When reports first came that Cluny the Scourge and his army were coming, Matthias Mouse was a novice at Redwall Abbey, tripping over his oversized sandals and wishing for an opportunity to be like Martin the Warrior, the mouse fighter memorialized in the ancient tapestry in the Great Hall, who protected the Abbey when it was first founded. By the time the giant, terrifying rat and his rat, stoat, and ferret army arrived, Matthias was starting to become a military strategist, and along with the badger Constance, he organized the mice and woodland creatures around the abbey into a defense force. The first attack by Cluny failed, and he retired to the nearby St. Ninian’s church to plot the next move.
The next move was a stealth attack to cut out Martin from the tapestry and steal it, to demoralize the mice who were depending on Martin’s help. Matthias was warned in a dream, but arrived just as the thief finished. The thief died falling off the wall, but the waiting Cluny took the tapestry and left, before Matthias could retrieve it. The next day he set off by himself for Cluny’s headquarters to steal back Martin. On the way he met Basil Stag Hare, a trained fighter who was adept at moving around unseen. Martin was not there (having been added to Cluny’s standard, which he had taken with him that morning when the army sortied), but they did rescue the Vole family. On the way back Matthias got lost, and was helped back to the abbey by a baby squirrel that did not talk.
Cluny’s army had been attacking the abbey, not very successfully. Cluny went searching through the woods with some rats and found a climbable tree near the back wall of the abbey. Cluny ruled entirely by fear and reward, which led to jealousy among animals jostling for promotion. A ferret was handling the climbing and movement of a plank of wood from a fence to form a bridge and angling to be well-received by Cluny. Old Methuselah Mouse noticed that the elm tree was not swaying to the north in the breeze from the south, but rather from east to west. Constance crept around to the back parapet and waited for the party to get on the plank. Cluny was the first, and when he was partway across, Constance stood up and kicked the plank. The fall badly injured Cluny. The jealous rat Cheesethief pushed the ferret off the branch as he looked down at Cluny, and then killed him after he had supervised Cluny being taken away.
The Abbey was keeping the attackers at bay, but the situation still looked difficult. Matthias and Methuselah decided that they needed to get Martin’s magical sword to sway the balance in their favor. However, no one knew where the sword was. Methuselah found some verses carved into the way behind the tapestry (visible now that Martin’s portrait was taken away). Together they started deciphering them. They discovered that Martin had predicted that someone like him named Matthias would come, and directed his instructions to him. The verses were a riddle leading to a series of puzzles leading to the location of the sword. After finding the middle stone on the steps led down into a chamber and solving the riddle there, they found Martin’s shield and his buckler. Further riddles, solved over the course of several days led to the solution of placing the shield on a carved stone on the top of the rampart at 1am on the next full moon. The moon reflected off the shield onto the end of the weather vane on the tower. The mother of the baby squirrel, Jess, was an expert climber and climbed up to the weather vane. But there was no sword, and Jess was attacked by sparrows and only saved by the mice shooting (small) arrows at the sparrows.
Meanwhile, Cluny had found a fox vixen and her son to heal him. The vixen, Sela, was a sly double-crosser, and arranged a message for her son to send to the Abbey: wealth in exchange for information. Cluny was very displeased that the guard had let Sela write something without him actually reading it. But he also arranged how he could use Sela’s deception to his advantage. He drew a map of his planned attack on the front gate with battering ram, while secretly intending to tunnel under the back corner. Constance gave Sela’s message a cold reception, but promised that the Abbot would meet Sela in the forest several days hence. She did not inform the Abbot about any of this. Sela got away on pretext of needing to get specialized herbs (Cluny made a show of being upset but let himself be convinced). Constance arrived instead of the Abbot, killed one of the rats who was supposed to be guarding her, and beat up the vixen. Back with Cluny, Sela and the rat could not tell a straight story and Cluny was extremely unhappy (albeit not surprised) about the betrayal. Then when Sela’s son accidentally let slip that they knew about the real plan, Cluny had them both killed.
The mice had wounded a sparrow, which aggressively talked at Matthias. One of her comments suggested that King Bull Sparra (the sparrows talk in a kind of pidgin), and Methuselah dug around in the Abbey records and found that a sparrowhawk had mentioned a sparrow with a sword. Methuselah gave Matthias building plans that showed how to get up to the loft of the Abbey. Matthias put the sparrow on a lead with a small brick tied to its leg and tried to tame it by leading it around the yard. When they started climbing up, however, the sparrow attacked him when he stumbled. Shortly afterwards Matthias suddenly pushed the sparrow off the edge, where it promptly fell due to the brick. Matthias held onto the rope, and got the sparrow to promise not to hurt him. Oddly, the sparrow became friends with Matthias after this at the end of the climb Matthias untied her, and she help him get into the loft.
He was promptly captured by the sparrows and nearly killed. King Bull Sparra compromised with putting the lead on Matthias. He ended up a pet of his friend sparrow and her mother. Also, he discovered that the king had only the scabbard, but not the sword. It turned out that the mother was a blood relative of the king, and that the king had killed her husband when the sword was lost in a skirmish with the local adder. The king was also an unpredictable, tyrannical ruler, so she was willing to help him steal the sword. She spread a rumor that the sword had been seen, unlocked Matthias, and they retrieved the scabbard. As Matthias was descending, the king sparrow came back and attacked him. His claws got stuck in the buckler, and together they were blown over the side of the roof by the high wind that day. Some time later the king sparrow was observed dead on the stream behind the Abbey, so the otters went searching for Matthias. They found him and the mice, for whom healing was a specialty for which they were renown through the land, resuscitated him.
