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By Root 5330 0

kick on the backside, when he has been caught kissing the beautiful Cunegonde. The obscure little undergraduate Pennyfeather suddenly finds himself being debagged by a lot of drunken upperclass rowdies. Charles Ryder's introduction to his `other world' begins when, on a similar occasion, Lord Sebastian Flyte suddenly leans through his ground-floor window and is violently sick into his room. Wells's time traveller, when he sets off into the future, has the sensation of being on a switchback, and when he finally stops his machine, it topples over, propelling him into the `other world' in his own version of a shipwreck. Wendy and company also find their flight into the Never Never Land a bit like a switchback ride, and are greeted when they land by the deafening explosion of a pirate gun.

Even when the heroes or heroines do not land in their `other world' quite so literally with a bang, it is always clear that something very queer is happening to them. They may simply sense that the reality of their familiar world is disconcertingly dissolving into something else, as when Alice finds herself passing through the mirror into the Looking Glass world beyond; or the horrified Lucius feels his arms growing hairy, and perceives he is changing into a donkey; or the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe push their way through a cupboard full of fur coats and find themselves emerging from the back into the snowcovered forest of Narnia.

Of course it is hardly surprising that the experience of passing over from one world to another is disconcerting, because the very definition of the `other world' is that it is totally strange and unfamiliar - and that the hero or heroine is trapped in it. Irrevocably cut off from the familiar world they have left, they now have to puzzle out the strange nature of this new world into which they have stumbled.

When we say the `other world' is abnormal, what precisely do we mean? Our sense of normality, even of what is real, is to an enormous extent of course governed by what is familiar to us. We make sense of the world through a whole framework of largely unconscious assumptions of what is normal, based on everything we are used to - socially, culturally, morally, geographically and physically, in terms of scale, space and time. Such things play a central part in giving us our sense of outward identity in the world, telling us who we are. And the whole point of the Voyage and Return story is that, in some important respect, it takes the hero or heroine out of that framework of the familiar. It takes away some crucial defining point for their sense of reality and identity, which is why so many of their adventures are experienced as a kind of disconcerting and unreal dream.

One way or another these stories work every conceivable permutation on their heroes' and heroines' sense of what is normal, even in terms of the most basic assumptions we make about our identity as human beings. Both Alice and Gulliver, for instance, find their normal perspective on the world distorted by experiencing grotesque alterations in their relative size: Alice because she herself grows magically taller and shorter, Gulliver because he finds the people around him are either abnormally tiny or abnormally huge. Similarly the time traveller experiences a suspension of our normal co-ordinates of time (the hero of another Wells Voyage and Return adventure, The New Accelerator, finds his normal experience of time distorted in another way, when a new drug speeds up all the workings of his mind and body by thousands of times, so that he sees everything and everyone else around him frozen grotesquely still). Lucius has his whole centre of normal perspective on the world knocked for six by suddenly having to experience it in the body of an ass. Robinson Crusoe and the other heroes of `desert island' versions of the plot lose their co-ordinates of identity in yet another way, finding themselves snatched out of the familiar constraints and framework of society into a world where all normal social assumptions are turned topsy-turvy