The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [48]
Yet when we come to examine such tales more closely, we find that they reveal some startling similarities.
The Call
We begin with the reason why the hero and his companions set out on their journey in the first place. The Quest usually begins on a note of the most urgent compulsion. For the hero to remain quietly `at home' (or wherever he happens to be) has become impossible. Some fearful threat has arisen. The `times are out of joint. Something has gone seriously and terrifyingly wrong.
The story of Aeneas begins amid the roaring flames, billowing smoke and crashing masonry of his beloved Troy, as it is being sacked by the Greeks. Christian in Pilgrim's Progress has a nightmare vision in which he sees that the city he lives in `will be burned with fire from heaven'. In Watership Down, one of the rabbits in Sandleford warren, the intuitive little Fiver, feels `some terrible thing - coming closer and closer', and has a vision of the field where he and the other rabbits play `covered with blood'. After living many years in Egypt, the Jews are being subjected to a savage persecution, their lives `made bitter with hard bondage', their sons murdered.
In the midst of this fear and suffering comes the Call. Amid the smoking ruins of Troy, the ghost of Aeneas's lost wife Creusa looms up, `larger than life', to tell him that across `a great waste of ocean', in `the Western land', he will find a new home. Christian meets Evangelist, who points out a distant `shining light' and tells him that he must head for it. Fiver's premonitions of some great disaster overshadowing Sandleford warren become so acute that a small band of rabbits meet in the field and decide to flee into the gathering dusk. Moses has a terrifying vision of God in the Burning Bush, telling him that the Jews must flee Egypt, and that they will eventually be brought up into `a land flowing with milk and honey.
The Grail Quest begins with the arrival at King Arthur's court of a strange knight. He proves to be the only knight who can sit safely in the Siege Perilous, the `Seat of Danger', at the Round Table: and this seemingly miraculous arrival of the young hero Sir Galahad is seen as the signal for the long-promised quest for the Holy Grail, `to free our country from the enchantments and strange events which have troubled it so often and so long'. There is a terrible clap of thunder, the hall is lit by a ray of more than earthly light, and the knights are given an ethereal prevision of the Grail for which they are about to set off in search.
So subtly constructed is the Odyssey, with its flashbacks and shifts in the centre from which the narrative is related, that, as Homer arranges the story, we do not begin with Odysseus at all. The story begins with the terrible threat overhanging the kingdom of Ithaca, from which its king Odysseus has been absent for many years. Amid the riots and debauches of the suitors for the hand of his queen Penelope (who has all but given up hope that Odysseus will ever return), the Call comes in a visit by the goddess Athene to his son Telemachus. She sends him forth to search for his lost father, almost as if young Telemachus is himself the hero of the quest. It is not until some considerable time later that we finally join up with the real quest motivating the poem: that of Odysseus seeking to return home, which had of course begun long before, like that of Aeneas, in the smoking wreck of Troy.
Surrounded by this atmosphere of menace and constriction, the Quest hero and his friends feel under intense compulsion to get away. Even so, they may face every kind of discouragement and opposition before they can depart. Aeneas and his friends only escape from Troy by the skin of their teeth. Christian is universally scorned when he tells of his fearful premonitions, and announces his intention to leave. The little group of rabbits with Fiver are subject to a violent effort