So Mossflower had issues as a prequel that even fourth grade me regarded with some contempt. There were continuity errors. Now, the notion of Canon Above All hadn’t really solidified into its modern form, or if it had, nobody interrupted my efforts to read about swords instead of doing my long division homework to tell me about it. Before Redwall became the defining personal interest that wouldn’t truly peter out until I was a teenager, I’d been a fanatic about the Oz books. If you haven’t dipped into that particular well of early twentieth century nonsense? They have negative continuity.
They’re also delightfully weird and grim as hell. Maybe that’ll be a future deep dive for me. That Return to Oz movie that zillenial youtubers are always complaining about because it’s dark and bizarre? Doesn’t scratch the surface.
The important bit is that I noticed discrepancies with the same pedantic part of my soul that got mad about movie adaptations diverging from the book. But I dimly understood sacrificing perfect cohesion for storytelling, and even the beginnings of the subtle and mature art of not giving a fuck. Mossflower had wildcats for its main villains even though foxes were implicated in Redwall. Whatever, cats are probably cooler. Thematically interesting. That didn’t detract from my enjoyment, though I remained sharply aware of it, because I was a little nerd.
Martin the Warrior has a different problem. As a Redwall book, it’s perfectly functional. There are evil rats and heroic mice and strangely motivated warlords and stabbing. As a self-contained thing, no real complaints. But. But but but.
Meaningless trivia: This was actually the first Redwall book I tried to read! But I was in first or second grade, I think, and I saw the mole accents on the first page and gave up. I’d circle back soon.
This is, I believe, the first book that has a frame story out of time, which would become fairly standard in the golden age of the series. There would often be a sort of in-universe prologue, where a traveler would arrive at the abbey and tell a story, and, generally, this would not really contribute anything. Usually you’d look back to the storyteller at the very end and everyone would say that sure was a story you told but in a fun accent, and that’d be the end.
This one starts around the time of Mariel, when a mysterious weirdo shows up and is like “I know secrets about your founder!” He reports this to whoever is doing the job of sitting in the gatehouse, waiting for travelers to stumble in out of the cold, which is one of the busiest and most significant offices of Redwall. And at the end I think the guy is like related to a character in the story? This struck me as very dramatic as a child but now it feels like Mr. Jacques should have cultivated a more honest relationship with his editor, frankly.
What happens to Martin? By this point, pretty typical stuff! His dad is disappeared (to be addressed in a pretty lifeless pre-prequel in the early 00s, so he and I think some friends get kidnapped and enslaved by pirates. This is a coastal one, so the villains kinda waffle between standard piratical shit and the more bandit band approach of the landlocked baddies. There is a fortress. There is a rebellion of cute, small animals against slightly larger, conventionally less cute animals. There is a battle.
All this would be fine, if not terribly intriguing for anyone over the age of nine. But Martin also gets. A love interest.
Her name is Rose. I think that was maybe short for something? Nessarose or Rosalyn or whatever. Boring-ass, phoned-in, bullshit name. At least Cornflower wasn’t so fuckin hackneyed. There is nothing important about Rose, except she is Doomed by the Narrative. Not in a fun way, but in a “well, we know Martin didn’t have a dull girlfriend mouse in the next book, so…”
Her death is some bullshit, too, let me tell you. I literally missed it the first time I read it. I remember almost no specifics about the plot, but I remember that whiplash. Redwall killed good characters all the time, but it was supposed to be a whole thing. Everyone would stand around and weep, and maybe they’d get some wise last words. Rose dies in the middle of a paragraph from being, uh, thrown against a wall or something?
This is a pitfall of all action writing, if you’re not careful. Marvel movies and wuxia shows and silly fight porn of all kinds runs into this all the time. Characters get dramatically injured all the time and are often barely affected, so when you do land a killing blow, there’s often nothing to differentiate it from everything that came before until a body drops.
So that I can almost forgive, but in retrospect, Rose was my first fridging. Introduced and eliminated without any arc of her own, allowed no personality but a vaguely homely simper, made the main character very briefly sad. Very briefly! Because here we return to my original gripe. Nothing of the Martin the Warrior we know is shaped by any of these events. There’s a line at the end about just not telling anybody about all the dramatics that happened in this book, because no one else would understand the extremely universe-typical angst. It lands with the sound of a moist towel dropped on a gym shower floor.
I don’t remember disliking the bulk of the book. It was an ordinary thing of its kind in most respects. If you were there to read about swordfights as the light faded and the smell of pot roast began to waft up the stairs, you were fine. But there are a lot of little lessons about storytelling, about series, about writing yourself into corners and pretending you haven’t, in among all those long descriptions of turnip pie.
(Anyway I bet nobody has noticed the gradual morphing of this series into mostly a reflection on the nature of narrative with Redwall as a vague springboard as I discover I remember the plots way less than I originally thought I would.)
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