Confession, I accidentally cheated a little bit. I was talking Redwall with a friend on account of this series, wanted examples of some of the accents, and went and pulled the first book I saw off the shelf. I did not realize that this was, in fact, the next one chronologically and therefore up in my series, here, and I inadvertently jogged my memory a very little bit just flipping through the first chapters in search of mole and hare dialogue.
Also, that book sure smelled like it hadn’t been opened in twenty years. As I mentioned in the Mariel rundown, I find I cannot reread these with fond nostalgia. Other books I hyperfixated on in childhood, Oz, Freddy the Pig, I can pull out if I need to just fully relax and turn into a content fungus for a bit. Redwall? These things do not make a lick of sense if you are more than eleven years old. The front cover is full of ecstatic blurbs, and I cannot fathom how all these adults read the books. Maybe they gave them to a third grader and asked for a summary.
This is one of my signed books. Brian Jacques came through town (well, a suburb over) on his American tour with the release of Triss. I place Triss firmly past Redwall’s prime, based on the strongly held opinions of a self I no longer remember, and was a freshman or sophomore in high school. I knew it wasn’t for me anymore, but I honored that past highly, and cradled the lonely child I had been, terrified to lose something loved. I mean, I had friends by high school, but the scars remain, you know?
My dad insists Mr. Jacques was drunk as a skunk during his talk about believing in yourself and having imagination, and he asked if my also 14-15 year old friend was my husband, so maybe he was, but I got Triss signed, and I read it like an elf about to fade and go into the west.
And Salamandastron, because you were allowed to get two signed and it was the first one I could put my hands on before I went to school that morning. It was a shitty, aged mass-market paperback even then, and having sat on that shelf a few decades, well, it’s a fucking relic. Firmly in the good era, though. (My personal reckoning of the good Redwall books goes up to Marlfox. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the passage of time. It’d be fascinating to see the correlation between Redwall fans’ reckonings of the last good one and what year they turned twelve.)
I may have breathed a little too much twenty year old paperback dust. Ahem.
I do not remember the abbey plotline of this book at all. The map here fails to rattle anything loose.
As discussed at length in the Mattimeo segment, Redwall books usually had two main plotlines. Sometimes they shared page-space and prominence fairly equitably, sometimes one stole the show, but there would be something going on at the abbey and a questy thing elsewhere. The abbey would generally be defending itself from some sort of attack or solving a series of riddles, often simultaneously. The quest was more of a wildcard. You could start somewhere else and quest toward the abbey in search of knowledge or fulfillment or a cool object, you could quest from the abbey to rescue kidnapped individuals or regain a neat weapon, you could be following the path laid out by a riddle in literally any direction. The quest lines had the advantage of new scenery, which you’d think would be a limiting factor, but there was apparently no end of secret knowledge and weird treasures hidden behind tapestries, secret passages, and riddles back at home base.
So yeah there’s a plot at the abbey, prolly, I do not know what it was.
The plot I do recall, unsurprisingly, was set at Salamandastron, or at least began there. Badgers in Redwall were… weird. You never met a badger who was just a guy. No badgers who were friendly farmers or whatever. Almost all of them were either the badgermother of Redwall, or were, had been, or were about to become rulers of Salamandastron. (You could retire from one of these positions to another.) There seemed to be no general population of badgers, and you’d assume they reproduced by budding if there weren’t a few parent-child pairings scattered around. Very few! Badgers who had a backstory beyond being implacable warriors for justice usually had dead parents for tragedy points.
This book follows one of those lucky few, the daughter of the lord of Salamandastron, and I don’t remember her name, sorry. She has a hare sidekick, and hares were always my favorite character, but he had a name like a joke Wodehouse character so I don’t remember that either. Their whole deal was they made friends with a weasel. A. Sexy weasel. I do not know what to do with this information, but we’re told repeatedly that this weasel (actually he might have been a stoat or something, some mustelid) had beautiful blue eyes and a charming manner. I think a fur snake would look kinda weird with blue eyes, but what do I know? This was about the thirstiest the Redwall books ever got. Son of a scary warlord weasel, the handsome blue-eyed boy seduces both of them into, uh, believing he is friendly and nice, and then his father’s horde attacks Salamandastron and the newly disillusioned badger girl and hare boy have to flee in search of help, and if they map’s anything to go by they bop around a while and then eventually save the day.
So yeah, the relevant part of this book is definitely sexy weasel. I read/heard somewhere that Jacques was trying something daring-for-him, by suggesting that evil might seem enticing and beautiful, and you shouldn’t just attribute goodness to familiarity and charisma. Which would be a cool lesson if it weren’t nested firmly in the biological determinism of this universe that meant that sexy weasel was doomed to be evil because he was a weasel. The cognitive dissonance? Delicious. What the fuck was wrong with this man. No wonder every Redwall fancying child took about ten minutes to come up with their own OC do not steal ferret/fox/ermine who’s a good guy and very cool.
But now I’m hung up on the promise of the original premise! The warlord’s son trying to corrupt two best friends while also planning to overthrow the fortress they’re heir to? There’s a sword and sorcery revival going. Hm.
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