Earlier today I suddenly remembered my favorite author from when I was a kid and I had the heartbreaking realization that in the time since then, he could have passed. Brian Jacques passed three years ago, it turns out. Even though I never saw him on tv, never heard his voice, never knew him half as well as many of his other fans, seeing a picture of him like the pictures on the inside cover gave me a warm, comfortable feeling. There was that same familiar pulling feeling in the chest like when I see a picture of my grandparents or my uncle... other emotional figures from early life who are gone now.
I have a lot of memories of the books themselves. Not the stories, but the books. When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher had us all get out the books we were reading so he could read the first paragraph of each out loud, and we'd analyze the tone and how the book drew us in... or didn't. Mine was a Redwall book, and he looked at the cover and then at me like "Aren't you a bit old for this?" But as he read the paragraph aloud, I heard the shift in his voice before pulling the book away and looking at the cover again. Sounding astonished, he said, "I REALLY like the way that author writes." That was the teacher who would later randomly take me aside and tell me how impressed he was with my fearless individuality. I suppose it's worth mentioning that was during my goth phase.
Then a couple of years later when I was well beyond what should have been that stage and, in retrospect, had already gotten addicted to porn by then (I'm sober now)... the younger son of a friend of my mom's wanted to borrow one of my Redwall books for a book report. I really, really, REALLY didn't want to lend it to him, but my mom demanded it and I relented. It was like he had punched me in the face when he returned my book with a huge rip and his own name scrawled in it. My mom thought it would give me a sense of satisfaction for what I did to see the book report he did on it, and all it did was piss me off further when I saw how poorly he wrote and how he essentially just summarized the events of the book without any thought. This prepared me for doing peer-reviews as an adult in community college.
I don't remember why he did, but my dad bought the first Redwall book for me rather spontaneously. We were both amazed by the cover art, and this was long enough ago that I can picture it resting on a blue hutch that hasn't been in my room since I hit "double digits". Every now and then he would buy me the next one in the order of their release, and before long I had a collection of about a dozen brilliantly covered fantasy books about mice with swords.
That is what is amazing about the Redwall books. Like most children's books, the stories and premises are completely absurd; but they were painted so well with words that rather than absurd, it was a completely immersive and enchanting experience to read them. As an adult, I can't even watch a fantasy movie without rolling my eyes; I feel embarrassed just hearing about details of Game of Thrones. But as a skeptical kid, I was absorbed into books about talking animals well past an age when one would expect a kid to be interested in such things. Well into the era of MTV and attraction to boys, I was still picking up books with badgers in body armor on the cover.
Looking at the covers of these books brings back vivid mental images of scenes in my head. I could never watch the cartoon show based on the series; it would never stand up against the illustrations in my head. The world of Redwall is painted in my memory as a a colorful pencil sketch, much like the covers. Everything has a comfort, a freshness, a familiarity that would be far too painstaking to replicate in animation. Ever. And this from someone obsessed with animation.
Earlier this evening, I reread a story book of Jonah illustrated by Kurt Mitchell; it also features a mouse, in this case filling the role of Jonah. I remembered the illustrations, the feelings they gave me; there was a sad longing at the end, at the sepia illustration of Jonah the mouse walking away from me at the end of his journey. There can be a small heartbreak when a book ends.
Something in me aches when I look at these books. The stash of Little Golden Books we had at the beach house that I'd get my mom to read when I wasn't ready to fall asleep in the house that was always scary to me for reasons I still don't quite understand. The blue copy of The Phantom Toll Booth that my sister got at a reading festival and that she read aloud to me, and how it was later the first chapter book I ever read cover to cover. The first three Harry Potter books, which I grudgingly started reading years after they became popular because I couldn't believe my peers were capable of liking anything that I would.
There are Redwall books that I haven't read, ones that were released once I moved on to classic novels and memoirs. Those books don't have to be over for me, and I still own all my copies. I'm a little scared to pick any up... I don't want to risk altering the memories I have of them. Maybe one of these days I'll treat myself to one of the new ones and give it a try. Perhaps I can take one overseas on my upcoming trip, where maybe nobody has enough context to wonder if that adult woman reading about Celtic warrior squirrels is mentally deficient.
Who am I kidding, I'd take the outside cover off. Not out of shame, but to preserve it.
