The Adventures of Modern Life

I have lived for some years in the constant agony of the boredom of modern life. Alienation and social anxiety aside, life now is horrible, and cruel, and dirty. We drink our Cherry Coke, and we watch our televisions, we masturbate, we dance to our music. No, scrap that, I could never be unkind to music. Modern life can be exciting, but within in a very limited scope. There is no adventure to modern life.

I have been a fan of the idea of fantasy fiction ever since childhood, but only the idea of it. For the most part reading fantasy fiction leaves me feeling cold. The actual experience is enjoyable enough, swords and sorcery and dragons etc. However the escapist charm dissipates into the aether the moment one has finished, and instead of being enraptured by the feeling of being elsewhere, one is confronted once again by the harsh realities of modern existence, and the cruel tedium that drives people to read escapist literature, or watch fantasy movies, is brought into a more stark and focused perspective, leaving us feeling worse than when we started. You still have that report to write, your girlfriend still isn't talking to you, the toilet still needs fixing. Being so caught up in a story or setting that has never existed and will never exist, then to realise that you will never experience something so exciting, really truly exciting, is a comedown worse than anything I can imagine.

The story of Peter Pan is about the death of the spirit of adventure, the childish freedom to imagine anything, and the 'grown ups' having lost this spirit, don't know how to have fun.
"To die would be an awfully big adventure" Pan states. Beautiful words that to me, sum up the desperation that we suffer as a result of our society having 'grown up'. We have become the Pirates of Pan's Neverland. In Steven Spielberg's re-imagining 'Hook' - the character of Hook is fleshed out, and becomes a much deeper and more profound allegory for the end of adventurous spirit. "Death is the only adventure I have left" he says.

This, I fear, is a statement that has come to represent everything that is troubling about globalisation. There is no unknown any more. Truly the last of the adventures of discovery ended in 1893, with the official closure of the American frontier. The only adventures of the twentieth century have been immortalised in countless films and books and television shows, they have become fictionalised and legendary. These adventures were the two world wars that took place in the first half of the century. War and death are the only adventures we have left.

The Goonies tells a familiar tale, that the drudgery of modern existence will destroy the spirit of adventure in the children, so they decide to make their own adventure, one last time before they have to grow up. Even if it is fantastical and not at all realistic, it is joyous to embrace the idea that adventure, real adventure, can take place in today's world.

Why was the recent film adaptation of The Lord of The Rings so popular? It was not the cast, or the special effect, or the direction - it was because we have always cried out for adventure stories that we can plunge into, and escape into. Fantasy and adventure work best by throwing the reader (and in many cases the protagonist) into the unknown, usually with some sort of guide (Gandalf, for instance) who is aware of the lore of the world and can explain things and create the correct emotional effects in both the reader and the protagonist; the reader doesn't know to fear something unless the guide tells them to be wary, for instance. However authors also rely on the emotional precedents built into us from childhood to create emotional responses relating to the unknown - caves and forest are to be feared for example. This idea of the unknown is both scary and exciting, and it typifies the adventure story. However, I have never been all that fond of fantasy that exists in and of itself, in a completely different universe. Someone once said that there is an inverse proportion between the quality of your fantasy fiction and how many words you make up while writing it; I couldn't agree more. To me, the most powerful fantasy fiction is that which anchors you to a setting you already understand, and allows you to more actively engage in the story. I am thinking mostly in modern terms of zombie films, and post-apocalyptic stories. Post-apocalyptic stories place the reader in a familiar environment, and make it unfamiliar. This creates a feeling of the unknown which is juxtaposed with the reader's expectations of the setting which they take from their experiences in real life. For example, place the protagonist in a post-nuclear-war London, and walking the streets of the West End becomes uncanny, rather than familiar; so the reader becomes scared and curious, where they would normally be confident. This type of adventure story is more powerful, by the nature or the world knowledge, and the same applies to historical fiction. By giving the reader a sense of world knowledge from the start, the readers sense of unease and adventure will be much greater than the fantasy novel where we are told the story of the world and why we should be afraid of Party A and empathise with Party B. Moreover, more often than not, completely fictitious fantasy can be read as an allegory, which can draw us out of the story if it becomes obvious. Even if it is not inherent in the text, an allegory imposed on the text by a group can be just as damaging in this regard. Tolkien always denied that The Lord of The Rings was in any way allegorical, but it is well known that the anti-nuclear lobby took it as an anti-nuclear allegory, and it is hard not to think about that when reading it. Allegories are a little easier to swallow in fantasy fiction based in our world, if just because we know that real world events effect our world, obviously.

To me, the best adventure fantasy has always been rooted firmly in our world. Stories like Treasure Island contain fictional elements, but they are set firmly in a world we already understand, even if it does not exist any more. We know the city of Bristol for example, and we understand the importance of seafaring in the 18th century. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, is a folkloric tale of adventure, set in the wilds of Cumbria, and it is littered to references to places that those listening to the story at the time would have recognised, and most importantly, that the writer of the story would have recognised, and drawn on. But again, both of these stories draw upon that key characteristic of fantasy fiction, the unknown. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is filled with strange and mystical creatures, such as the woodwose, or the Wild Man who roams the forests of Britain, and Treasure Island has the island itself, mysterious, and uncharted.

Increasingly we look towards history to create adventures from, back when real life was an adventure, truly, for real people. The Age of Discovery, the frontiers of America, the conquistadors in South America. Real life adventure, that we cannot experience in real life because there is no more unknown, so we look to fiction. Recently there was a spate of popular Chinese films set in medieval China. These films were popular in the west, because the period is unfamiliar to us, and this unfamiliarity is of course, exciting.

So fantasy leaves me wanting, but the reality is much worse. The real truth here is that for me, the wonders of escapism are ruined by the stark realities of life, and that globalisation, and instant communication, and the enslavement of the population has ruined the possibility of adventure for most of the population who crave it. We need more adventure fantasy stories based in the knowledge we possess of the world, stories we can relate to, that are exciting.

Please do not let the spirit of adventure die.