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By Root 5573 0

the more puzzled Martins becomes. He is here in a common predicament of the Voyage and Return hero, feeling he has been caught up in some strange, unreal dream world where everyone knows more than he does. The dream then begins to turn to nightmare when it turns out that Lime had not only been on the run from the authorities, for running a particularly nasty racket in deadly watered-down penicillin, but that he is still mysteriously alive. Eventually Martins makes contact with Lime and, when they talk on the great fairground wheel, is shocked by the cynical heartlessness with which Harry justifies his criminal activities. Martins has also fallen in love with Lime's erstwhile mistress, the enigmatic Anna, and is drawn by Calloway into a plot to trap his old friend on behalf of the authorities. The story winds to its nightmare climax in the chase through the half-lit tunnels of the Vienna sewers, with Martins firing the last fatal shot as his friend's fingers clutch for fresh air and life through the grille of a manhole cover. As Lime's body is at last genuinely buried the story ends, with the implication that, after such a horrific experience, Martins will now return to his normal, humdrum existence, although we no more see this at the end than at the beginning. The story is framed simply by his entrance to and exit from the alien world.

We must finally consider one more form of the Voyage and Return story, where the degree of the hero's translation into an unfamiliar realm might seem even more extreme than in the geographical or social journeys we have looked at so far. This is the kind of story where the hero temporarily undergoes a complete change of outward identity, while remaining himself behind his new persona. A wellknown example was F. Anstey's Victorian novel Vice Versa (1882), in which a father and his schoolboy son magically switch outward identities, with potentially catastrophic results in each case. But long before this such a form had already been used rather more seriously in one of the most profound of all Voyage and Return stories, in which the hero finds himself turned into an animal.

Lucius, the hero of the neo-Platonic allegory The Golden Ass, written by the Roman North African author Apuleius in the second century AD, is a young man obsessed with sex and the occult. He goes on a journey to Thessaly, home of the black arts, where he finds lodgings in the house of a well-known sorceress and embarks on a heady affair with her beautiful slave girl Fotis. But Lucius also has a voyeuristic craving to spy secretly on her mistress, and to do this he asks Fotis to turn him by magic into a bird. The spell goes horribly wrong. She turns him by mistake into an ass, which is almost immediately stolen by a gang of robbers. It seems Lucius is now trapped in his new persona with no hope of escape. After a series of frightening adventures he is sold to a circus owner, who prepares to put him on public show making love to a human murderess. Lucius finds this prospect more horrifying than anything he has yet had to face, not least because he suspects that, as the spectacle reaches its climax, the circus owner will release onto the stage a wild beast to tear both him and the woman to pieces ('I was not only appalled at the disgraceful part I was to play. I was in terror of death'). In the nick of time, he manages to run away. Lying exhausted on a beach after his `thrilling escape, he awakens in moonlight to see a shining vision of the goddess Isis rising from the sea, `with so lovely a face the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. She tells him she is `Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements ... sovereign of all things spiritual ... the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses there are'. On her instructions, he attends a great religious ceremony in her honour, and feels his ass's body melting away. He has become human again. As a result of his miraculous deliverance he remains a devoted follower of the cult of Isis, and the rest of the story (which we shall consider