The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [63]
The theme of the castaway or castaways cut off from civilisation so seized the European imagination that Defoe's novel was to find imitators in many countries (in Germany such tales were known as `Robinsonismus'); and the desert island genre continued into the twentieth century, in examples ranging from J. M. Barrie's comedy The Admirable Crichton (1902), about an upper-class family and their servants wrecked on an island in the South Seas, to William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954). This is a model example of the Voyage and Return plot, with its description of a group of young, upper-middle-class English schoolboys marooned on a desert island by a plane crash. After an initial period of reasonably well-behaved excitement they gradually degenerate into bloodthirsty savages until, just as the nightmare has reached its murderous climax, they are plucked back to the normal world when they are miraculously rescued by the Royal Navy.
The other of these two categories of Voyage and Return stories, that which describes the hero's visit to some strange, unknown civilisation, found one of its most notable expressions just seven years after Robinson Crusoe with the publication in 1726 of Swift's Gulliver's Travels (although this too had its precursors, such as Thomas More's account in 1513 of the visit of the mariner Ralph Hythloday to the imaginary country of Utopia). The travels of Lemuel Gulliver are made up of no fewer than four voyages, each to a separate land of freaks and marvels: the most famous of course being those to Lilliput and Brobdignag. Both episodes follow a classic Voyage and Return pattern, with the hero finding his initial sense of wonder turning to frustration as he realises that he is trapped. In Lilliput the tiny inhabitants finally turn against him when he helpfully puts out a fire in the king's palace by urinating on it. Gulliver is threatened with blinding and death, and only manages to escape in the nick of time, first to the neighbouring kingdom of Blefescu, then back to Europe. From Brobdignag, where Gulliver becomes the tiny plaything of giants, his escape is even more dramatic when his `travelling box', in which his captors carry him about, is picked up by a monstrous eagle and dropped into the sea, from where he is rescued by a passing ship.
The eighteenth century, with its voyages of discovery to the southern hemisphere, made a particularly notable contribution to the literature of Voyage and Return stories, another haunting example being Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797). The greybearded old sailor-hero tells of how, many years before, he had gone on an initially exhilarating voyage into the unexplored southern ocean ('we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea'), and how the greatest marvel they found there was the huge, beautiful white albatross which followed their ship. But then, in a reckless moment, the mariner had shot the albatross, at which a terrible curse had fallen over the voyage. The ship is becalmed, amid terrifying visions of sea monsters. Finally a spectral vision of another ship approaches, containing Death and her mate. The mariner see his shipmates all die, one by one, of hunger and thirst. Then, just when all seems lost, the mariner is looking down at a mass of sea-snakes crawling around the ship. He is so moved by the sight of the only living creatures left apart from himself that he croaks out a blessing on them. The ship returns to ghostly life, and a mysterious wind springs up, carrying it back within sight of home: at which point it sinks, leaving the mariner to be carried to shore, half-dead, but repentant of his crime.2
By the nineteenth century, as fewer and fewer places on the earth's surface remained unexplored, authors were having to push further and further afield to find terrestrial settings with the necessary remoteness for Voyage and Return stories. Samuel Butler's imaginary country of Erewhon (1872) was situated on the far side of an