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tealinA few years ago, when Occupy was doing their thing and their grievances and agenda were in the news, I had this thought:
These are clever, resourceful, idealistic, fit young people in their prime, who evidently don't mind a bit of discomfort to prove a point. If they want to reject the system, why don't they pool their resources, launch a Kickstarter to cover the shortfall, buy some big property somewhere in the back of beyond, and start a self-sufficient cashless community independent of corporations and unfair government?
Then I realised the utopia I was imagining was essentially Redwall.
Before Harry Potter had crested the horizon, Redwall was my obsession. It went beyond an obsession, in fact; at a time when I was a fish miles from water, struggling in an unfriendly school, and otherwise alienated from everyday reality, the Redwall books were my refuge and salvation. I read them over and over, read almost nothing else aside from the books assigned in class, and more or less looked out at the world through Redwall's windows. They gave me somewhere to go that wasn't my own head, and I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had that.
Most of my childhood was spent in places that could not have been further, visually, from the verdant pastoral quasi-medieval world described in the books, so when I moved to the UK I decided I needed to reread them, now I've become more familiar with the architecture and biome described. I was also curious to find out how my perspective on them might have changed in the fifteen years or so since I cracked one open. I can't say I was necessarily expecting anything, but it was curious what I noticed ...
First of all, I now have a much more thorough understanding of the cultural background of the author and the time the series was started. Brian Jacques was a proud working-class Liverpudlian, born during the war, raised with rationing, and writing much later in the era of Margaret Thatcher, who with Ronald Regan and others of their ilk established the privatizing, business-forward, ambition-led, no-such-thing-as-society, militaristic, greed-is-good paradigm of the 80s. Viewed in that light, the conflict between peaceable cooperative non-materialistic woodlanders and the invasive ravaging hordes of predatory animals motivated by desire for wealth, status, and power takes on another dimension. I don't think he was writing with a political agenda in mind, but it's clear what his values were. On a personal level I find it amusing that my dad was so concerned about my NPR addiction being 'liberal brainwashing' when in fact it was the silly little fantasy paperbacks full of talking animals and siege warfare that may have been the greater threat. Live and learn, I suppose.
If I had been expecting anything, it was that I'd find little cultural signifiers of which I'd previously been unaware, now that I'm much more familiar with the people and accents of Britain, but aside from the moles (who didn't need the background of Somerset farmers to be understood, really) and hares (a type familiar to anyone who'd seen a WWII movie) I didn't feel I'd gained all that much new insight ... there were certainly character types which I've come to recognise, but not the sort of package of associations bundled with a regional accent that is such an important feature in, say, the casting of a radio play.
Speaking of radio, though, a new insight I did have was how completely obvious it was that Jacques was a radio guy – every time action was described in the dialogue of observers rather than prose I had a little chuckle.
Something that took me completely by surprise was the role of female characters – when I read the books as a teenager I just took them as given, but with all the fuss lately about male-dominated YA literature and fantasy in particular, it was especially noticeable how much of an equal footing the female characters were given. The hero, of course, is a male, but in the supporting cast you have a range of perfectly competent, strong-willed, pro-active, confident female characters, and none of the males seem to think this is anything but perfectly normal. Some of the more prominent ones:
1. Constance the badger - Dismissed as being 'a bit slow-thinking' by Matthias at the very beginning (in a scene where he's clearly puffing himself up anyway) she turns out to be one of the most thoroughly capable denizens of Redwall, combining clarity, resourcefulness, ferocity, and great physical strength in a loyal and civilised package. Really she ought to have been the Warrior of Redwall when you think about it ... but in a character trait that would have feminists everywhere reaching for their whisky, she'd probably turn down the position because she didn't want the fuss and she'd do the same without the title.
2. Jess Squirrel - Country wife and mother of a child with some sort of developmental delay, Jess kicks butt. When they need someone to climb to the top of the abbey it is she, not her husband, who does it, and gets about it like it's no big deal. Later she's thick as thieves with old soldier Basil Stag Hare and stages an audacious raid on the enemy camp. What does Mr Squirrel do? Cheers on his wife and serves vegetable soup to the defenders.
3. Winifred the otter - as far as I recall the only named otter in the book, called upon to do the ottery things and is a dab hand at the sling and repartee besides.
4. Warbeak Sparra - So totally didn't have to be female but was anyway; a fierce bloodyminded warrior who doesn't hesitate trying to kill the hero when she gets a chance, but eventually befriends him and then becomes fierce bloodyminded Queen of the sparrows and a welcome relief from the dangerously despotic king she replaces.
5. Sela the Vixen - Apparently the only female 'bad guy,' also the only character with the initiative to be a double-agent
6. Guosim - Like Warbeak, also totally didn't have to be female, but was, and is in no way differentiated from the male shrews except in gender of pronoun.
In fact the only female character who's your typical bland-as-toast nice pretty girl is the one who's usually the only female character in a swashbuckling questy sort of fantasy novel, the nominal love interest Cornflower. And if memory serves, she grows a personality and some (not literal) cojones in the sequel, where she has more than a few scenes' screentime.
