In Timothy Findley's novel The Wars, Robert Ross, soon after arriving in Europe, finds himself leading a line of horses through thick green fog. The foul smell of the air puzzles him, but Poole, his batman, detects the odour of chlorine that has soaked into the ground.

The smell was unnerving—as if some presence were lurking in the fog like a dragon in a story. Poole was quite correct; the ground was saturated with gas. Chlorine and phosgene were currently both in use. Mustard gas was still to come.

This matter-of-fact chemical information is typical of the novel's verisimilitude. An almost documentary realism seems to seduce the reader into accepting the authenticity of the account. By mentioning "a dragon in a story," however, the narrator teases us with a glimpse of another, more truly seductive influence. Behind the elaborate realism of The Wars hides the beguiling shape of myth and legend—the dragon that lurks in the fog.

Northrop Frye finds the essential principles of story-telling in mythology; those structural principles are "displaced" from mythology to literature. What kind of displaced mythology would we expect to find in Findley's novel? The Wars is a work of irony; in it we see the attempt, as Frye says in Anatomy of Criticism, "to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence." He goes on to say, "As structure, the central principle of ironic myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways." A dragon's proper home, of course, is the world of romance; if he can be displaced into the world of "unidealized existence," perhaps other aspects of his home-world have made their way with him. Following this lead, I intend to examine The Wars as a "parody of romance." (p. 70)

Adventure is the essential element of plot in romance, and in a naive form romance can be the story of a hero who dies in the glory of combat or who undergoes a series of exciting adventures and always comes back for more, like a comic book hero. There are plenty of children in the novel who see war this way. They range from Robert's younger brother, thrilled to announce at school that Robert would receive the Victoria Cross, to boys arriving at the front, exhiliarated by the "heavensent chance" to become men. (pp. 70-1)

The true romantic hero begins in innocence and journeys in quest of knowledge. A wise old guardian may supervise the initiation, as do Arthur's Merlin and Dante's Virgil. Robert's innocence lies in the fact that killing is "a foreign state of mind" for him. He needs "someone who could teach him, by example, how to kill" and thinks he has found such a person in the legendary Eugene Taffler, an older man who has already journeyed to war and back; ironically, this nearly mythic figure turns out to practise sexual perversions and later attempts suicide….

Robert's initiations and loss of innocence remind us that we expect life to have four seasons—youth, maturity, age, and death—but part of the horror of The Wars is the realization that this natural cycle has been drastically accelerated. We expect young men in romances to face challenging ordeals and life-changing epiphanies, but in this novel too many men face dead-end ordeals and learn too much too soon. We see this in the constant emphasis on the childishness of the characters: "men" whose average age is nineteen, some of whom do not yet shave and whose voices still waver, who promise their mothers not to drink and who soil their pants in moments of crisis. (p. 71)

A variation of the innocence theme appears in the hero's pure love for a damsel—love, like adventure, being one of the keynotes of romance. In one version, the hero leaves a chaste lady, has adventures, and returns to marriage. In another form, often focusing on a sister or daughter figure, the journey ends in virginity. The chastity of the latter quest may thinly disguise a latently incestuous relationship; the chaste love of brother for sister may represent a lost Golden Age but may also hover near a moral taboo (virtue being most admirable when closely pressed by temptation).

In the case of Robert Ross, the catalyst for the story is his love for his sister Rowena; "Rowena," we may remember, is the name of one of the heroines in Ivanhoe. Robert often remembers her in critical moments of the war. She represents a lost happy time: he remembers her with her rabbits, or the idyllic sound of lapping water as they vacationed at Jackson's Point. (p. 72)

Romances often begin with a knight riding off into a forest after an animal, an image which is never very far from metamorphosis, the changing of the hunter into an animal. Near the beginning of the book, Robert goes for a long run with a coyote. The two enjoy a special communion, both drinking from a river in the prairie. Robert becomes oddly identified with the animal as he crouches "on his haunches" watching it. When confined to barracks for two weeks, he sits like a caged and lonely animal on the roof and stares across the prairie, "wishing that someone would howl." Metamorphosis, or the union of human and animal identities, is an important theme in The Wars…. Metamorphosis in romance often indicates a lowering of human identity as the hero obscures the signs of original identity and joins a lower world of animals. In The Wars, it is a lowering in the sense that the humans are trapped and frightened like the animals, but the fellow-feeling with animals is also part of the human largeness and generosity of characters like Rodwell and Robert. To recognize oneself as an animal is to recognize one's kinship with and duty towards all life, a recognition threatened by the "ethics" of war.

The changing of humans into animals occurs specifically in those romances concerned with the descent of the hero, and The Wars is primarily the story of a journey into a lower world, although there are points of ascent. Ascents in romance typically involve an epiphany at a mountaintop, tower, or staircase. Since the ascent reverses the Fall of Man, it is not surprising that the goal is often a new Eden, a locus amoenus or "beautiful green world." (pp. 73-4)

[A] subtle image of ascent occurs when Robert and his men climb into a giant crater to cut gun beds. It is hard to find images of upward movement in the flatlands of Europe, and the crater is most obviously an image of descent, but Findley gets double service from this crater by making it an ironically inverted mountain…. As the men clamber out of the crater, they might as well be mountain climbing, with the "sound of falling debris" and the treacherous slipping backwards, "sliding in the snow." At the top of this climb is a vestigial locus amoenus, for in the midst of all the mud is a singing bird and an enemy soldier who has laid aside his weapon in order to watch the bird. At the peak. Robert shoots the soldier and then has a devastating epiphany: the man he has killed had no intention of killing him.

