The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [30]
Despite such caricatures, the significance of the thrilling escape from death runs very deep. It is one of the most consistent motifs in storytelling, cropping up again and again in stories of every kind. And it is hardly surprising that we should find stories based on little else but the build-up to a thrilling escape.
An obvious example is Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. We know nothing of the hero of this short story, who he is or why he has been imprisoned. All we know is that he is tied down in some `dark, enclosing space', a form of prison cell, undergoing a succession of mounting horrors. First he is attacked by giant rats. Then a huge, razor-sharp pendulum swings closer and closer to his body, although he uses this to sever his bonds. Then the metal walls of his prison become red-hot and begin to close in on him, driving him nearer and nearer to the edge of a bottomless well, until suddenly, just as the sense of oppression becomes unbearable:
`the fiery walls rushed back. An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell fainting into the abyss ... the French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.'
Poe explores the same theme in his Descent into the Maelstrom, in which the hero describes how his fishing boat had been sucked down into the black, roaring hole of the world's most notorious and deadly whirlpool. Deeper and deeper they spiral down the watery walls, until the hero notices that certain lighter pieces of driftwood are being carried not downwards, but upwards. He jumps out of the boat as it is being carried down to certain destruction and, miraculously, is carried up to safety.
There are other stories based on little more than this relentless build-up towards some inevitable doom, followed in the nick of time by miraculous deliverance. For instance, Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Camus's La Peste are both stories set in a city which has been attacked by a mysterious, deadly pestilence. From small beginnings, we feel the virulence of the plague becoming more and more obvious and terrifying until it seems no one can possibly survive: then suddenly, as by a miracle, it fades away. The mysterious plague in such stories is playing the part of the monster, all-conquering, deadly, remorseless in its power: except that we never see this particular monster face to face because it cannot be directly personified, but remains just a shadowy, increasingly threatening presence. Similarly the hero is not personally responsible for overcoming the monster; at the story's climax, the reversal comes when the threat suddenly recedes, as it does for Poe's hero in The Pit and the Pendulum. Indeed the same is true in other stories we have already cited under the heading of Overcoming the Monster. The War of the Worlds, for instance, is not strictly an Overcoming the Monster story, because the hero himself has nothing to do with the routing of the monsters; and the same is true of many of the stories which followed it in showing a deadly attack by some world-threatening monster from outer space, such as The Kraken Wakes. We experience such stories, in fact, much as we do those of Poe, Defoe and Camus: through the eyes of a hero who is merely a more or less helpless observer, sucked into a nightmare which seems certain to end in his death, until brought to an end by agencies beyond his awareness or control.
Stories on this pattern have again become familiar in recent times in the form of those `disaster movies' so popular from the 1970s onwards, such as The Towering Inferno (1974). This followed the experience of a disparate group of people who become trapped in a huge skyscraper, during the hours after an electrical fire breaks out in the bowels of the building. At first the fire is tiny and unnoticed. For a long time we know it is spreading behind the scenes, so that there is a sense of some enormous growing threat while, on the surface, life in the tower carries on