Apologies like the birds in the sky

[sovay]

I have been having an absolutely miserable night, but after venting at length to 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.)

Comments

[sovay]

It's been a long while, but I definitely remember them being kind of disturbing!

The levels of on-the-page violence were definitely high, which in hindsight surprises me although at the time I didn't think much about it, and there was a prevailing tone of deep, weird time and a sort of adventure-story grotesque, which was a feature for me rather than a bug. Like, it is extraordinarily strange to find, in a children's book, a subterranean kingdom deep beneath the ruins of a plague-abandoned, earthquake-swallowed land, built on the labor of child slaves and presided over by a mad albino god-ruler who lives within an immense stalactite statue of himself, but that's the climactic setting of Mattimeo (1989). The only thing that differentiates the Kingdom of Malkariss from something like the eponymous decadent, subterranean realm of Fritz Leiber's "The Lords of Quarmall" (1964) is that Malkariss is a white polecat and does not really practice sorcery, although he certainly has a cult. That's so WTF, I can't hate it. But Outcast didn't even have WTF going for it.

[thisbluespirit]

I certainly remember violence, much more than the batshit stuff which I would have thought would have appealed otherwise; I must have found it too off-putting back in the day. I don't know if I got as far as Mattimeo before my patience ran out or not - they came along a little late for me and soon got very samey. But I was never really into that kind of talking animal thing, really. (I mean, where they wear clothes and have their own societies - they all seem pretty disturbing one way or another and I swore off them all after Redwall and Robin Jarvis. If humans meet a animal that happens to talk, that's fine, of course.)

[sovay]

(I mean, where they wear clothes and have their own societies - they all seem pretty disturbing one way or another and I swore off them all after Redwall and Robin Jarvis. If humans meet a animal that happens to talk, that's fine, of course.)

I have not read Robin Jarvis—I assume it is the same kind of anthropomorphism as opposed to the Richard Adams animals-that-live-like-animals model? The thing that was weirdest for me about Redwall was the way the first book clearly took place in the interstices and hedgerows of our own world, with carts and horses and barn cats and so forth, and then by Mossflower we are clearly in some secondary world populated almost strictly by small mammals and birds. Even in elementary school, I noticed the switch.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, no, they all go in the same boat of nightmare fuel regardless. I blame Beatrix Potter and the (stop-motion) animated Wind of the Willows in early childhood (those weasels were terrifying!), but Watership Down, Redwall, all of them. I have more respect for Richard Adams than something like Redwall, of course, but they still quickly parse as horror to me. I don't think Robin Jarvis's Deptford Mice etc. were clothes-wearers, I think they lived like animals in between human worlds, but they were the last straw in my late teens/early twenties, because they actually were low-level teen horror with rats and mice and at that point I decided No More, No More. :lol:

(I do make an exception for Mrs Frisby. Not that there's not still nightmare fuel in that, too. What is it with authors, furry animals, and terrifying children??)

[alexxkay]

Your talk of children's books with suprising levels of both violence and WTF makes me wonder if you've ever read The Borribles Trilogy? I loved it to death when I was younger, but haven't reread in decades, so it may well have been visited by the suck fairy...

[alexxkay]

Along slightly different lines, I commend this book review to you. The book itself turned out to be more violemt than is to my taste, sadly...

[sovay]

Your talk of children's books with suprising levels of both violence and WTF makes me wonder if you've ever read The Borribles Trilogy?

Yes, although not since I discovered them in college. My memories from that time, however, suggest that the books do not suck.