Before I launch into this book, I am announcing a slight amendment to the challenge. I said I wouldn’t look at any summaries or character lists, and I’m not changing that because it is funny. I am, however, going to allow myself to look at the map. This is partly because if I don’t, several of these will be a paragraph long as I won’t recall anything at all about some of the later books. But mostly because Redwall maps are a very particular genre of art.
I had the official, full-color one from The Redwall Map and Riddler hung on my wall for many years. I hung it up over a handwritten copy of The Warrior’s Code, on looseleaf, which I stained with tea and signed in blood. Why did I do this? Because shut up. I may still know The Warrior’s Code by heart.
The official map was massive and totally nonsensical. It was only accurate up to like, Marlfox or so, had no sense of scale whatsoever, and included random one-off locations with the same solemnity as major recurring motifs. But each book had its own map. These days I have to confess I often flip right past the ponderous cartography that fronts a nice secondary world fantasy, and only refer back to it if it feels important, but oh, I stared at those maps. They were such gloriously clumsy beauties. Most of them served the same purpose fantasy maps generally do, letting you follow the rambling journeys of the quest-oriented characters and fancy yourself part of the adventure.
Mattimeo has an utterly bonkers map, as follows:
Nothing about this is remotely helpful. It’s like. A list of biomes. This is, arguably, a map. It’s the territory our heroes will cross. But. As presented? It conveys no information. (There’s the bit about the bell, the badger’s head, and the lord of Mossflower. They’re some rocks and trees and you have to solve a riddle to understand that they are trailmarkers, I think. And the compass that says “thorn” and “shout” is, I’m pretty sure, just an anagram for north and south. These are the riddles, folks.) Masterful in its surreal simplicity. I would absolutely get this as a tattoo.
Okay, so, plot. Mattimeo is about Matthias and Cornflower’s titular son, who has exactly the same personality as his dad, and will eventually marry some girl mouse named after a plant and have his own son with exactly the same personality. This is the spirit of Martin the Warrior at work and not just that writing an interesting protagonist is hard.
The book opens on a feast, because feasting is actually the only thing there is to do at Redwall that isn’t riddles or war. There are some sumptuous descriptions of food that will make you very hungry, even though you are an eight year old Midwestern USian child and if someone gave you a turnip pie you would actually die. (Just me?) Then some traveling players show up and do a cool show.
Hey remember how I mentioned in the last entry that these books are low-key kinda racist? Yeah, there’s a lot of G-slur here as well. No reason for it. Just included because old British guy.
I guess the abbey dwellers can be forgiven for not perceiving this as a problem, because it’s only the third book and the pattern has not been established, but the traveling players are all rats and weasels, and their leader is a fox named Slagar. So. They are evil. The villains of the first two books have just kinda wanted riches and power and security for their followers, which is straightforward and fairly understandable. These guys? These guys wanna kidnap babies to drag away into underground slavery in a weird cult! It feels like a bit of an escalation!
So they drug everybody at the feast, and for good measure do some hypnosis. (Vague psychic powers are the most concretely identifiable magic in this universe. So many vague psychic powers.) There’s some light murder as a few Redwallers didn’t drink the poisoned toast and attempt to save the stolen children. Like I said, the evil kinda gets out of hand right away on this one. Mattimeo, two of his friends (one his future love interest) and I think several other baby animals too indistinct for me to remember get kidnapped.
A squad of heroes assembles, including Matthias, Basil Stag Hare, Warbeak the Sparrow, and some other people. Maybe Constance the Badger? Or she might stay back at the abbey. Here I must confess, there is probably a B plot to this book and I do not remember it at all. Most Redwall books had at least two main storylines, sometimes more. Usually they ran in parallel, but because the books were also divided into volumes, sometimes you’d do all of one at once, or jump back and forth in time. It was honestly pretty ambitious for the format and age group. And, now that I think about it, possibly responsible for my weird inability to write anything longform from a single POV.
One of the plots was almost always defending the abbey from some kind of horde. This could be a pretty minor plotline, and on at least one occasion a complete anticlimax, but there was almost always some holding of the fort to conduct. If the main action of the book predated the founding of Redwall, you could have the base plot be set in Salamandastron or something. The second plot was usually some variety of quest, and the quests had the range. Sometimes they were straight up just for a macguffin, like the sword rigmarole from Redwall, but you could be rescuing somebody, seeking allies, escaping somebody, etc. Sometimes the quest started at Redwall, but just as often it would end there.
This is a long-winded way of saying I’m pretty sure there was something going on back in the abbey in this book, but I couldn’t tell you what. There was some nonsense about a torn map and a riddle, thus the silly stuff on our map above, and maybe solving that was all they did back at the abbey. Riddles could pop up in both home base and quest plotlines, often at the same time.
We got a lot of scenes of the baby animals being sad about being abducted and occasionally attempting to escape with their ragtag friends. The book made a weird fuss about how Mattimeo was growing up and into his own as he tried to protect his buddies, and even as a kid I was like “but he is a child.” A mouse child, but still. The questing heroes fight a lot of bad guys and face a lot of natural hazards.
I’ll be honest, this one was very exciting to read because I was small and silly, but the bulk of the book was very Two Towers. A long chase of facing perils. I remember Warbeak dies because she was cool, but not how or when or if it mattered. Eventually the evil slavers get to their destination, and the rescuers are close behind! It’s all very exciting!
The child slave caravan reports to a horrible underground snake cult kinda place where a spooky statue gives commands and terrorizes a bunch of child slaves. It’s so absolutely a little kid’s idea of what evil means. Flawless end to a dungeon crawl, y’know? Anyway, there’s
a battle when the rescue arrives, most of the baddies die, it eventually turns out that there’s just a guy inside the statue. The guy is a polecat and that sounded so cool. I was very disappointed when I found out a polecat as basically a skunk. Evil cult leader skunk.
Here we hit one of the few legitimate twists in the whole Redwall series. It may have been revealed much earlier, but whatever. The evil fox wears a spooky mask, and underneath his face is all scarred up. He... is actually the same evil fox from the first book! The one who didn’t die, just got real fucked up on account of snakebite! The whole child abduction to a subterranean skunk cult? His revenge on Redwall for, uh, not preventing his and his mother’s suffering that was mostly their own fault or inflicted on them by Cluny the Scourge and/or a big snake.
...Look, it was a pretty good twist at the time. I was eight. Skunk cult!
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