Keeping adventure within hailing distance

John Buchan on the quality that makes a story “romantic”—i.e. an adventure—in Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works:

Scott transforms life, as is the duty of a great artist. He enlarges our view and makes the world at once more solemn and more sunlit, but it remains a recognisable world, with all the old familiar landmarks. He has that touch of the prosaic in him without which romance becomes only a fairy tale and tragedy a high heeled strutting.

That’s Buchan on Scott specifically, but Buchan continues with a more general observation on storytelling:

“For the kernel of romance is contrast—beauty and valour flowering in unlikely places, the heavenly rubbing shoulders with the earthly. All romance, all tragedy, must be within hailing distance of our humdrum lives.”

Better authors and critics than I have pointed out that, in the best and most vividly realized fantasy or adventure stories, the protagonist ventures away from an ordinary life into one of excitement and danger, in which everything is different. As Buchan lays out here, that link to the ordinary provides contrast and keeps the story grounded no matter how wild it may get.

One thinks immediately of the hobbits who, as Tom Shippey has noted in detail, Tolkien made just about as characteristically English as he could—Bilbo with his tobacco and brass buttons and greedy cousins, Frodo going off to war with his gardener-turned-batman, and the whole Shire with its tavern gossip and detailed genealogies. Or perhaps the Pevensies, swept from a stately—or, to them, boring—country house during an unfortunately ordinary total war through a seemingly ordinary piece of furniture into another world. One could multiply examples. Buchan’s own books offer plenty.

Neglecting contrast will result in stories that are all weirdness, all bleakness, or mere chaos. Think of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies’ descent into the maelstrom. The first film had an actual toehold in reality that made the intrusion of a ghost ship, voodoo, and cursed Aztec gold exhilarating, but by the third film the fantasy elements had completely overwhelmed anything “humdrum”—Will Turner’s blacksmithing, say—and this combined with its visual grotesquery robbed the series of what made it feel like an adventure in the first place.

Carefully providing contrast, on the other hand, will not only keep the reader grounded but suggest to him that adventure—the dangerous, the uncanny, even the “heavenly”—is nearer to him than he may have thought.