Michael de Larrabeiti\'s The Borribles trilogy: Can a portal quest fantasy take place in London?

Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles trilogy: Can a portal quest fantasy take place in London?
A paper for Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference, University of Liverpool, 8th June 2015
Michael de Larrabeiti's Borribles trilogy- The Borribles (1976) The Borribles Go For Broke (1981) and The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis (1986) are Young Adult novels (although from my recollection originally marketed as Juveniles) written during a turbulent period in British politics, and in London development. Indeed, publication of the third book in the trilogy was held up by the riots in the early 1980s, publisher Collins stating that after "the events of Brixton and Tottenham we have had to look at The Borribles in a different light" (quoted in The Telegraph's obituary of de Larrabeiti, 7th May 2008). The strongly anti-authoritarian attitude displayed in the books, and, particularly in the second and third volumes, anti-police, meant that in the early years of the Thatcher government, they fell out of popularity, being republished as a trilogy first by Pan MacMillan in 2002, with a foreword by China Mieville, and then by Tor in 2003.
De Larrabeiti describes Borribles as "pretty tough looking and always scruffy, with their arses hanging out of their trousers", (Borribles, 2013, pg 6). They are "generally skinny", with pointed ears, and have evolved from normal children; children who are runaways, live by shoplifting and inhabit abandoned buildings. They never grow up; in fact they dread being caught by the authorities, because once they are caught their ears are clipped and they have to become adults. Borribles do mix with normal children as a disguise. The Borribles starts in a series of squats in Battersea; squats were more common in 1970 and 80s London.
"They don't get on with adults at all, or with anyone who isn't Borrible, and they see no reason why they should. Nobody has ever tried to get on with them, quite the contrary", (pg 7)
Farah Mendlesohn (2008) describes a portal quest fantasy as a narrative in which "a character leaves her familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place" (pg. 2). In 1949, Joseph Campbell coined the phrase "monomyth" to describe the essentials of mythology from around the world. He summarised the hero's journey as:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (Campbell, 1949. P.30)
Phoebe C. Linton (2015) uses the term Romance quest (which Tolkein also used to describe his Middle Earth novels) to describe their genre: "Essential to the romance quests from the Middle Ages to the present day are adventures of a fantastic and marvellous nature that traverse the boundary from everyday existence to the strange and unprecedented" (2015, p. 261).
Mendlesohn argues that Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is a Portal-Quest fantasy. She states that while Lord of the Rings is an immersive fantasy, set in a fictional world of Tolkein's creating, the reader views the world through Frodo's eyes; we experience the dangers and wonders outside The Shire with the hobbits (2008, pg 2). This applies to The Hobbit too; Bilbo Baggins' comfortable, respectable life is so explicitly laid out in the first two chapters of The Hobbit that the dangers and discomforts are the journey to the Lonely Mountain are vividly experienced by the reader along with Bilbo.
Borribles live by shop lifting, theft and squatting in abandoned buildings; like their near-namesakes Borrowers, they do not see stealing goods from people as wrong. However, they consider money un-Borrible. The original reason given for their quest is to defend Borrible territory, Battersea Park, from the Rumbles of Rumbledom, giant avaricious rodents who live in an underground bunker. The consequences of their quest becoming corrupted by stealing the Rumbles' treasure are devastating both to individual Borribles and to their way of life. The group of Borribles' motives for joining Knocker in the Great Rumble Hunt are for honour and glory, to earn their Borrible names and to be celebrated in song and story.
In The Hobbit, the dwarfs celebrate their heritage in song and story, but their desire to regain the Lonely Mountain is explicitly entwined with their desire to regain their treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo, to his dismay, has been designated the "burglar" of the party, suggesting that the criminal nature of the enterprise is explicit upfront, unlike the Borribles, where only Spiff and Knocker are aware of it.