It's not just that there are so many strong female characters, it's that no fuss is made about the fact. No one is getting on with the arse-kicking despite being female; no one comments that their behaviour is either undesirable or especially commendable because of their sex; there don't seem to be any gendered expectations at all. I understand the point of drawing attention to female achievement as a way to compensate for a biased world, but might it not be just as valuable, subliminally, to offer a world where female equality goes unremarked because it's assumed to be perfectly normal?
Possibly also worth mentioning is the relationship between Squire Julian and Captain Snow, who look an awful lot like the sort of inter-war 'gentlemen friends' whose living arrangements are left discreetly unprobed by friends and relations. I'm not saying ... I'm just saying.
I can't make a flimsy case for transgender representation, though, because Killconey the ferret, who famously switched from male to female without leadup or explanation (save that it was a proofing error) three-quarters of the way through the book, has been corrected in the edition I read. It's a bit anachronistic anyway, in a world with very primitive medicine ...
Sadly the re-reading experience was not as blissful a trip down memory lane as I was kind of hoping it would be ... Redwall itself is a tricky book because the author doesn't really find his groove until a third of the way through, and the worldbuilding that gives the other books in the series such a nice integrity is still a little shaky in this one – it's the only book with any suggestion of a human presence, the relative sizes of the animals are all over the place, and the history of Mossflower Country is a great big unknown. The adventure was grand and it was still pleasingly cinematic (and the set designer has improved a lot since I was 13), but I've been spoiled by an education in screenwriting and more grownup literature that has ideas and stuff in it; Redwall is sweet in its simplicity but it does kind of make me want more out of aspects of the story and characters which are probably not intended for that purpose. I am all in favour of just enjoying a good yarn sometimes so I will let it be, but it did slightly diminish my enjoyment of it on an adult level. But mainly, I think, it's that I don't really need it anymore – I no longer need to hide from the world, in fact I quite enjoy the world I'm living in now, not least because I can get to Mossflower Woods on the Tube.
I have a copy of Mossflower waiting for me, which I'm looking forward to because it's got Martin the Warrior in it and he's a good 'un, but I don't know when I'll get to it because I've got a giant stack of homework that I'm about to get started on ... It'll be good to visit for brain candy on a dark winter night, though. Boy am I ever excited for it to be winter again.
These are clever, resourceful, idealistic, fit young people in their prime, who evidently don't mind a bit of discomfort to prove a point. If they want to reject the system, why don't they pool their resources, launch a Kickstarter to cover the shortfall, buy some big property somewhere in the back of beyond, and start a self-sufficient cashless community independent of corporations and unfair government?
Then I realised the utopia I was imagining was essentially Redwall.
Before Harry Potter had crested the horizon, Redwall was my obsession. It went beyond an obsession, in fact; at a time when I was a fish miles from water, struggling in an unfriendly school, and otherwise alienated from everyday reality, the Redwall books were my refuge and salvation. I read them over and over, read almost nothing else aside from the books assigned in class, and more or less looked out at the world through Redwall's windows. They gave me somewhere to go that wasn't my own head, and I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had that.
Most of my childhood was spent in places that could not have been further, visually, from the verdant pastoral quasi-medieval world described in the books, so when I moved to the UK I decided I needed to reread them, now I've become more familiar with the architecture and biome described. I was also curious to find out how my perspective on them might have changed in the fifteen years or so since I cracked one open. I can't say I was necessarily expecting anything, but it was curious what I noticed ...
First of all, I now have a much more thorough understanding of the cultural background of the author and the time the series was started. Brian Jacques was a proud working-class Liverpudlian, born during the war, raised with rationing, and writing much later in the era of Margaret Thatcher, who with Ronald Regan and others of their ilk established the privatizing, business-forward, ambition-led, no-such-thing-as-society, militaristic, greed-is-good paradigm of the 80s. Viewed in that light, the conflict between peaceable cooperative non-materialistic woodlanders and the invasive ravaging hordes of predatory animals motivated by desire for wealth, status, and power takes on another dimension. I don't think he was writing with a political agenda in mind, but it's clear what his values were. On a personal level I find it amusing that my dad was so concerned about my NPR addiction being 'liberal brainwashing' when in fact it was the silly little fantasy paperbacks full of talking animals and siege warfare that may have been the greater threat. Live and learn, I suppose.
If I had been expecting anything, it was that I'd find little cultural signifiers of which I'd previously been unaware, now that I'm much more familiar with the people and accents of Britain, but aside from the moles (who didn't need the background of Somerset farmers to be understood, really) and hares (a type familiar to anyone who'd seen a WWII movie) I didn't feel I'd gained all that much new insight ... there were certainly character types which I've come to recognise, but not the sort of package of associations bundled with a regional accent that is such an important feature in, say, the casting of a radio play.
Speaking of radio, though, a new insight I did have was how completely obvious it was that Jacques was a radio guy – every time action was described in the dialogue of observers rather than prose I had a little chuckle.
