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Trying to find something distracting to consume hasn't been working overwell, so I reached for something comforting instead and am rereading Mossflower. The book was published in 1988; my copy was published in 1990, but I probably stole it from a Montessori library sometime around 1995. It looks like this, now:
If memory serves, the cover came to me with a small crease (it was in a school library), which developed into a second crease, which tore a couple of years ago; I still use a liberated corner of the cover as a bookmark. Again if memory serves, I think the book has gone with me to two nations, two states, two colleges, and about seven different residences.
And it isn't even that good.
It's comparable to comfort food both because food is a recurrent aspect of the Redwall series and because it doesn't have to be objectively good to be comforting. I actually don't much care for Redwall, the first book in the series: the plot is central to the world's history, but it's distinctly a first attempt and while it contains many of the aspects which would become cornerstone to the series—puzzles, food, dialects, multiple adventures running in parallel—the setting and tone is only half there. In Redwall we know there are humans somewhere, building barns and horsecarts, and suddenly an abbey full of talking mice is ridiculous.
Mossflower is the change into what the series would be. It discards the human world, and without making any more justifications or sense (badgers weigh twenty pounds, a mouse stands three inches tall) the setting becomes far more convincing: talking mice and weasels, get passed it; they're not even weasels, really--species function as a stand-in, problematically, for a group of people. It takes those cornerstones and reiterates them, defining what the series would be from here--but coming early enough in the series that it feels familiar rather than redundant (both in publishing order and upon reread). And it's less insular, showing Mossflower as a place entire rather than a central building, journeying as far as Salamandastron, in a way establishing so much more than Redwall did. Redwall was a practice run, but Mossflower determines the future: it builds the Abbey and the series. And I love that series, I read it while growing up and have almost the entire thing in handsome hardback, I celebrated every new release well into my college years, and Jacques's death in 2011 crushed me because that was the death of my childhood.
All the descriptions of food, the shallow puzzles, the existentialist and/or exaggerated characterization*, are rather glaring to me on this reread, but I find I don't mind them. It's almost nostalgic, to see as an adult what it was that made this book work for me as a child. The hardest books for me to review are those with which I have history, because how to separate that history from the book itself? Mossflower is perfectly competent, utterly decent, not awfully well-written, and I love it to literal pieces—the cover has come right off.
* Except Martin. Martin, man, whose one-word characterization may be "Warrior" but whose character arcs are almost always about the conflict between warring and living: fighting is necessary to protect what he loves, but it divides him from what he loves. That conflict is reiterated in all his stories, but it's so bittersweet and surprisingly gentle—quiet, powerful, lonesome Martin, so eager to accept the first hand extended to him in friendship even though he remembers exactly how that ended last time—that I don't much mind.
If memory serves, the cover came to me with a small crease (it was in a school library), which developed into a second crease, which tore a couple of years ago; I still use a liberated corner of the cover as a bookmark. Again if memory serves, I think the book has gone with me to two nations, two states, two colleges, and about seven different residences.
And it isn't even that good.
It's comparable to comfort food both because food is a recurrent aspect of the Redwall series and because it doesn't have to be objectively good to be comforting. I actually don't much care for Redwall, the first book in the series: the plot is central to the world's history, but it's distinctly a first attempt and while it contains many of the aspects which would become cornerstone to the series—puzzles, food, dialects, multiple adventures running in parallel—the setting and tone is only half there. In Redwall we know there are humans somewhere, building barns and horsecarts, and suddenly an abbey full of talking mice is ridiculous.
Mossflower is the change into what the series would be. It discards the human world, and without making any more justifications or sense (badgers weigh twenty pounds, a mouse stands three inches tall) the setting becomes far more convincing: talking mice and weasels, get passed it; they're not even weasels, really--species function as a stand-in, problematically, for a group of people. It takes those cornerstones and reiterates them, defining what the series would be from here--but coming early enough in the series that it feels familiar rather than redundant (both in publishing order and upon reread). And it's less insular, showing Mossflower as a place entire rather than a central building, journeying as far as Salamandastron, in a way establishing so much more than Redwall did. Redwall was a practice run, but Mossflower determines the future: it builds the Abbey and the series. And I love that series, I read it while growing up and have almost the entire thing in handsome hardback, I celebrated every new release well into my college years, and Jacques's death in 2011 crushed me because that was the death of my childhood.
All the descriptions of food, the shallow puzzles, the existentialist and/or exaggerated characterization*, are rather glaring to me on this reread, but I find I don't mind them. It's almost nostalgic, to see as an adult what it was that made this book work for me as a child. The hardest books for me to review are those with which I have history, because how to separate that history from the book itself? Mossflower is perfectly competent, utterly decent, not awfully well-written, and I love it to literal pieces—the cover has come right off.
* Except Martin. Martin, man, whose one-word characterization may be "Warrior" but whose character arcs are almost always about the conflict between warring and living: fighting is necessary to protect what he loves, but it divides him from what he loves. That conflict is reiterated in all his stories, but it's so bittersweet and surprisingly gentle—quiet, powerful, lonesome Martin, so eager to accept the first hand extended to him in friendship even though he remembers exactly how that ended last time—that I don't much mind.
