In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [72]
But you don’t name a book Visa for Avalon by accident, especially if you are Bryher, composer of historic novels. “Avalon” in Arthurian legend was the place to which King Arthur was boat-lifted after his last battle. Susan McCabe mentions Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version, in which Avalon is a sort of apple-filled Edenic island where Arthur will be healed, and also Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, in which Arthur dies there, surrounded by weeping women. She does not, however, invoke the most likely influence on Bryher, who as a voraciously reading child went through her father’s library. That late-Victorian library would have contained the works of Tennyson, including his long narrative poem, Idylls of the King. What Bryher’s novel means to signify is intimately connected with what Tennyson’s Idylls meant to signify.
The final section of Idylls, “The Passing of Arthur,” begins with “that last weird battle in the west,” a misty affair filled with confusion and the difficulty of being able to identify the enemy—a confusion and a difficulty mirrored in Bryher’s book. Both works have to do with a man’s fated journey toward his possible death, the collapse of a civilization and its return to savage and lawless ways, the betrayal of the nobility in man, and—underneath these themes—the sadness of getting older and finding yourself surrounded by young people who don’t understand what you’ve lived through or even what you’re talking about. Tennyson sounds this note repeatedly in “The Passing of Arthur,” which is told by Sir Bedivere in his old age, when he is living among “new men, strange faces, other minds.”
The new men, the strange faces, and the other minds are already a problem for both Lilian and Robinson, quite apart from any green-uniformed Movement. There’s a considerable amount of grumbling about “change,” and “development,” and “progress,” and how things aren’t the same as they used to be, and about the rudeness of the young, and also that of waitresses—themes not unheard-of among any group of retirees sharing doughnuts at the corner coffee shop. In addition to this, Robinson is a man who from the outset feels that he’s no longer of the present day and finds himself resigned to his own end. “Do you know,” he says, toward the beginning, “I wish I could step ashore and die with this moment as my memory of earth.”
Section Two begins as Robinson takes his “final walk” beside the waves: “They were full of the terror of death, of the return to the caldron of the sagas, where what was finished was swept away and new patterns formed from the atoms … Age was rather an exhaustion of the emotions than a physical fatigue …” Or, as Tennyson’s Arthur put it, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new …” Will Avalon—for Robinson—be a place of death or a place of healing, or will the latter be a version of the former?
And what will Avalon be for the other folk headed there? Each one of the travellers has different hopes connected with it. A young girl thinks happily of love, Alex wants “the truth,” the pilot—an Avalonian—is torn between the domestic and the adventurous. Avalon is said to be a place of more freedom, but there’s mention of a mysterious “them” who seem to be a controlling bunch, if only in the way of a posse of quasi-benevolent religious supervisors checking to see if you’ve passed some never-specified test. It’s a land of peace, but then, so is the after-life. Is Avalon really the country from whose bourne no traveller returns, as we’re led from time to time to believe? But then we’re led to believe otherwise, because Alex has been there and has come back. No sooner does Bryher strew around a few