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A review by alexandrabree
Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques
4.0
The layers hidden within the pages of these books, the writing leaves me in amazement every time. I read this series for the first time 20 years ago now.
Badrang and his castle are one kind of tyrant. Captain Clogg and his crew are an adjacent, very similar kind of tyrant. You have the savage banal evil of the lizards and the wild malace of the squirrels. The inflexible warden (who is in the vein of institutional evils, think of Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter)
You have the horrors of being a slave, and the complexity of those who have escaped risking recapture to free the others. It is a kind of heroism that can easily be overlooked, I think people like to say and would like to think they would go back and save others, however it is far more likely 9/10 would have just run off to save themselves. The Troup who could have simply packed up and left but chose to help.
We have the hero figure of Martin and the tortured revenge figure of Feldo. They are two sides of the same coin. We always have that glimpse of it being better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war in Redwall novels, and I love that.
We have redemption arcs in the shrews who keep slaves but treat them better than the vermin, and allow not just Martin and his traveling companions but also Pal his freedom when earned. They also later come to help in the final battle.
The characters are all so fully developed and complex, and dynamic. These characters feel real, which is something sorely lacking in a lot of more modern fiction. Everything feels much more movie ready, crowd palletable, clichéd, troped, and structured in the past 5-10 years. Hunger games, divergent, lunar chronicles, all good, but it's the difference between a store bought cake and cake at a bakery/Cafe in Paris.
Badrang and his castle are one kind of tyrant. Captain Clogg and his crew are an adjacent, very similar kind of tyrant. You have the savage banal evil of the lizards and the wild malace of the squirrels. The inflexible warden (who is in the vein of institutional evils, think of Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter)
You have the horrors of being a slave, and the complexity of those who have escaped risking recapture to free the others. It is a kind of heroism that can easily be overlooked, I think people like to say and would like to think they would go back and save others, however it is far more likely 9/10 would have just run off to save themselves. The Troup who could have simply packed up and left but chose to help.
We have the hero figure of Martin and the tortured revenge figure of Feldo. They are two sides of the same coin. We always have that glimpse of it being better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war in Redwall novels, and I love that.
We have redemption arcs in the shrews who keep slaves but treat them better than the vermin, and allow not just Martin and his traveling companions but also Pal his freedom when earned. They also later come to help in the final battle.
The characters are all so fully developed and complex, and dynamic. These characters feel real, which is something sorely lacking in a lot of more modern fiction. Everything feels much more movie ready, crowd palletable, clichéd, troped, and structured in the past 5-10 years. Hunger games, divergent, lunar chronicles, all good, but it's the difference between a store bought cake and cake at a bakery/Cafe in Paris.