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A review by chrisbiss
Redwall by Brian Jacques
2.0
A few years ago as I was trawling through a charity shop I came across a stack of paperback copies of the Redwall books, and upon opening them I discovered that most of them were signed by Brian Jacques. I had owned *Martin The Warrior* when I was a kid and for some reason never read it, but the aesthetic of Redwall has always appealed to me and I figured that for 50p each there was no reason not to buy them all and read them. In typical fashion those signed books have been sitting unread on my shelf for years and every now and then I think "I should read them". I'm generally a fan of anthropomorphic animal stories. As a kid I loved The Animals of Farthing Wood, and Watership Down is - I think - among the best novels ever written. Games like Mouse Guard and Mausritter get played regularly in my house. And yet for some reason I've never read Redwall.
This past 12 months I've been reading lots of series in their entirety. I read all of Joe Abercrombie's First Law books, I am in the process of reading all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, and I have slowly been working my way through all of Alaister Reynolds' novels, so this seemed like a good time to finally make a start on Redwall.
This was a weird read and I'm not fully sure whether or not I enjoyed it. There were lots of moments in the course of reading this book, from about 30% of the way in, where I thought, "I don't want to finish this". And yet, despite my commitment this year to aggressively not finishing novels I'm not enjoying, I persevered with it.
Redwall is ostensibly a children's series and at least for the first couple of chapters that seems true. The language in the opening chapters is fairly simplistic and lots of sentences are written as statements that end in exclamation marks to make it exciting! There's a focus on how small and cute the animals are, and there's lots of what people would probably describe as "cosiness" during the opening. But it doesn't take long for this to drop away and we end up reading a book that seems to straddle the line between adults fiction and what we'd categorise as YA these days. I was particularly surprised by the level of vocabulary used in the book and it made me wonder if modern children's and YA books are maybe a little condescending: or, if not condescending, that they assume a lower reading level or level of intellect on behalf of the reader than a children's book from 1986 does. I'm 38 years old (the same age as Redwall, funnily enough) and have been a voracious reader for over 30 years, I have an MA in English literature and make my career as a writer, and I still found myself having to look up unfamiliar words while reading. It didn't happen often, but that it happened at all is highly unusual for me and especially surprising to find in a children's book.
The story itself is fairly compelling. An abbey populated by mice and other woodland creatures comes under siege from a rat warlord and his army of evil rats, ferrets, stoats, and weasels. A young mouse discovers that he is the reincarnation of an ancient hero and goes on a quest to recover his lost sword in order to help mount a defence of the abbey. During his quest, he befriends creatures who would traditionally be enemies of mice like sparrows, a cat, and a barn owl, and turns them into allies while helping to solve their various problems. In the process he learns what it means to be a hero. This is a very traditional, familiar fantasy narrative and one that I enjoy generally, and I think it was largely the familiarity of this story combined with the relative novelty of the setting and the cast of anthropomorphic animals that kept me reading even when the book itself was often a slog to get through.
I can't even really put my finger on what made the book such a slog for me, but it definitely was. I found myself losing my concentration and my interest very regularly, so that a book that should have only taken me a few hours to read ended up taking a few days as I dipped into it a chapter or two at a time before getting bored and putting it down. But I still kept coming back to it even when I was debating whether I should finish it or go and read something else that I might actually enjoy. Despite feeling like it was often spinning its wheels and not going anywhere, and despite increasingly finding myself skimming chapters that weren't concerned with Matthias' quest for the sword towards the end of the novel, I nevertheless wanted to stick it out and finish the book rather than abandoning it.
It's definitely rough in places. One thing that really stuck out to me is that Jacques is very inconsistent about the scale of this world. (I'm very sure that I'm not the first person to make this observation). Our first site of Cluney and his army of 500 rats sees them on the back of a haywagon being pulled by a horse. All 500 rats in his army fit in the hay on the back of the wagon. This indicates to me that the wagon and the rats are scaled in a way that matches the real world. And yet, at the end of the novel, the rats construct a siege engine out of the wagon which they are able to lift using block and tackle in order that they can remove the axles and the wheels and drag them to the abbey. Similarly, at one point Matthias meets an army of shrews who live inside a hollowed out tree trunk. This tells me that the shrews and Matthias are the size of real shrews and mice. And yet a chapter later they cross a river by paddling on a tree trunk, which they are able to move by punting with poles in the water. This indicates that at this point in the novel the mice and shrews are now human-sized in relation to the trees. It's not important that the scale keeps changing and I'm sure that it's not something that most children would pick up on or care about, but it bothered me. I also sort of respected how little Jacques cared it, though.
All this is to say that I genuinely do not know whether I think this first Redwall book was good or not. I don't think I would be in a rush to recommend it to somebody, but likewise if somebody asked me "should I read Redwall?" I don't think I would immediately say no. I also find myself in a strange situation where I'm glad that I can now read something else other than this book, but I am still interested in reading at least the next book in the series. It's a weird place to be in.
