In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [73]
Visa for Avalon purports to take place in the future—television and computers are mentioned in passing—but the foreground is taken up by a great deal of linoleum: good, bright linoleum, and bad, squalid linoleum, and even a linoleum hat. Nothing dates an era more tellingly than floor coverings, and 1965 was the Age of Shag Carpeting, not the Age of Linoleum. In the physical details of its setting, Visa for Avalon suggests not a future but a past—two decades of it laminated together. There’s the utopian brutalism of the fascist and Nazi 1930s ideologies, with their impulse to destroy the systems of the past and streamline the present, and there’s the dinginess of the war years in England, with their crowded trains and depressing waiting rooms. The emotional climate, too, is that of wartime: the inability to get anywhere or obtain much-needed documents or do anything effective, combined with a grinding boredom, and, at the same time, the acute, stomach-churning anxiety of not knowing what is really going on.
In these areas of observation, Visa for Avalon has the texture of lived experience. We don’t know what to think about the tyrannical government or Movement that’s taking over—are they left or right, or does it matter?—but we certainly learn to the last traffic jam and hastily packed suitcase and nasty armband-wearing guard and eerily deserted street how such a takeover would feel to ordinary folk trapped inside it. As people do when their adrenaline levels are high and there’s no overt means of expression, the characters focus on single details perceived with hallucinatory clearness: the rusty oil drum, the splintered piece of timber, the cable wheel. The handling of these sections is realistic in the extreme.
Once on the plane with the small saving remnant, we find ourselves back in a quasi-symbolic universe. Robinson wonders whether the whole experience he’s just lived through has been an illusion; he decides it’s real, but we’re wondering. Soon he’s speaking the language of salvation by Grace: “What had he ever done that had made him worthy of rescue?”
“Things do come to an end,” says Lilian. As she remembers with nostalgia her life in Trelawney, she has an amazing insight:
By a terrific effort of will and with the physical force that she had needed to stand against the autumn gales, she stammered, but who heard her against the roar of the engines, “I wanted to be out on the Seven Seas, I never wanted to be in Rose Cottage at all!”
It now seems that Lilian—unknown to herself—has wanted to run away to sea all along, like the young Bryher. Is a visa for Avalon a kind of litmus paper that shows us the truth about ourselves?
Right after this surprising cri du coeur the plane plunges into fog, the radio fails, the novel takes us through a near-death experience, and Robinson is back in Tennysonian mode: “All of us have our fate … none of us can escape it.” But whatever his fate may be, it doesn’t include a crash-landing in the sea, since Avalon itself is glimpsed briefly at the book’s end: “… the clouds parted for an instant and Robinson saw far below them, as they came in for a perfect landing, gorse bushes, the valley full of apple trees and a stretch of white sand.” Or, as Tennyson had it,
I am going a long way
With these thou seest—if indeed I go
For all my mind is clouded with a doubt
To the island-valley of Avilion;
… it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair, with orchard lawns …
Is life a waiting room or a journey? In Visa for Avalon, both options are proposed. If a waiting room, what comes after you’ve done the waiting? If a journey, what is its end? Bryher doesn’t tell us, partly—one feels—because Tennyson doesn’t tell us whether Arthur lived or died, and partly because she hadn’t made up her own mind about life after death;