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unexplored range of mountains in New Zealand. In the twentieth century, Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) was set on a strange plateau in the Amazonian jungle, isolated from the rest of the `normal' world by a geological freak which had preserved it as a wonderland still inhabited by dinosaurs and primitive cavemen. In Scott Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as The Ritz (1922), the young hero made his journey into a remote, closely guarded valley in the Rocky Mountains ('the only five square miles of land in the country which has never been surveyed'), where his host lived on top of a diamond so big that it made him `the richest man that ever lived'. James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933) set his imaginary paradise of Shangri-La, where no one grew old, in a remote, sealedoff valley in the Himalayas.

But already other authors had taken still more imaginative steps to surmount the shrinking availability of such settings on the face of the globe. Jules Verne set one of his most famous Voyage and Return adventures in an imaginary underworld deep below the earth's surface (journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864) and another, a few years later, below the surface of the sea (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1872). H. G. Wells found a still more dramatic solution in The Time Machine (1895), taking his hero out of the familiar world in terms not of geography but of time. The Time Traveller invents a machine which transports him 800,000 years into the future, where he discovers the little, child-like Eloi, living in palaces in a seemingly paradisal landscape full of strange, exotic flowers and fruits. But then the familiar shadow intrudes. He gradually becomes aware that there is another semi-human race inhabiting this world, the sinister Morlocks who live underground, hating the light and coming up at night to prey on the defenceless Eloi for their food. The story winds to a familiar nightmare climax when the hero is chased and nearly caught by a gang of these horrible night-creatures, only managing in the nick of time to scramble back onto his machine, to return to the safe Victorian world he had left.

In the twentieth century, of course, countless authors were to venture still further along the path pioneered by Verne and Wells, setting their heroes travelling not just in time, but more frequently to other planets and still more remote parts of the universe. In fact a major factor contributing to the emergence of `science fiction' was simply the need of storytellers in an over-explored world to find alternative or unfamiliar worlds in which to set Voyage and Return stories. For the essence of this plot is its central figure's confrontation with the unknown, that which seems abnormal precisely because it is in such contrast to and so cut off from the familiar world he or she naturally inhabits.

The social Voyage and Return

We have so far looked at Voyage and Return stories almost entirely in terms of those where the hero or heroine makes some kind of physical journey into an unfamiliar world.

There are other, less obvious versions of this plot where the journey is of a rather different kind: as where, for instance, it takes its central figure into an unfamiliar social milieu. An author particularly drawn to this type of plot was Evelyn Waugh, several of whose best-known novels are shaped by the Voyage and Return theme. A fairly conventional example, not dissimilar to those we have already looked at in that it involves a physical journey into another country, is Scoop (1938) (which also has a Rags to Riches element, in showing how its obscure little hero, a shy writer of nature notes, finally pulls off an amazing journalistic scoop and becomes a national hero).

Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), however, was an example of what may be called a purely `social' Voyage and Return story. Paul Pennyfeather, a dull, ordinary undergraduate, suddenly finds himself ejected from his cosy, humdrum existence when he is helplessly caught up in the consequences of an upper-class brawl and sent down from Oxford. He first finds himself