Back To The Abbey

Wandering a bit off the beaten path for this one.


As all two of you know already, I usually natter on about this video game or that video game or some other damned video game.  This entry is a bit different.


Today I'm talking about books.


Specifically the old Redwall series by Brian Jacques.  You can go on and mock me if you like, call me immature or a furry (or furmature, the hell ever).  But there's just something special about these things.  I can go out there and follow a video game badass and how he's saving the world, or rampage about and save the universe, or even go out on a quest to preserve existence itself.  But inevitably, inexorably, I wind up back with my nose in a book about woodland creatures hanging out and living idyllic lives (or earning a shot at idyllic lives, or reclaiming idyllic lives) in benign, homey places, fighting off various barbarous hordes.


I enjoy these things immensely, even with some of the flaws that the series shows (and in some cases embraces).  And as time goes on, even when I start picking at it, I find more reasons to like it.  They're strictly formula, with variations on a few literary themes and archetypes, which actually seems to enhance things somehow (time is like a river, and history repeats).  The eponymous Redwall Abbey changes so much between books, that it comes across as a benign version of frickin' Castlevania (but instead of mysterious wall chickens, we have fractious roof sparrows--at least early on, dammit Mattimeo), but it works out quite well most of the time.  The place started out as frickin' huge relative to the inhabitants; enough so that in the very first book, Redwall, none of the abbey dwellers had been on the main roof, or even the second floor rafters and attic above in living memory, and it's a major undertaking to get up there, akin to actual mountain climbing.  What they do when the roof needs fixing is anybody's guess.  Later on in the series, Redwall Abbey is much more reasonable in scale and feasible to explore (though still pretty blasted big).


There's plenty of swashbuckling adventure, but it is tempered with a good deal of reality and (for lack of a better term) human tragedy.  The good guys typically kick asses and take names, but they bleed, they get shook up and shocked, they get scared and scarred, and they can and do die.  The bad guys are usually fairly shallow; they're evil for evil's sake, strongly implied to born that way and beyond redemption (Outcast of Redwall), though as the series went on, they'd get a bit more rounded and a bit of different character traits.  There were even sympathetic villains (mostly low-ranking horde minions) and even one or two redeemed villains here and there, to contrast with nominally good characters that are deeply flawed or outright reprehensible (Taggerung having two big examples, with an extreme child abuser that died 'offscreen' and a tribe that practices human sacrifice that fortunately ends with the heroes' arrival).


I find it funny that birds in this series are wild cards.  It doesn't even matter if they're a typically predatory species or not; we have typically heroic hawks and falcons, with eagles that have to be impressed by a protagonist somehow before joining the ranks of good, ravens and crows that are pretty much orcs with wings, and owls that are all over the alignment chart.


Hell, I can just go on and on about the characters.  I need to stop for now, but I'll probably make this a sub-series within the overall blog.  The Harvest Never Rests, and don't ever mess with badgers.