Images of descent are, of course, richly elaborated and to prepare for descent, one needs a talisman, such as a golden bough. For Robert it is his pistol, which gives him the "ritual edge in authority," not so much from the enemy as from his own men in the nightmare world they enter. (p. 74)

The lower world is a form of hell, a night world, a subterranean world where the shapes of animals swarm upon the hero…. More than anything else, hell is full of dead people, and surely our main impression of the battlefront is that it is a world full of corpses. At times this vision of hell frankly becomes a vision of the Apocalypse, as when flame-throwers unleash fire storms, men explode from combustion, horses rear "with their bones on fire," and the earth is "seared and sealed with fire."

Earth and air are man's natural elements. The romantic hero journeying to another world must pass ordeals of the other two elements, fire and water, just as Dante must pass through a ring of fire and the river of Eden. (p. 75)

The whole area of the battlefield is "well below sea level" and the men fight in "a shallow sea of stinking grey from end to end" where men and horses drown in mud. Robert's ordeal by water comes when he slips off a dike and nearly drowns. It becomes important to find ways of living with water. Robert appears to love Harris, who tells stories about feeling at home in water, and Rodwell's toad survives a gas attack by staying in a pail of water: "It was a matter, Rodwell had said, of your element. The toad has a choice."

The world of fire can be a destructive world of malignant demons, such as the enemy's fire storms, but it can also be a cleansing purgatorial fire. Both connotations apply to Robert's ordeal by fire in the burning barn. It shows the stupid destructiveness of the war world; it is also a gateway by which Robert rises to a higher level of heroism….

[The] life-assertive statements that appear throughout the book insist that there is … triumph in Robert's end: the epigraph from Euripides, for example—"Never that which is shall die"—or Rodwell's last letter to his daughter—"Everything lives forever"—or Robert's reply to the nurse who, "ashamed of life," offers to help him die:

'Not yet.' Not yet….

"Not yet" are the words of a man who had been profoundly educated by his journey to the lower world. He fully knows the presence of death and he holds onto life. Knowledge of death feeds this human impulse to survive. When the hero fights the dragon to get at the secret treasure hoard, the real wealth is a wealth of wisdom, which is often wisdom about death…. (p. 76)

[Robert] finds a way out of the underworld, a way to survive: a radical act of individuality. The act leaves him physically scarred, of course, but heroes from Oedipus on have known that mutilation is often the price of great wisdom. Although the individualizing act, saving the horses, returns Robert to a full compassion for life, it necessitates the destruction of life—the killing of Captain Leather. This paradox is what Frye calls "a return that achieves its recreation by a creatively negative act."… Unfortunately, "creatively negative" acts do not stand up well in the courts. One of the motifs of romance is the trial founded on a mistaken or narrow-minded charge or a wrong identity; the hero escapes by revealing his true identity. The Robert who shot Captain Leather was a man making a desperate last gesture to pull himself out of the lower world of war in order to recreate his own identity. Once that identity is recreated, he is no longer the same man. Thus, Robert's trial is, in fact, the trial of a "wrong identity" and it is poetically appropriate that he be tried "in absentia" and allowed to return to St. Aubyn's for convalescent treatment.

The return to St. Aubyn's is, of course, a return to Eden. As romance moves to a world of original identity, the symbolism of the garden of Eden reappears…. Robert can never return to his first Eden: Rowena and her rabbits are dead. The last picture taken during his life shows, however, that Robert has achieved a new Eden. Juliet d'Orsey loves him; they are together in St. Aubyn's; he holds her hand and "he is smiling." Juliet, who even as an old woman maintains a child's wisdom, becomes a substitute for Rowena.

This identification is made even more clearly in the epilogue. We see one more picture which echoes the earlier picture of Robert linked to Juliet, and this is "the last thing you see before you put on your overcoat":

Robert and Rowena and Meg: Rowena seated astride the pony—Robert holding her in place. On the back is written: 'Look! you can see our breath!' And you can.

The hero brings the end of his quest in line with the beginning; the circle closes. (pp. 78-9)

[It] is clear that while The Wars' realistic details generate part of its appeal and effectiveness, the way in which those details are given imaginative impact goes beyond the effects of verisimilitude. We demand that historic and geographic "facts" be given a "shape" to contain them. The situation of the narrator in this novel mirrors this fundamental issue in fiction: he has only a few photographic images which, by themselves, say little. His task—"your" task—is to take those few facts and pictures and find their meaning. To find the meaning of the pictures, to discover the imaginative impact of realistic details, the story-teller must be a master of the basic principles of story-telling—principles which give shape to human experience, and which are as old as myth and legend. (p. 79)

Bruce Pirie, "The Dragon in the Fog: 'Displaced Mythology' in 'The Wars'" (reprinted by permission of the author), in Canadian Literature, No. 91, Winter, 1981, pp. 70-9.