If you’ve got kids of the right age, you’ve probably heard of
Redwall; not only is it a popular and still growing
series, but the first book was made into a PBS TV show. That’s
where David first encountered it, and he was too excited for
words to find out that we actually had a copy of the book for
me to read to him. It took us the tail end of September, all of
October, and the first few days in November, but by golly we
did it.

A quick plot summary: the peaceful mice of Redwall Abbey are
known all over the countryside for their willingness to help others.
But an evil rat, Cluny the Scourge, is coming with his horde; he wants
to take Redwall Abbey for his castle. The Abbey was founded in part by
the great warrior mouse Martin, who defended it and then pledged himself
to peace. Now a young mouse, Matthias, must find Martin’s armor and
sword, and take up arms to defend Redwall as Martin did. So it’s about
knights and armor and derring do and battles and brave scouting missions;
it’s a coming of age story, naturally; and since it’s written for kids
there’s lots of good stuff about the importance of forgiveness and
turning enemies into friends. Martin succeeds, of course, and a great
celebration is enjoyed by all.

I find I need to approach this review from two points of view,
David’s, and my own.

David loved it. He was thrilled. I couldn’t possibly have had a
better audience. If Redwall the novel has any faults,
David was immune to them.

Now, my point of view. I bought our copy of Redwall
some years ago; I often like kid-lit if it’s done well. I liked it,
with caveats, but didn’t feel at all motivated to by any of the
other books in the series.

Nothing about this reading changed my mind. The writing isn’t great.
The prose frequently edges into the purple; a good editing could make
it a much cleaner, crisper read. The plot is rather contrived.
The quest for Martin’s sword involves hints which require Martin to
have been seriously prophetic, for which no decent explanation is given.

The laws of physics get stretched in a cartoon-like way far more often
than I like. And no, I’m not being overly critical here. It’s one thing
if the laws of physics are stretched by magic–that’s part of the story.
So are talking mice who live in an abbey. But in this case, they are
simply stretched to make the story work properly.

I can almost hear the author saying, “Yeah, that’s implausible, but the
kids won’t care.”

And he’s probably right a lot of the time. But I think that books for
younger readers must play fair and follow the rules. The author is
free to set the rules; and one of the rules for Redwall is
that it’s a world more or less like our own. The rules of physics apply.
To break them just to make the story come out is an insult to the readers
and an unwarrantable liberty on the author’s part–the more so as
(given its vocabulary) Redwall is clearly aimed at the teen
market. These kids are smart enough to notice these things.

It doesn’t really read-aloud well, either (most flaws are at their most
visible when read aloud), and it doesn’t break up into nice chunks for
for bedtime reading. You finish a chapter with Matthias in a serious
cliffhanger, and it doesn’t get resolved until a full chapter later, for
example. Plus, the chapter lengths vary widely. I can’t really criticize
these last two points so much, though, as it just reflects that
Redwall is really a book for much older kids.

Now, there’s a lot to like here as well. The plot is fine, and the
storytelling was adequate. I wasn’t writhing in bored horror as I read
the tale to Dave. Jacques clearly accomplished what he set out to do.
But I really wish the writing was better and the solutions a little
less strained.

I believe this was Jacques’ first book; it may be that his writing
improves in the subsequent volumes. I have every reason to expect that
I’ll find out…but it’s with a sigh of relief that I remember that
we’ll be starting Prince Caspian tomorrow night.

This book is a popular survey of Mayan archaeology, with the decipherment
of Mayan writing being the uniting theme. The topic may sound dry, but
the book isn’t–because it’s really the story of people. It’s the tale
of the Mayans themselves, of course, but even more of the wide and varied
cast of characters who have studied them over the last five-hundred years.
And unlike the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was
accomplished (with the help of the Rosetta Stone) by the great
Champollion in two busy years, the decipherment of the Mayan script took
many strange turns and odd directions courtesy of the many strange and
odd people who have studied it.

It’s a surprisingly engaging tale–this is my second time through it, in
fact. I learned quite a bit about the Mayans, dispelling quite a few
myths, but also about language and writing systems in general (by the
end, our alphabet alphabet seems a thing of wonder).

It’s also something of a cautionary tale about trends in academia. The
Old Guard in Mayan Archaeology had decided that Mayan script was
“ideographic”, that is, that each glyph corresponded to a particular
idea, rather than to any particular word. The same has often been said
of Egyptian writing, and Chinese as well, and it turns out that it’s
hogwash. Every writing system known encodes spoken language, and every
writing system known has a phonetic component. In Mayan script, for
example, a jaguar’s head might be used to mean “jaguar”, but it might be
used purely for the sound of the word “jaguar” as part of another word.
If we wrote English the way the Mayans wrote their language, we might use
a glyph that looked like a cat to mean “cat”, but also as the first sound
in “catapult”, “cattle”, “category”, and so forth.

This has been known to be true for Egyptian, for example, since the
mid-nineteenth century; the Old Guard’s ideas were 50 years out of date
even at the beginning of this century. And although the first successful
phonetic decipherment of Mayan script was done in 1952, it was thirty
years before that small beginning was able to blossom and bear
fruit–largely because the staunchest member of the Old Guard was dead
by then.

Anyway, it’s a cool book. There’s a second edition out, with more
pictures than I’ve got in mine; I should probably find a copy.

This is the fifth book of Flint and Drake’s “Belisarius” series, now
finally available in softcover; I reviewed its four predecessors last
fall. For those who’ve joined us since then, it’s an alternate history
series with a fun but goofy premise. Evil people from the far future
have sent an artificially-intelligent computer called “Link” to Earth in
the days of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I and his highly-competent general
Belisarius. Link’s goal, naturally, is to so adjust Earth’s history that
its creators ultimately end up on top of the kind of world they like.
Pursuant to this, Link has caused the founding of the Malwa Empire in
India. The goal of the Malwa empire, naturally, is to take over the
world in the most brutal and inhuman way possible, all under the
guidance of Link. This is a series with White Hats and Black Hats, and
the Black Hats (with the exception of a few misguided souls who
eventually come ’round) are very Black indeed. It’s not enough for them
to have evil ends; they must have despicable means as well.

On the other side you’ve got General Belisarius and his happy, jovial
crew of soldiers of all kinds. Belisarius is accompanied by another
visitor from the far future, the crystalline entity called “Aide”.
Unlike the inhuman, emotionless machine-entity Link, Aide is funny,
sarcastic, and caring by turns–but Aide is equally determined to see
Link fail. Naturally, both Link and Aide give advanced technology and
tactical tips to their teams. The difference is, of course, that fascist
Link wishes to control the flow of information whereas Aide is happy to
give Belisarius and his followers anything they can possibly use.

Unsurprisingly, competence, good humor, and the free flow of ideas is
going to triumph over evil totalitarianism, and this is book in which we
begin to see it happen. Like it’s predecessors, it’s a rollicking good
time; the good guys beat the bad guys six ways from Sunday, the villains
get theirs in suitably ironic fashion, and so on and so forth–though
there are some surprises.

There will be at least one more book in the series, in which Link and the
Malwa Empire will presumably be destroyed; it’s to be called
The Dance of Time.

If this sounds like anything you’d enjoy reading, I think you’ll enjoy it
quite a bit. I did.