Apologies like the birds in the sky
I have been having an absolutely miserable night, but after venting at length to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch about Brian Jacques' Outcast of Redwall (1995) I spent at least an hour reading about various mustelids online, including several species (tayra, hog badger, ferret-badger, grison) I hadn't known existed, and I think that was good for me.
(I liked ferrets. I found them clever, beautiful, charming creatures. I had had a stuffed animal black-footed ferret since late elementary school. By the time Outcast came out, I even knew several domestic ferrets in person; they were playful and I did not object to their smell. That was the novel where I realized that Jacques' species essentialism was immutable, and I felt painfully betrayed. I understood the long shadow of The Wind in the Willows, but I couldn't understand how Jacques could miss that his readers would at some point identify with Veil, the orphaned ferret kit adopted into a society of mice and voles and moles—the outsider, the one who feels there's something wrong with them for just being what they are—and then fail to see how it would hurt them to have Veil confirmed as irredeemable, genetically evil after all. He went so far as to give a morally ambiguous character a selfless death scene and then retract it a few chapters later. That ending accomplished what endless recipes for damson and chestnut and Mummerset dialect could not: I burnt out on the series on some deep level and have never even now gone back, despite positive memories of the first four books and their unique combination of cozy talking animals and total batshit weirdness. If you can't appreciate ferrets, I'm out of time for you.)
spatch about Brian Jacques' Outcast of Redwall (1995) I spent at least an hour reading about various mustelids online, including several species (tayra, hog badger, ferret-badger, grison) I hadn't known existed, and I think that was good for me.(I liked ferrets. I found them clever, beautiful, charming creatures. I had had a stuffed animal black-footed ferret since late elementary school. By the time Outcast came out, I even knew several domestic ferrets in person; they were playful and I did not object to their smell. That was the novel where I realized that Jacques' species essentialism was immutable, and I felt painfully betrayed. I understood the long shadow of The Wind in the Willows, but I couldn't understand how Jacques could miss that his readers would at some point identify with Veil, the orphaned ferret kit adopted into a society of mice and voles and moles—the outsider, the one who feels there's something wrong with them for just being what they are—and then fail to see how it would hurt them to have Veil confirmed as irredeemable, genetically evil after all. He went so far as to give a morally ambiguous character a selfless death scene and then retract it a few chapters later. That ending accomplished what endless recipes for damson and chestnut and Mummerset dialect could not: I burnt out on the series on some deep level and have never even now gone back, despite positive memories of the first four books and their unique combination of cozy talking animals and total batshit weirdness. If you can't appreciate ferrets, I'm out of time for you.)
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I would be interested to read your post. The early books were very important to me; I think I must have found them when Mattimeo (1989) was new, because I was in elementary school and I can remember a space of a couple of years when there were only the three books and then Mariel of Redwall (1991) came out and all of a sudden the trilogy was an open-ended series. I drew pages on pages of searats. I had trouble with Jacques' eye dialect. I wondered about making desserts with damson jam. I was disappointed with the young weasel Klitch in Salamandastron (1992) being a charming, treacherous villain who eventually died for his troubles, which I guess should have been a warning sign. And I can't tell if I'd be able to read any of them again. I mean, I might or might not be able to hack the plot formulae or the characterizations, but emotionally, all the other reasons.
A woman at the music school where I took voice lessons in high school had a pet rat which used to ride around on the shoulder of her coat. I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. It was a silky, dusty grey and very friendly; it would sniff delicately at your fingers and then lick them in a sort of casually hopeful fashion, as if just asking for a friend. It had a lot of personality.
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I can't decide if morbid curiosity is enough to lure me into taking another look at the early ones.
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I seem to have the strongest memories of Mossflower, Mattimeo, and Outcast. I remember liking Mariel—it was all high seas and swashbuckling and our heroine renaming herself Storm Gullwhacker, which I still think is a pretty great epithet for a mouse, also I believe at one point there was a fight with a lobster. I retain almost nothing of Martin the Warrior or The Bellmaker.
I can't decide if morbid curiosity is enough to lure me into taking another look at the early ones.
The more I think about Mattimeo, the more it resembles an H. Rider Haggard novel with a lot of mice in. In addition to the abovementioned subterranean kingdom, there's a pine forest inhabited by some unknown species of small animal that paint themselves for camouflage with green and black vegetable dyes and prey on travelers, whom they catch with nooses and pierce with wooden lances and hang their bones from the branches as trophies. (I realize now that this scared me in the same way as the line from the ballad "Anathea": there among the green pines standing / you will find your brother hanging.) They don't speak any known language and they're afraid of fire. Seriously, what was this book?
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I think the only one I still have on my shelf is Mossflower. It was always my favorite, not that this means it has stuck in my memory very well.
Seriously, what was this book?
. . . I have no idea. Pretty sure I read it, but that sounds rather out of whack.
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I remember Mossflower being my favorite of the original three, although the weird bits of Mattimeo appear to have gone into permanent storage.
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The Redwall wiki tells me that they're a loving parody of the Liverpool longshoremen's union. Apart from anything else, I guess now we know how their accents sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIQ7rhW655Y
(not to post mystery links, this is Louisa Jo Killen singing "Bonny Bunch of Roses-O.")
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No, these are encountered by Matthias and company well into their southward pursuit of Slagar and the kidnapped children of Redwall—they have already met up with the Guosim by then. I don't think the text ever identifies them as anything other than "the painted ones." They kill several shrews and almost steal a young otter before our heroes get away from them; Slagar's party suffered similar losses when it passed through the same dark pines. They do not reappear in any of the books I read, although that doesn't preclude Jacques re-using them in a later novel, probably less effectively. In elementary school, because of the bones, I think partly because there never is a real explanation of who or even what they are, they bothered me.
The Redwall wiki tells me that they're a loving parody of the Liverpool longshoremen's union.
Well, I did not pick up on that as a child.
(not to post mystery links, this is Louisa Jo Killen singing "Bonny Bunch of Roses-O.")
Louisa Killen is always welcome in comments.