Redwall Abbey Series, by Brian Jacques

Redwall Abbey: To mouse scale, so a mouse would be the size of a human
in this setting. The abbey is surrounded by Mossflower Wood

Color these books "Beatrix Potter Meets the Third Reich." I read the following eight books in the Redwall Series, by Brian Jacques:

• Martin the Warrior
• Mossflower
• Mariel of Redwall
• The Bellmaker
• Salamandastron
• Redwall
• Mattimeo
• Rackety Tam

     It has taken me ten weeks to read these eight books. I found them to be clever, but laborious--excessively detailed in all of the wrong places. Jacques wrote more of these books; I am thankful they were not on the list.

Legendary Martin the Warrior

     The Redwall books are set in a fictional forest called Mossflower Woods, which holds the magnificent and strong Redwall Abbey. The abbey is a place of health, help, and healing, occupied by monastical brother and sister mice, as well as numerous other small mammals. Badgers and wolverines are the largest sentient critters; field mice and "Dibbuns" (babies) are the smallest. Birds are sentient. Insects and fishes, no. You can't eat sentient; you can eat fish. Although the abbey is presented as a place of peace and its inhabitants offend no one, the abbey is constantly beset by evil. The abbey itself is attacked in every single book.
     All of the characters in the Redwall books are small mammals of the British woodlands. In the first book, a horse appears, but from then on no hoofstock appear. In two books cats are characters. Otherwise everyone is a squirrel, mouse, vole, mole, otter, badger, shrew, toad, rabbit, hare, fox, rat, and the above-mentioned wolverine. There are several kinds of birds. There is no chipmunk--is that an American animal? Also no skunks, although a skunk would be a formidable weapon. The wittle amuhmuls are just too cute, wearing little clothes and eating quaint foods.

The evil rat Cluny the Scourge

     I had a hard time relating to any of these little furry treasures, but I am definitely not the demographic for these books. I can imagine that if you feel overly small and powerless yourself you might identify with a mouse who becomes endowed with great warrior skills and powers and a magic sword and all that. I think that precocious skinny fifth graders with big glasses and no sign of body hair in the foreseeable future would lap up these books like an evil kitty-cat laps up leche.
     I was troubled by peculiarities of scale. If I stood next to Redwall Abbey, would it come up to, say, mid-thigh? Or is everything scaled up so that the mice people were really 5 feet tall and I could easily shake hands with them? How high were the trees of Mossflower Wood? They were not specified as tiny trees, yet the critters interacted with them as though they were scaled down oaks and maples and apple trees. Was there a human-sized world somewhere? What would happen if a human found Redwall Abbey? Finally, I had to just let go of anything related to scale, subsisting in a sort of logistical limbo. And, of course, I was overthinking everything because I was unengaged. I did not relate, so I tried to compute. And computing didn't work either!

Badger--good

     The plots and themes were utterly simplistic--good versus evil. Evil foxes and rats kept trying to take over the abbey. It was creepy how the slaughter of the good by the bad was portrayed as evil and craven, but the parallel slaughter of the bad by the good was somehow clean and necessary. The Redwallians never tried to mediate or convert. They resorted to violence and trickery to protect their abbey. The ends justified the means. Whoosh! Off goes a bad rat's head! Yippee! Score one for the abbey side. Characters were also all bad or all good. Redwallians might have quirks and foibles, but their hearts were gold through and through.

Fox--bad

    The villains, however, were evil incarnate. Every villain in the nine books I read was a carbon copy of the others--a brute who ruled by coercion and violence, the typical schoolyard bully. He or she was always portrayed as brilliant and cunning, but somehow good is smarter than evil (a common convention of science fiction and fantasy literature) no matter how smart evil is. The villains were quick to kill, slow to think. I suffered from reading these books so close together. It was like that bad guy with the deadly hat in Goldfinger or Gollum in LOTR who kept coming back from what you thought was sure death. These bad foxes, rats, wolverines just kept coming.

The squirrel hero Rackety Tam

     So, although these books were lush and long, they came across as shallow and stilted. Both the villains and the heroes were tedious, especially in light of the obviously foregone conclusion that the abbey would prevail. I can almost hear "Onward Christian Soldiers" in the background. Curiously, the abbey was absolutely not portrayed as Christian. The spirit of the great warrior Martin watches over the abbey, but even Martin is not particularly deified. Critters consult him, but they don't pray to him. The order of monks (male and female) who ran the place were nature-based and one of the saving graces of the books were the many ways to say grace in a nature-oriented way. Here is an example:

Fate and seasons smile on all,
From sunrise to the dark nightfall,
This bounty from both earth and tree,
Was made to share, twixt you and me.
To Mother Nature let us say
Our thanks, for life and health this day.

Verses, poems, and songs were plentiful and pleasing in all of the books, although I started skipping them after awhile, just to get the pages to turn faster.

Redwall food is so well-detailed that
you can cook it yourself at home!

     The abbey critters had an absurd interest in cooking, talking about, and eating food, and Jacques' imagination certainly had no limits. Huge feasts were described in excruciating detail and did virtually nothing to advance the plots of the books. I started speed reading through these, too, to somehow find some action. And when I did find action, it was always fighting and killing. These books are basically one huge neverending battle scene. And the detail is gruesome...heads rolling off...guts falling out...spear through the throat...and that's just the stuff the good characters did!
     I was troubled by the utter lack of compassion of the Redwallians. They felt little or no regret at taking lives in battle. They were unable to relate to the bad guys, to even imagine walking in their shoes. The bad guys were pre-labelled, their fates inevitable. This is how you gear up cultures for war--dehumanize the other side (and in this book, no one is even human to begin with!).
     In conclusion, if you like these books and they do something for you (or for the kids who read them), then I'm OK with that. I can see that they might assist in empowering the weak. But as an adult I found the Redwall series boring, simplistic, and slow. I don't particularly recommend them.

SIDEBAR: Is It Quest Literature?

     The Redwall books have most of the elements of quest literature--untried heroes and heroines going off to discover gifts and dangers, fighting for the right, and maturing into true adult warriors. (All true adults are warriors, I assert.) But the absolute lack of tension in these books makes one hero journey after another meaningless. We know exactly how the book will end from the very beginning.
     For the hero journey/quest to succeed, the element of peril must be full and robust. There should be some fair chance of defeat (have you seen "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"?) (were you worried that Luke might go over to the dark side?) (what about when Frodo turns to Sam in the belly of Mount Doom and says "No, it's mine, my own"?--that's a hero in serious peril). The Redwall books resemble video games more than they do quest literature.