The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [69]
Equally shattering in this `other world' is the confrontation with those who already inhabit it, and who live by such different values; which is why much of the hero or heroine's time may be spent in trying to puzzle out the riddles posed by how they live and what they say: as when Alice is baffled by the quite literal riddles and nonsense talked by almost everyone in her two `other worlds, or the agnostic Charles Ryder by the Flyte family's all-pervasive and seemingly illogical Roman Catholicism.
The `other world' may initially seem to be full of beguiling promise. As Alice explored the hole she had plunged into, she caught her first glimpse of the wonderland she was about to enter when:
`she came across a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door ... she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains.'
As Charles Ryder set off to his first lunch invitation from the glamorously eccentric Lord Sebastian, he went:
`full of curiosity and the faint unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that great city.'
But sooner or later the experience of being in the alien world becomes less and less pleasant. Our heroes and heroines never really become engaged with the alien surroundings in which they find themselves. They continue to experience everything in a kind of dream-like, semi-detached way. The `other world' is never wholly real to them - even though the experience of being there may eventually seem to threaten their very survival. And it is here we come to the most important question of all about any Voyage and Return story. To what extent, when they finally emerge from their encounter with the `other world, has it left any lasting mark on them? How has the experience changed them?
Quite regardless of what outward form they take, Voyage and Return stories really fall into two distinct categories. There are those where the hero or heroine is transformed by the encounter with the mysterious `other world'; and there are those where they are not.
Firmly of the latter type are the two adventures of Alice. `Such a curious dream' remarks Alice, as she wakes up from her visit to Wonderland, and this is all it turns out to have been: just an incomprehensible dream, which she can look back on as no more than a memorably bizarre experience. Exactly the same are the visits of Dorothy to Oz and of the Darling children to Never Never Land. Equally, the point about Waugh's two heroes Pennyfeather and Boot, in Decline and Fall and Scoop, is that they end up returning quite unaffected to the limited and obscure station in life where they began. So unaffected is the time traveller by his journey into the future (although he returns physically exhausted) that, no sooner has he recounted his bizarre experience to his friends, than he is off again on another journey. But this time he never returns. Such a'Voyage without Return' can only be described as a 'dark' version of the Voyage and Return story; although, in this case, since we never discover what happened to him on his final journey through time, there is no story. 3
On the other hand are all those stories where the central figure is affected by the experience of having been in the `other world'. The degree to which they are affected varies considerably. In some instances, the chief effect is simply that the hero has been given a terrible shock, which leaves him shaken and in a rather more reflective state of mind. When Peter Rabbit returns home from his nightmare adventure in