Doomwyte (Redwall #20) Book

I picked the audiobook up at the Library. I loved the Redwall books as a middle-schooler, so mostly I picked this up to see if my tastes back then were any good. I can see why I liked them. They are very well crafted stories, easy to follow, but have a lot of fun and "exciting" twists and turns. Mostly Brian Jacques sticks to a very narrow story pattern which is repeated in every book. This isn't all bad, he does it well and so its perhaps good that he sticks with what he knows.

The biggest criticism of these books I have is that they are racist. It is fantasy after all and set in a different world with different rules so maybe its okay to be racist when dealing with animals. When I say racist, I mean that race defines if you are good and bad, and you cannot change that - you are born that way. Thus, mice, rabbits, etc. are basically good. This is actually kind of a strange concept for me. Imagine a people who have the inability to perform evil, or at least, great evil. They do make small mistakes, but they simply cannot do really bad things. A mouse could never kill another mouse. Rats, on the other hand, have the inability to actually be good and do great good. Again, they can slip up for a bit and do some good things, even join the Abbey for a bit like in Outcast of Redwall, but they cannot fully embrace good.

If this "anthropology" (or rodentology)were actually true, our stories would be much different. In the Bible, there are distinctions between the righteous and the wicked, but they are more fluid. Wicked can become righteous, and righteous can become wicked. Israel as a whole is the most obvious example. They start out as God's chosen people - you don't get more righteous than that. Then, they kill the son of God and God rejects that race in favor of another race - the gentiles. Or, on a more individual level, we could take Abraham. A righteous man, yet, he doesn't seem to mind prostituting his wife with Pharaoh. Or take Aaron. He is the mouthpiece of Moses and high priest - and then builds a golden calf (or did that just pop out of the fire?). Or take Moses. The most humble man in the world, but he still gets angry and hits the rock really hard.

The Bible has a much more nuanced picture of the good guys and the bad guys than the Redwall stories. One might say that the Redwall stories are for kids, so its good to simplify things for them. That is true, as long as the simplifications do not distort the truth. We can teach our kids that Abraham was righteous, that Moses was awesome, that David was a great. And that Cain was evil, and Manassah was horrible, and that Ham was cursed. This is all true. But there are other stories where Abraham was stupid, Moses was disobedient, and David was sinful. In Redwall, these other stories do not exist. Given that there are now 20 books in this series and that each book is considerably large, they are too big to be over-simplified. I think that this defect creates a false view of reality.