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By Root 5252 0

a distant memory from his childhood in a small country town. As a small boy obsessed with fishing, he had once, all alone, penetrated a dark wood in the grounds of a large house outside the town, where he had come across a secret, deep, dark pool, surrounded by trees. Gleaming in its depths were huge, ancient golden carp, the biggest fish he had ever seen. Now, half a lifetime later, he decides he will escape all the oppressions of his empty life by setting out on a Quest, back to the world of his childhood, to fish for those numinous carp in their mysterious pool. It is a classic external projection of the symbolism of the Self.

George journeys to the town, which he finds swollen almost out of recognition by modern development. The surrounding fields he remembered from his boyhood have disappeared under rows of identical little houses and factories. His childhood home is now an unwelcoming tea shop. He glimpses the pretty girl he had loved in his youth, his lost anima, now aged into a shapeless hag. He finally reaches the country house, now a lunatic asylum, and walks on through the trees, nearing his ultimate goal. But suddenly he emerges into a housing estate. Much of the wood has been felled. When he asks after the secret pool, he is told by a resident he must be thinking of that hole over there which, long since emptied of water or fish, is filled with tin cans and all the rubbish of twentieth century civilisation. He has sought the outward symbol of the Self, only to find it an empty hole, crammed with the detritus of human egotism. He returns home to his nagging wife, defeated and broken.

The destructive onward march of the twentieth century across the English countryside also hangs like a dark shadow over one of the most haunting and successful of recent Quest stories, Watership Down (1972). On the face of it, this modern epic is an almost perfect recreation of the Quest archetype, as its heroes set out on their long hazardous journey, reach their goal, marry their `Princesses' and see the survival of their `kingdom' secured for the future. One of the book's most appealing qualities is the way it transforms a stretch of familiar, all-too domesticated Home Counties countryside into a vast, seemingly mythic realm, comparable with that wild, mysterious terrain familiar from many an older Quest journey. It takes a feat of imagination to translate contemporary rural England, with its broiler farms, barbed wire fences and motorways, back into such a faeryrealm of romance and high adventure; creating the most successful pseudomythic landscape since the imaginary world conjured up by Tolkien.

But it could only do this by turning its heroes into little rabbits, whose worst enemies, with their cars, guns and traps, are the human race itself. The very reason the rabbits must set out on their Quest is that the warren where they live is about to be gassed and bulldozed, to make way for yet another human housing estate. And it is precisely because the heroes are animals and not human beings that they can be invested with purely human qualities. With James Bond, Star Wars and most latter-day adventure stories, set in a prison of space rockets, aeroplanes, fast cars and electronics, the modern epic hero has been all but dehumanised, turned by his technology into little more than an automaton. With the rabbits of Watership Down, we are firmly back in a pre-mechanical world, where Hazel and his friends can only survive by their direct exercise of primary, innate human qualities. But the very fact that, to conjure up such a human story, according to the age-old pattern of the Quest, the author had in effect to escape from our modern technologically-shaped world altogether, says much about the underlying message of the book. It was trying to preserve the essence of the archetype in a world where in human terms, it was implied, humanity's remorseless collective egotism had rendered this all but impossible. For all its virtues, the story was little more than an escapist and rather melancholy dream.

Such is the power of this archetype