Something that took me completely by surprise was the role of female characters – when I read the books as a teenager I just took them as given, but with all the fuss lately about male-dominated YA literature and fantasy in particular, it was especially noticeable how much of an equal footing the female characters were given. The hero, of course, is a male, but in the supporting cast you have a range of perfectly competent, strong-willed, pro-active, confident female characters, and none of the males seem to think this is anything but perfectly normal. Some of the more prominent ones:
1. Constance the badger - Dismissed as being 'a bit slow-thinking' by Matthias at the very beginning (in a scene where he's clearly puffing himself up anyway) she turns out to be one of the most thoroughly capable denizens of Redwall, combining clarity, resourcefulness, ferocity, and great physical strength in a loyal and civilised package. Really she ought to have been the Warrior of Redwall when you think about it ... but in a character trait that would have feminists everywhere reaching for their whisky, she'd probably turn down the position because she didn't want the fuss and she'd do the same without the title.
2. Jess Squirrel - Country wife and mother of a child with some sort of developmental delay, Jess kicks butt. When they need someone to climb to the top of the abbey it is she, not her husband, who does it, and gets about it like it's no big deal. Later she's thick as thieves with old soldier Basil Stag Hare and stages an audacious raid on the enemy camp. What does Mr Squirrel do? Cheers on his wife and serves vegetable soup to the defenders.
3. Winifred the otter - as far as I recall the only named otter in the book, called upon to do the ottery things and is a dab hand at the sling and repartee besides.
4. Warbeak Sparra - So totally didn't have to be female but was anyway; a fierce bloodyminded warrior who doesn't hesitate trying to kill the hero when she gets a chance, but eventually befriends him and then becomes fierce bloodyminded Queen of the sparrows and a welcome relief from the dangerously despotic king she replaces.
5. Sela the Vixen - Apparently the only female 'bad guy,' also the only character with the initiative to be a double-agent
6. Guosim - Like Warbeak, also totally didn't have to be female, but was, and is in no way differentiated from the male shrews except in gender of pronoun.
In fact the only female character who's your typical bland-as-toast nice pretty girl is the one who's usually the only female character in a swashbuckling questy sort of fantasy novel, the nominal love interest Cornflower. And if memory serves, she grows a personality and some (not literal) cojones in the sequel, where she has more than a few scenes' screentime.
It's not just that there are so many strong female characters, it's that no fuss is made about the fact. No one is getting on with the arse-kicking despite being female; no one comments that their behaviour is either undesirable or especially commendable because of their sex; there don't seem to be any gendered expectations at all. I understand the point of drawing attention to female achievement as a way to compensate for a biased world, but might it not be just as valuable, subliminally, to offer a world where female equality goes unremarked because it's assumed to be perfectly normal?
Possibly also worth mentioning is the relationship between Squire Julian and Captain Snow, who look an awful lot like the sort of inter-war 'gentlemen friends' whose living arrangements are left discreetly unprobed by friends and relations. I'm not saying ... I'm just saying.
I can't make a flimsy case for transgender representation, though, because Killconey the ferret, who famously switched from male to female without leadup or explanation (save that it was a proofing error) three-quarters of the way through the book, has been corrected in the edition I read. It's a bit anachronistic anyway, in a world with very primitive medicine ...
Sadly the re-reading experience was not as blissful a trip down memory lane as I was kind of hoping it would be ... Redwall itself is a tricky book because the author doesn't really find his groove until a third of the way through, and the worldbuilding that gives the other books in the series such a nice integrity is still a little shaky in this one – it's the only book with any suggestion of a human presence, the relative sizes of the animals are all over the place, and the history of Mossflower Country is a great big unknown. The adventure was grand and it was still pleasingly cinematic (and the set designer has improved a lot since I was 13), but I've been spoiled by an education in screenwriting and more grownup literature that has ideas and stuff in it; Redwall is sweet in its simplicity but it does kind of make me want more out of aspects of the story and characters which are probably not intended for that purpose. I am all in favour of just enjoying a good yarn sometimes so I will let it be, but it did slightly diminish my enjoyment of it on an adult level. But mainly, I think, it's that I don't really need it anymore – I no longer need to hide from the world, in fact I quite enjoy the world I'm living in now, not least because I can get to Mossflower Woods on the Tube.
I have a copy of Mossflower waiting for me, which I'm looking forward to because it's got Martin the Warrior in it and he's a good 'un, but I don't know when I'll get to it because I've got a giant stack of homework that I'm about to get started on ... It'll be good to visit for brain candy on a dark winter night, though. Boy am I ever excited for it to be winter again.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-27 04:36 pm (UTC)It is an interesting idea, just not really workable under current systems of taxation.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-27 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-31 04:50 pm (UTC)YES! I couldn't have said it better myself. I think presenting female equality as a given is especially valuable for kids - particularly younger ones - because they don't have as much context to form a gender bias.
I admit I haven't read the books - I only listened to the radio play of the first book, loved it - but I'll have to keep the series in mind to read to my son!
This is Katie by the way. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-10-31 07:16 pm (UTC)