This Post Went to Florida and All it Brought You Back Was this Lousy T-Shirt

By Andrew Tibbetts

“Voyage and Return” is the fourth of Christopher Booker’s seven basic plots. The hero or heroine takes a trip and reports back: “where I went on my summer vacation” or “the Odyssey.” Same thing.

A voyage and return story lives or dies on the interest you can generate from your alien destination. Islands with one-eyed giant monsters that try to eat you: good; a McDonalds that has run out of hot apple pies: bad.

In movies, recently, the road trip sub-genre predominates in this category. The kooky family in “Little Miss Sunshine” returns from their voyage, not any less dysfunctional, but more united in their dysfunctionality. They dysfunction together. You’ve seen that t-shirt, the family that illegally transports dead relatives and riots at beauty pageants together stays together, right?

In Canadian literature, our voyages are often into the wild. We ratchet up the suspense with hypothermia and bears. Our triumphant returns are often of mere survival- a few wounds, some missing toes, a child planted in the ground ‘like a flag’- we come back diminished, more often than enriched. And this presents us with what more modern readers might want from a voyage and return tale: a change in the traveler. We’re so into our psychology; geography, not so much these days.

As well, I’d like to point out that often Canada is the alien terrain in our ‘voyage’ stories. We’ve been populated throughout our history by waves of immigration. Our stories have no ‘return’. We stay put.

One of my favourite novels is Guy Vanderhaege’s “The Last Crossing”. Some of the characters ‘return’ and some don’t. One of the most beautiful things in the book is the traveler who discovers a true home on his voyage. His ‘return’ is to his authentic self, a self that couldn’t have been entered into with a geographic return to the old country.

I wondered, as I thought about this ur-plot, if I should add this technique to my arsenal. In my writing, my characters never go anywhere. Often, I have a character that I really like, but I don’t have a story for them. Perhaps I’ll send them on a trip next time. This idea doesn’t spring naturally to me. I rarely travel myself. I’m too poor. And too anxious. We traveled so much when I was a child, I developed the opposite of wanderlust. I’ll call it rootslust, the longing to be planted somewhere. But my characters? There’s no reason why they should be homebodies.

And yours, writing readers? Do your characters need to find themselves somewhere outside their comfort zones? I challenge you to write a ‘voyage and return’ story. Stay tuned for mine.