Minotaur in Love is Fraser Harrison’s second novel. His first, High on the Hog, published in 1991, set around a family Christmas in the country, was funny and moving. Minotaur in Love is altogether odder. Written in epistolary form, the Minotaur of the title is Bruno, a publisher, who tries to explain his strangeness to a female former colleague.
He does this in a journal, starting with his birth shortly after the accidental death of his five-year-old sister. He has the distinct feeling that his father dislikes him, and he attributes this to his father’s unassuageable grief. Their estrangement becomes obvious when the ten-year-old Bruno, on his brand- new birthday bicycle, follows his father on the latter’s weekly pilgrimage to his daughter’s grave. Jangling his bell, he speeds up to where his father stands with bowed head at the grave. The only words Bruno remembers him saying are, ‘Don’t ever come here again. You have no place here. You are not wanted.’ There is no recovery from this. As Bruno explains:
How can a man who buys generous presents be accused of hatred, I can hear you ask. Well, I dare say it was my mother who actually orchestrated my birthday surprise, but that’s not the point. What is hard to grasp if you haven’t experienced it at first hand is that hatred and duty are not incompatible.
His mother is not unkind and Bruno feels she probably loves him, but she is as eccentric as her husband. As a couple, they have no friends and sneer ironically at life in general.
Bruno describes himself as an adolescent:
I had always been a solid child, and now I began to fulfil what turned out to be my laterally gigantic though vertically stunted potential.
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