So what makes The Borrible Trilogy a portal quest fantasy, when the stories take place in London of the 1970s and 1980s? Despite their relative freedom, Borribles live a precarious way of life. Outside of their immediate homes there are rival Borrible gang areas, police and other adults as dangers. Dewdrop and his son capture the Great Rumble Hunters and keep them imprisoned, forcing them to burgle houses, and submit to the fondlings of Erbie, the son: "Erbie came along the line and under the watchful eye of his father he ran his hot and heavy hands over the frail forms of the Borribles" (pg 102). De Larrabeiti's descriptions of London emphasise the alien and threatening nature of the cityscape outside of the Borribles' patch; for example
The wide curve of the river was empty and still, and the ripples of its heavy green water were frozen and dirty. On the Fulham shore squatted the oil depots, faceless places waiting on faceless roads that led nowhere and where nobody lived. (pg 64)
De Larrabeiti's use of "heavy", "dirty", "squatted" and "faceless" emphasises the threatening, alien nature of London outside the Borribles' immediate experiences. The oil depots are described as mystical beasts, reminding us of Campbell's taxonomy of the Hero's Journey, where the hero encounters supernatural wonders. Wandsworth is an "unknown place" to all but one of the Rumble Hunters; it is the territory of the fiercest rivals to the Borribles; the Wendles.
That description of the Wandsworth Reach of the Thames reminds me of the Misty Mountains through Bilbo's eyes:
There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and led nowhere or to bad ends; and most of those passes were infested by evil things and dreadful dangers. (pg 60)
There is a parallel with the "real London" experiences of excluded young people. In a blogpost for the Huffington Post, educationalist and chair of the Mayor's Enquiry into London Schools Dr Tony Sewell wrote about a 6th form student from his Generating Genius charity needing directions to travel 5 miles from Surrey Quay in South East London to Trafalgar Square by bus. I myself taught in Tottenham, North East London, where most of the 9 and 10 year old children in my class had never been into central London. As Reay (2000) argues, the extent to which "children feel in control of or controlled by cultural geography is powerfully influenced by additional social positionings such as gender, 'race' and disability, as well as being integrally linked to familial resources and income" (pg 153). She goes on to describe the differing experiences of London of 10 year old Richard, a white middle class boy, discussing how he likes travelling by London Underground, having nearly "finished" some of the lines, and white working class Lisa, whose boundaries are much more located near her home. Reay quotes her research participant Lisa's perception that muggings are frequent on Oxford Street. The barriers to wider experience of London for working class children are obviously financial and time related, but also cultural: Sewell states that the students that his charity work with do not have the feelings of entitlement to London that middle class people have; they prefer to stay within their local areas where they feel socially and racially at ease. The social dangers of embarrassment that working class young people fear outside their familiar surroundings are akin to the physical dangers that Lisa fears, and that the Borribles encounter on the Great Rumble Hunt.
Children's Literature researcher Ebony Elizabeth Thomas reminds us that to "thrive, city dwellers of all ages must constantly shift from one context to the next, often many times within the same day and during moment to moment interactions with each other" (2011, pg 11). The shifting, uncertain nature of cities that make them an "unknown place", a place of wonders and danger, and therefore, a portal-quest fantasy can happen in cities like London, once the protagonist leaves their immediate, familiar surroundings.
My final point is a plea for more attention to be given to De Larrabeiti's work, The Borrible Trilogy in particular. They are fantastic stories, and a goldmine for researchers interested in political structures in fantasy.
References
Butler, C (2013) 'Tolkein and Worldbuilding' in Hunt, P (ed) J.R.R. Tolkein (New Casebooks) London: Palgrave
Campbell, J (1988) The Hero With A Thousand Faces London: Paladin
De Larrabeiti, M. (2013) The Borrible Trilogy London: Tor
Linton, P.C. (2015) 'Speech and Silence in The Lord of the Rings' in Croft, J.B. and Donovan, L.A. (ed) Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkein pgs 258-280
Mendlesohn, F (2008) Rhetorics of Fantasy
Mieville, C (2001) 'The Borribles- an introduction' http://www.tor.com/2014/03/13/the-borribles-excerpt-introduction-china-mieville/ [accessed 26/5/15]
Reay, D (2000) 'Children's Urban Landscapes: Configurations of Class and Place' in Munt, S. R. Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change London: Cassell
Thomas, E. E. (2011) 'Landscapes of City and Self: Place and Identity in Urban Young Adult Literature" The ALAN Review, Winter 2011
Tolkein J.R.R (1937, 1961) The Hobbit or There and Back Again Harmondsworth; Penguin