While Mitchell was offhand about his imaginative romances, they are viewed here as more than just potboilers whose brand of utopian idealism was designed to garner widespread popularity. On the contrary, Mitchell employs a lightweight fiction form to promote key themes about society, human nature and historical evolution. Two of his fantasy novels are explored as classic time-travel yarns of Voyage and Return. The first of these, Three Go Back, invokes a natural Golden Age of the prehistoric past untrammelled by civilised values, while his last fantasy Gay Hunter constitutes a darker dystopian narrative informed by the contemporary rise of fascism in Europe. The intermediate romance The Lost Trumpet is appraised as a classic example of the popular genre of the Quest, an early form of magical realism set in Egypt in which pressing socio-political themes are addressed within the framing fantasy of an archaeological search for Joshua’s talismanic trumpet of Old Testament legend. Ultimately the fantasy form is viewed as uncongenial to Mitchell’s literary aspirations, although his formal experimentation in these novels was important to his literary development.