
Redwall, by Brian Jacques. I hadn’t read this book in a very long time, so it was interesting to find out what I thought again. My memories had been that the food sounds more delicious than I’d actually think if someone set it down in front of me in real life, the books seemed pretty formulaic, and especially the stereotyping bothered me, as in, why couldn’t there be any good rats, ferrets, weasels, stoats, or martens?
Now that I’ve read it again, though, I’m thinking that if you’re going to write children’s military fantasy, and if you’re going to be so violent and kill off quite so many people, it’s probably vitally important, ethics-wise, to characterize the bad guys as inherently, fundamentally bad, and to make all of the characters who die be animals of types that in real life are considered just fine to have die (via one’s cat, for example, if not more directly by humans). Otherwise it could be just too traumatic for the younger readers. There is, in fact, one species where individuals might be either good or bad, with the latter being worthy of death – the sparrows. And again, real-life children are unlikely to become personally attached to individual wild sparrows. (The foxes are bad but treated ambivalently by both sides).
So when we extrapolate from the story to the implied real-life-relevant messages, we get “enemies are generally unredeemably bad – a person’s goodness or badness is generally determined by their category rather than their individual actions” (which is not a message most of us would want kids to apply to humans) and “it may be sad to have animals die but don’t forget, these are just animals” (which does require some reflectiveness on the children’s part, since within the story they are hardly “just animals,” they are people).
Anyway! The parts of the story I most enjoyed were where Matthias leaves Redwall to go find the sword – visiting the sparrows at the top of the abbey, meeting the shrews who were thoughtlessly “democratic,” and exploring the quarry, which was far more beautiful than any real-life quarry I’ve ever heard of. I am still pondering over the decision not to name Constance’s friend the beaver – every time he appeared in the story he felt more like a strange mysterious animal than the person, because the author was making such a point not to name him. Strange!