Rereading Redwall on its 40th Anniversary
(Note: this article is reprinted with permission from The Better Reader, where you can find book reviews, literary criticism, and encouragement in the reading life from Ellen Andrews, whose work we love and highly recommend. Subscribe today at thebettereader.substack.com.)
Forty years ago today, Brian Jacques published Redwall, the first in a series of children’s fantasy novels that now spans 22 titles in 28 different languages, selling 30 million copies worldwide.
Those familiar with these books can take this as an excuse to revisit the titular first installment with fondness, as I was lucky enough to do this summer on a camping trip with my son. Those unfamiliar with Redwall should take this as a challenge to go and read it out loud to a child in your life immediately.
I read Redwall and other books in the series growing up, though I have not read all 22 installments. My parents gave it to me along with my first reading lamp. I can still remember the vanilla smell of the pages as I stayed up late in bed reading. It was the most dramatic book I had ever read; I must have been around twelve.
This summer, I read it to my son on our first ever father-son camping trip to Lake Leo in the Colville National Forest in Northeastern Washington state. My son is five. In between our attempts to fish with his Spiderman fishing rod, which we had bought at Walmart specially for the occasion, we lounged around the campsite and read—at the picnic table, in the tent, in the hammock, by the lake.
We read about talking forest animals, mostly mice, badgers, squirrels, and moles, that live harmoniously in Redwall Abbey, helping those in need and enjoying the good life. Hallmarks of the good life in this book include good friends, good jokes, good songs, good food, and the awareness and freedom to participate in it all. We also read about a horrible rat, Cluny the Scourge, the largest, meanest bilge rat ever to set foot on land, named for his barbed and whip-like tail, who comes to Mossflower Wood with a villainous horde of bad animals—mostly rats, stoats, weasels, and foxes. Cluny has one goal: to take the abbey, enslave its good people, and rule as a tyrant.
We read about a small restless mouse, a novitiate named Matthias, who dreams of adventure even as he trips over his own sandals. He answers the call to defend the abbey and goes questing for the sacred weaponry of a warrior. My son was enthralled. (So was I.)
As we read we watched the forces of evil routed time and time again. In fact, Cluny is never closer to his goal than at the beginning of the story, when he first arrives at the abbey in arrogance to demand Redwall’s unconditional surrender. What follows is a tale brimming with battle, intrigue, and the total and complete triumph of good over evil.
We didn’t catch many fish. Decades later, it still seems to me to be one of the most dramatic books I have ever read.
Critics may say that a story where the good guys always beat the bad guys only sets kids up for a rude awakening when they come face to face with the real world. But here I offer the advice of C.S. Lewis in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: “Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.”
Make no mistake: Cluny is at large. Scanning the headlines today, we often get an eyeful of impending doom. It’s hard to see how things can ever be made right, let alone what we can do to help at all. We need Jacques’ vision now more than ever. We need to cultivate Matthias the warrior.
Fans will know that Jacques originally wrote the story for the children he volunteered to read aloud to at the Royal School for the Blind in Liverpool, which is why the stories are so full of rich description. Aren’t we lucky he did?
We’re all a little blind sometimes, after all. And that’s why we need to read and reread books like Redwall. To remember that good does conquer evil in the end, and to remember how glorious it is when the small confound the mighty.
Aaron Andrews is the director of programs at Young Voices, a talent agency helping the next generation of classical liberal writers find their voice. He’s based in Spokane, Washington.