Unrelated: at one point in my life I was a huge Harry Potter fan, though I no longer talk about those books because I vehemently disagree with the author's views about trans people and her behaviour surrounding this issue. It was very interesting to me to see a number of plot points and character details in this book that seem to have been lifted almost whole cloth for the Potter novels. I had always known that those books were at least a little derivative of other, earlier works, even when I was a huge, fanfic-writing fan, but this is the first time I've personally discoveredsomething that ends up being very significant in the Potter books that exists in work that predates them.
This past 12 months I've been reading lots of series in their entirety. I read all of Joe Abercrombie's First Law books, I am in the process of reading all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, and I have slowly been working my way through all of Alaister Reynolds' novels, so this seemed like a good time to finally make a start on Redwall.
This was a weird read and I'm not fully sure whether or not I enjoyed it. There were lots of moments in the course of reading this book, from about 30% of the way in, where I thought, "I don't want to finish this". And yet, despite my commitment this year to aggressively not finishing novels I'm not enjoying, I persevered with it.
Redwall is ostensibly a children's series and at least for the first couple of chapters that seems true. The language in the opening chapters is fairly simplistic and lots of sentences are written as statements that end in exclamation marks to make it exciting! There's a focus on how small and cute the animals are, and there's lots of what people would probably describe as "cosiness" during the opening. But it doesn't take long for this to drop away and we end up reading a book that seems to straddle the line between adults fiction and what we'd categorise as YA these days. I was particularly surprised by the level of vocabulary used in the book and it made me wonder if modern children's and YA books are maybe a little condescending: or, if not condescending, that they assume a lower reading level or level of intellect on behalf of the reader than a children's book from 1986 does. I'm 38 years old (the same age as Redwall, funnily enough) and have been a voracious reader for over 30 years, I have an MA in English literature and make my career as a writer, and I still found myself having to look up unfamiliar words while reading. It didn't happen often, but that it happened at all is highly unusual for me and especially surprising to find in a children's book.
The story itself is fairly compelling. An abbey populated by mice and other woodland creatures comes under siege from a rat warlord and his army of evil rats, ferrets, stoats, and weasels. A young mouse discovers that he is the reincarnation of an ancient hero and goes on a quest to recover his lost sword in order to help mount a defence of the abbey. During his quest, he befriends creatures who would traditionally be enemies of mice like sparrows, a cat, and a barn owl, and turns them into allies while helping to solve their various problems. In the process he learns what it means to be a hero. This is a very traditional, familiar fantasy narrative and one that I enjoy generally, and I think it was largely the familiarity of this story combined with the relative novelty of the setting and the cast of anthropomorphic animals that kept me reading even when the book itself was often a slog to get through.
I can't even really put my finger on what made the book such a slog for me, but it definitely was. I found myself losing my concentration and my interest very regularly, so that a book that should have only taken me a few hours to read ended up taking a few days as I dipped into it a chapter or two at a time before getting bored and putting it down. But I still kept coming back to it even when I was debating whether I should finish it or go and read something else that I might actually enjoy. Despite feeling like it was often spinning its wheels and not going anywhere, and despite increasingly finding myself skimming chapters that weren't concerned with Matthias' quest for the sword towards the end of the novel, I nevertheless wanted to stick it out and finish the book rather than abandoning it.
It's definitely rough in places. One thing that really stuck out to me is that Jacques is very inconsistent about the scale of this world. (I'm very sure that I'm not the first person to make this observation). Our first site of Cluney and his army of 500 rats sees them on the back of a haywagon being pulled by a horse. All 500 rats in his army fit in the hay on the back of the wagon. This indicates to me that the wagon and the rats are scaled in a way that matches the real world. And yet, at the end of the novel, the rats construct a siege engine out of the wagon which they are able to lift using block and tackle in order that they can remove the axles and the wheels and drag them to the abbey. Similarly, at one point Matthias meets an army of shrews who live inside a hollowed out tree trunk. This tells me that the shrews and Matthias are the size of real shrews and mice. And yet a chapter later they cross a river by paddling on a tree trunk, which they are able to move by punting with poles in the water. This indicates that at this point in the novel the mice and shrews are now human-sized in relation to the trees. It's not important that the scale keeps changing and I'm sure that it's not something that most children would pick up on or care about, but it bothered me. I also sort of respected how little Jacques cared it, though.
All this is to say that I genuinely do not know whether I think this first Redwall book was good or not. I don't think I would be in a rush to recommend it to somebody, but likewise if somebody asked me "should I read Redwall?" I don't think I would immediately say no. I also find myself in a strange situation where I'm glad that I can now read something else other than this book, but I am still interested in reading at least the next book in the series. It's a weird place to be in.
Unrelated: at one point in my life I was a huge Harry Potter fan, though I no longer talk about those books because I vehemently disagree with the author's views about trans people and her behaviour surrounding this issue. It was very interesting to me to see a number of plot points and character details in this book that seem to have been lifted almost whole cloth for the Potter novels. I had always known that those books were at least a little derivative of other, earlier works, even when I was a huge, fanfic-writing fan, but this is the first time I've personally discoveredsomething that ends up being very significant in the Potter books that exists in work that predates them.