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By Root 5309 0

among the semigrotesques of the seedy private school of Llanabba, and is then swept up into the even stranger and more exotic world of Margot Best-Chetwynde, a fabulously rich upper-class `older woman' who somewhat implausibly decides she wants to marry him. Like Alice or the Time Traveller or many other central figures in Voyage and Return stories, Pennyfeather is caught up in events largely beyond his control - a bewildering dream which eventually turns to nightmare when he is convicted of having, quite unwittingly, been an agent in Mrs Best-Chetwynde's international `white slave' ring. He is sent to prison, whence he is rescued by his now ex-fiancee to undergo an operation which gives him a new identity. He ends up returning to Oxford under a different name, to sink back into exactly the kind of dull, anonymous student existence from which he had been plucked at the start of the story.

In some ways a similar, though much more developed version of this story came twenty years later in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945). Again a fairly ordinary middle-class Oxford undergraduate, Charles Ryder, finds himself abruptly plucked out of his humdrum routine into an exotic upper-class world, this time that of Lord Sebastian Flyte and his family's great house Brideshead. Ryder's initial exhilaration at being introduced to this romantic other-world is gradually overshadowed as Sebastian slides into incurable alcoholism; only to be revived by a second `dream stage' when Charles embarks on a love-affair with Sebastian's sister Julia. This in turn becomes shadowed as Julia's father, the Earl Marchmain, dies, and Julia refuses to go ahead with her planned marriage to Charles. Thus rejected, the hero leaves the `faery world' of Brideshead forever - until, in totally different circumstances, he unexpectedly finds himself back at the house as an army officer in World War Two, and recalls his Voyage and Return experience in a prolonged flashback.

Such a 'remembrance of times past', prompted by the activation of memory and conveyed through some kind of flashback, is not unfamiliar as the framework for a Voyage and Return story. The analogy between a journey into the past and one into another country is even made explicit in the opening lines of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953): `the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there'. This serves to preface the aged narrator's recollection of the social Voyage and Return he had made 60 years before when, as a little middle-class schoolboy from a not very prosperous home, he had gone to stay with a rich, upper-class schoolfriend on his family's estate in Norfolk during a long, hot summer holiday. The boy Leo had found his initial shy exhilaration at being introduced to such a strange, grand, grown-up world increasingly shadowed as he becomes helplessly involved as a go-between in the secret affair between the daughter of the house, Marian, and her handsome, lower-class lover living in a humble cottage a mile away. The story had wound to a nightmarish climax when, as the heatwave broke in an immense thunderstorm, Marian's fearsome mother discovered the hapless lovers in an outhouse, in flagrante delicto. The semi-disgraced little hero had been abruptly packed off home, expelled from this wonderland for ever (until, 60 years later, he returns to meet Marian, now an old woman who, after the scandal, had never married).

A Voyage and Return story set in an alien social milieu of a different kind was the film The Third Man (1948), scripted by Graham Greene. The hero Holley Martins, a writer of Westerns, travels to the half-ruined city of Vienna during the post-war Allied occupation, to track down his old school friend Harry Lime. He is shocked to discover that his old friend has just been killed and buried in mysterious circumstances. But the more he tries to uncover what happened from the bizarre assemblage of people he meets in Vienna, ranging from Lime's seedy, mysterious friends and his enigmatic former mistress Anna to the laconic British military police officer Calloway,