The Christmas Maze by Danny Fahey – a Review by David Collis
Why do we seek to be good, to make the world a better place? Why do we seek to be ethical – to be altruistic, and even heroic? Danny Fahey’s The Christmas Maze: Where Hope is Found gives a narrative meditation on the place of hope in childhood, and what becomes of it.
The central character to Fahey’s story, the young boy Matthew, takes on a burden of guilt seemingly too heavy for any shoulders. Tricked by a man in a van promising a puppy, Matthew inadvertently allows his sister to be kidnapped – subject to horrifying fates that are only magnified by their lack of confirmation. It’s left to the imagination. This guilt resonates in Matthew, an existential hunger to make amends for what he allowed to happen to his sister. He must find and solve the Christmas Maze to rescue his sister.
As an author, Fahey draws upon archetypal narrative elements and sequences. Matthew embarks upon a journey to find his sister. Along the way he overcomes a series of ethical challenges. Like a quantum particle resolving into a particular state, Matthew creates his personality as he navigates a series of ethical challenges. He is guided by an unflinching grasp of courage, determination and compassion. Like hobbits, pilgrims, and heroes of a thousand stories, Matthew’s search shows him coming into being as an ethical person.
The blurry reality of this story, moving between psychological and external realities, meditates on the power of virtue in the face of adult badness. The world is dead if it is controlled by the powerful, but children can interrupt power if they will it. The world can be refreshed through courage, determination and compassion which are more powerful than power. Echoing the ethos of Hayao Miyazaki’s transformative child characters, Fahey’s hero Matthew, a child, is able to transform reality in a way that no adult can. Psychological resolution unfolds alongside this transformation of reality.
Notwithstanding its heavy themes of kidnapping and implied pedophilia and murder, The Christmas Maze is a book for children. In the best fairy tale traditions, Fahey does not treat child readers with kid gloves. Rather, he trusts child readers to cope with brutal realities – of searing regrets, overwhelming guilt, and an all-consuming search to make amends. Child readers will recognise the author of The Christmas Maze as a storyteller who looks them in the eye and speaks candidly to them as real people. By not shying away from dark themes, Fahey believes in children, believing they can become adults capable of seeing the world in all its light and shade.
The Christmas Maze is also a story for adults. It reminds us that the child lays down the reality that the adult inhabits – where childhood decisions establish character and set the framework for adulthood. The child is the parent to the adult. And the adult must, if they are to remain spiritually alive, remember the child whose decisions defined them. Through the story of The Christmas Maze. Adult readers must ask: in the face of alluring cynicism, do they believe that courage, determination and compassion are more powerful than power?
