icarus. The book, however, charts a broader trajectory. It goes beyond being a mere retelling of events from the perspective of a character relegated in the original mythological tale to the sidelines. At its core, it is the study of a complex father-son relationship, and a study of how a man—even a mythical polymath like Daedalus—can get caught and lost in a labyrinth of his own actions.

The novella opens with a prologue that sets the nightmarish, almost Kafkaesque, tone of the majority of the narrative: “I turn corners and pass rooms … I have been walking a long time. I am following, and I am followed.” This tone is echoed in another passage towards the end of the prologue in which Daedalus tells us, “I may be dreaming, or dying. Or I am awake now and all the rest was a dream, and we’ve always been here. You ahead, he behind.” This captures a sense of Daedalus’s seemingly eternal quest for Icarus after his son’s fall from sky in the first few pages of the book.

The escape of the father-son duo from their stifling life under the despotic King Minos is the point at which the novella opens. Sullivan plunges his readers into the heart of the action from the beginning, when we meet Daedalus and Icarus using wings made of wax to flee Crete. This is also the moment when Daedalus and Icarus are together for the last time. As the Greek myths tell us, the daring idea of their escape results in the well-known fall of Icarus—the episode in which Icarus flies too close to the sun, resulting in the melting of his wax wings and his death by falling into the sea. Icarus’s fall here becomes the beginning of Daedalus’s own descent into a gorge of despair, where he only has questions for Icarus and is desperate to meet him one more time. The readers soon become a part of Daedalus’s quest for answers, most urgently to the question that continues to haunt him even after his death: What made Icarus do it? What made him fly so close to the sun?

Daedalus seeks the answers to his questions and continues to look for Icarus once he reaches the underground, the part of hell to which he is confined after his death. But the fickle gods aren’t happy with him and decide that his punishment will be never to meet Icarus, never to be able to get the answers to his questions, never to explain himself to his son. As Daedalus does everything that he can think to earn a glimpse of his son one more time and to talk to him, his quest reveals things about him as a person—not just to the readers, but to Daedalus himself. Towards the end, there seems a possibility that Daedalus just might have realised why Icarus did what he did, even as Icarus continues to elude him.

The novella is told by Daedalus but in second person, addressed entirely to Icarus. But while Icarus is at the centre of this quest, he is rarely present in the novella. We glimpse him only a few times in the chapters set during the past. Icarus’s actual presence lies in his absence, which becomes more and more unbearable to his father as time passes by.

Daedalus’s own death occurs somewhere around the time the book reaches the fifteen percent mark and, from then on, chapters are set alternatively in Daedalus’s “present” in hell and his past in Crete. The chapters set in hell add to the nightmarish feel of the narrative as Daedalus moves from one desperate act to the next in his attempts to find his son and break free from the curse. The descriptions in these chapters capture the feel and the tone of both his desperation and of hell’s architecture, and give the feeling of reading about a character’s slow descent into madness—which can be described, perhaps, as a hell of its own.

For instance, even though he becomes the architect of certain sections of hell, there comes a point when Daedalus finds he can no longer remember the place. “The city is strange now, stranger for its familiarity. Like finding my own severed arm in the gutter. I know I built all of this, even if I can’t remember how, or why I built it this way and not that. I walk among towering heaps of stone that have nothing more to say to me.” Sullivan makes use of images to convey the strange, unnerving impact of hell on Daedalus to a great effect. “The rooftops of Hell proceed in straight lines and meet at right angles. The streets angle and turn back on themselves, promising a way through. Alleyways beckon towards other alleyways; archways frame empty squares.” This labyrinthine structure of hell within which Daedalus is trapped with little hope of redemption echoes, and is neatly tied with, another labyrinth—the one Daedalus built on Minos’s orders to keep the Minotaur confined within. At another level, this labyrinth also comes to represent the labyrinth of Daedalus’s memories. As the novella progresses, the reader learns that Daedalus might not be a reliable narrator, that there are gaps in his memory, faults in his version of events.

These gaps and cracks lie at the heart of the novella and are brilliantly used by Sullivan to both frame and propel the book in a certain direction. His writing is capable of capturing the different moods of Daedalus—most notabley the dread, urgency, and nightmarish feeling of claustrophobia which Daedalus feels from time to time. The structure of the novella echoes the structure of the labyrinth too: Readers move between past and present in this complex and richly layered story, and those layers are gradually peeled away from the events of the past.

There’s been an increase in mythological retellings in recent years. From Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) to Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019), very often these retellings have focused on seeing the world of the epics and myths from the eyes of vibrant women characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines and/or branded as villains in a man’s quest narrative. Daedalus Is Dead breaks from this trend. Even as it explores the world from the eyes of yet another sidelined character, the story focuses more on a father-son relationship—and the protagonist here comes across as a grey character who is, to a great extent, the villain of his own story.

Some knowledge of Greek mythology is a pre-requisite for enjoying Daedalus Is Dead to its fullest. However, one needn’t be a fan or connoisseur of Greek myth to read and revel in this novella’s layers of meaning and the motives of the characters that people its pages. I wish Sullivan had developed it into a full-length novel, though. This way, some of the women characters—who play a key role in revealing the gaps in Daedalus’s narrative and his memory, but who don’t seem to get enough space for greater character development—would have felt more alive, rather than being mere steps in Daedalus’s journey of realisation. But, as a debut novella, Daedalus Is Dead packs a punch. It achieves what it has clearly set out to do, leaving no place for a dull moment once you enter its labyrinth.