In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [71]
Insofar as Visa for Avalon has a central character, that character is Robinson, a man of retirement age whom we first discover waking up by the sea. His name connects him with islands (Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson must have been known to Bryher, who as a child “devoured” everything in print), and Robinson will soon develop a yen for another island—the island nation of Avalon. Robinson is on vacation in a Cornish-sounding village called Trelawney; he’s staying at Rose Cottage, owned by his landlady, the widow Mrs. Lilian Blunt. (Those lilies, those roses: the innocence of the garden in Tennyson’s Maud, before the catastrophe. Bryher, like most writers of her generation—Pound included—used armfuls of images and much stock vocabulary from the Victorian literature they claimed to be heaving out the window. The hand of Tennyson in particular lay heavily upon them, a point to keep in mind when the significance of “Avalon” is considered. The practical “Blunt” of Lilian’s last name stands in opposition to the more romantic elements: this is a landlady who cooks eggs and does other bustling, domestic things, but her Blunt element is—we will discover—somewhat of a disguise.)
After a working life that sounds confining and tedious, Robinson has planned to spend his retirement years in Trelawney. He often goes fishing with a younger man called Alex. But the peaceful scene is disrupted when a “Movement” youth group in green uniforms and caterpillar formation worms its way into the village, when Mrs. Blunt is informed by a bureaucrat that her beloved cottage—her lifelong home, her only possession—is to be demolished to make way for a factory access road, and when it swiftly becomes clear that worse upheavals are in store. The rights of individuals are about to be mashed underfoot in the name of collective progress, as the fate of Rose Cottage exemplifies.
Robinson and Lilian decide to flee, not only from Trelawney but from their no-name England-like country itself. They travel to the also no-name city by means of jammed and filthy trains; they attempt to get a couple of the rare visas for the mysterious island nation called Avalon; they are helped in their efforts by Alex, who works at the Avalon consulate; and finally—joined by a couple of other visa-holders—they make it onto the last tiny plane for Avalon, just before the moblike Movement closes the airport and prepares to “laugh at international law.”
Along the way, Robinson and his several fellow travellers provide a running commentary on the trends unfolding. What has caused things to go so thoroughly to the bad? Is it overpopulation? The fact that “people are apathetic until it becomes too late,” as Alex says? The repression of this or that urge or passion, bound to burst forth in a thuggish fashion? The unconscious desire of the majority for a return to barbarism? Whatever the reason, no good will come of it. “If an individual’s right to a place of his own were not respected,” Robinson muses, “it was the first link in a chain that would ultimately lead to the elimination of the unwanted by any group that happened to be in power.” Lawson—Avalon’s representative at the consulate, and a straight arrow, as his name implies—takes the psychoanalytic view: “Why was there so deep an urge for destruction in people … They used so much research to introduce automation into everyday life and so little to find out what really went on in a nation’s mind.”
But all of this political chat—although true enough, and informed by Bryher’s considerable experience with head-in-the-sand denial, and psychoanalysis, and the rampages of iron-fisted and destructive political movements and the stifling of the rule of law—seems almost like flotsam on the surface of a different sea. There’s a dreamlike air to the narrative, even apart from the this-can’t-be-happening sensations that overtake people