Book Review 2025 #7 - Brian Jacques's Redwall
Redwall by Brian Jacques
Published by: Philomel Books
Publication Date: October 23rd, 1986
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
The festivities at Redwall Abbey are underway for Abbot Mortimer's Golden Jubilee. It is the Summer of the Late Rose and the abbey has been blessed with peace and abundance. As the inhabitants scurry about with last minute preparations there's Matthias, tumbling cowl over tail, scattering the hazelnuts. Oh how he longs to be graceful and brave like Martin the Warrior, the founder of Redwall Abbey, whose tales of derring-do have always transported him. But as the Abbot tells Matthias, we are now an order of peace. The time of Martin and his famous sword and shield are over. The Abbey is a place of happiness and refuge as all the denizens of Mossflower Woods arrive to celebrate the Abbot. But that night a horrific scene unfolds on the road outside the Abbey walls that Matthias and Constance the Badger witness. A large Portuguese water rat and his army are on the road. They were astride a demented horse and cart. A council is called that night. The rumors of Cluny the Scourge seem to be true. He is the worst kind of warlord and the Abbey has to be prepared because it doesn't look as if Cluny is just passing through. He has set up camp at the Church of St. Ninian's and has his eye on the Abbey. It would be the perfect seat for his empire, Cluny's Castle. Plus the mice will surely just hand it over to him without a fight. They're just little mice, he has a rat army! Little does Cluny know that while they are a peaceful order now they were founded by a true warrior and they will protect those who need protecting. When Cluny arrives at Redwall Abbey with the articles of surrender that all his conquests must abide by he is shocked by their iron will and then terrified by a tapestry of Martin the Warrior. Cluny is transfixed by the image of Martin as he is the shadowy figure that has been haunting the rat's dreams. Shaken, the rats leave the Abbey to regroup. And then Cluny attacks by stealth and steals the tapestry, at once capturing the object of his nightmares while trying to demoralize the mice by removing the effigy of their protector. He underestimated the mice, Redwall prepares to protect itself at any cost, even war. As Matthias bemoans to Brother Methuselah, if only they had Martin the Warrior's sword and shield they might stand a chance against the Scourge. But Methuselah tells Matthias that the young mouse is so like Martin that perhaps, given the clues built into the very Abbey walls, that these totems can be recovered and used to spur them on to victory. Though a sword is, in the end, just a sword, and it's the true warriors that will win the day.
I learned about Brian Jacques's Redwall series at Christmas in 1993. Friends of our family who always gave me and my brother books for Christmas got him Martin the Warrior. This was the first time I saw a sword wielding rodent on the cover of a book under Brian Jacques's name, but it would certainly not be the last. As my mother started as a grade school librarian at my old school when I started high school her job was to keep up with the trends, and the biggest trend was Redwall. Our local bookstore had a wall dedicated to Brian Jacques just as you entered on the left hand wall and that was usually the first stop when stocking up on books for the school library. The thing about each and every one of these books is they are just beautifully done, the covers, the chapter art, even if you've never read them or plan to read them, you covet them for your bookshelves. All twenty-two of them in the end. I finally got around to reading Redwall for the first time in 2000, my guess is that the added exposure from the the television series made me finally bite the bullet. I enjoyed it enough to read the second book, Mossflower, which, as I found out, was not the sequel. But if you're a fan of this series you know there are multiple flowcharts and timelines to study if you really want to do a deep dive. Picking this book up again a quarter century later I was enchanted by it. Sure, there's a lot of death, but there's this comradery, just a whole bunch of people coming together and defeating the baddie without dissension while also having amazing vegetarian cuisine. This was just the right book at the right time to make me feel good and cozy while also wanting to topple tyranny. Though I think I'm the exact audience for this book, it was written in the eighties and released when I was eight, so it fully embraces the traumatize your child vibe that us eighties kids know so well. It's The Secret of NIMH meet Cadfael meets The Name of the Rose, whose star-studded adaptation came out the same year in wonderful synchronicity. A comfort despite all the death and destruction, which I think anyone who has watched The NeverEnding Story ad infintum knows aren't mutually exclusive feels. Though this one has more of a human element than later volumes, which Jacques says was intentional. But I still would love a deep dive on where the hell the idea for Basil Stag Hare came from. Is he a time traveler from WWII? I mean, I love animals thinking they're secret agents and spies, the foxes in the Rivers of London series being the prime example, but for a pseudo medieval world this was just weird. But I like weird, so we're all good.
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