Basil’s supervision with his military experience had substantially helped the defenders. Some time after Jess had arrived, the two plotted to steal back Martin’s portrait from Cluny. The hare provided a diversion, and Jess stole the portrait. The hare was injured, and since she did not want to abandon him to death from the merciless rats, she gave him the portrait and told him to hide (which he expertly did) and to return to the Abbey while she diverted the rats. She took a fake portrait (a dishrag) and led Cluny on a chase through the forest until they were well away from the hare. Then she raced along the treetops back to the Abbey.
The hare, who was very fond of the excellent abbey food (and also a big eater), milked his injury. Matthias, however, quickly recovered. Methuselah had been killed when Sela’s son, who was not actually fully executed, sought shelter in the monastery in exchange for updated information. The Abbot, who thought all creatures were basically good, agreed. Late one night the fox stole all the valuables in the monastery, hitting Methuselah with the bag as he attempted to stop the fox. (The fox ended up sleeping in a convenient hole that night, but it turned out to be the lair of Asmodeusss, the adder.) Matthias continued Methuselah’s life mission of finding the sword by asking the hare about Asmodeusss. The hare said it was a bad plan, but since Matthias insisted, he said Matthias should talk to Captain Snow, an owl. He gave Matthias instructions to give the owl a medal of valor the owl had given him, and to be careful not to be eaten.
Matthias went in search of the owl, but ran into a group of rowdy shrews on the way. They had a habit of talking at once, so they had a stone to indicate who the person who was allowed to talk was. They also had a bunch of rules organizing their guild, which tended to annoy Matthias. They initially wanted to kill him for trespassing on their land, but agreed that since he was from Redwall Abbey, known far and wide for their service to all animals, predators included, they would honor the unwritten law that Redwall Abbey inhabitants be allowed free passage. They told him that the owl lived in a certain barn. However, it turned out that the barn had a cat, Squire Julian. Fortunately, Julian hated the taste of mice, and indeed, was actually a vegetarian. The owl, he said, was no longer welcome in the barn, due to a quarrel they had some time earlier. He directed Matthias to a dead tree, after giving him a message telling the owl he needed to apologize.
The owl tried to trick Matthias into putting himself in a place to be eaten, but Matthias was too smart for that. The owl told Matthias where Asmodeusss could be found, but found the idea of a mouse killing the snake to be hilarious. Matthias used that to get the owl to agree to a bet: he would get to keep the medal if Matthias died as he expected, but if not, he would promise not to eat any mice and shrews as long as he lived, as well as to apologize to Julian. The owl figured this was the easiest bet he’d ever had.
Meanwhile, the battering ram had been giving the defenders trouble. Jess schemed up an idea with her son to put a hornet’s nest in a barrel, which Constance supervised kicking it down onto the attackers. After the rats fled the hornets, the defenders poured vegetable oil onto the battering ram, which made it too slippery for the attackers to hold. The moles who were helping defend the Abbey (they talked in a hard-to-understand dialect) kept an ear out for the progress of the tunnel.
The shrews, after some procedural complications, voted to accompany Matthias to the stone quarry where Asmodeusss lived. They eventually found his liar, quite by accident. As predicted, the adder was asleep after his meal (unfortunately, of one of the shrews). Matthias slipped by the adder as he slept and retrieved the sword, but one of the shrews shouted excitedly in one of the outer chambers and woke Asmodeusss up. Fleeing into a dead end, Matthias and the shrew very nearly fell victim to the magic of the adder’s eyes, but Martin came to Matthias in a vision and told him to attack the adder. Matthias snapped out of it and killed the adder with the sword.
The tunnel complete, the attackers came by night. However, the defenders were ready with boiling water, which they poured into the tunnel, and then jumped on the tunnel to collapse it. Cluny came up with the bright idea of building a siege tower. It nearly succeeded, except that Cornflower Mouse—an attractive young mouse Matthias’ age, between whom there was a mutual attraction—saw it as she was handing out late-night soup. Acting out of instinct, she tossed the lantern on the siege tower, which burned, killing several rats and effectively stopping the assault. Since fire was fatal to both sides, it was an unwritten rule that neither side, not even the ruthless Cluny, used fire. However, it gave Cluny an idea of how to gain entry to the Abbey. They had captured a large family of field mice several days before. Cluny set fire to a trench and told the father that he would burn his family alive unless he infiltrated the Abbey and opened the doors at night. The terrified father easily mingled with the mice, and opened the door that evening while everyone was asleep.
As Matthias and the shrews were celebrating the death of Asmodeusss, his sparrow friend (now the Queen Sparrow) found him and informed him that the Abbey had been taken. Matthias rushed back to the Abbey, followed by the sparrows and shrews. In the morning Cluny was gloating over his victory, when in walked Matthias, hooded and sword in hand, just like the nightmares that Cluny had been having. The sparrows and shrews arrived shortly afterwards, and even the owl and Julian (who had returned to being fast friends after the owl initiated the apologies, which ended up being mutual) arrived to help. The rats were completely beaten, and Matthias personally killed Cluny by dropping the Abbey bell on him. The Abbot, dying from the wounds Cluny gave him, made the shrews and sparrows friends of the Abbey, and told Matthias that he was too brave to become one of the order (which was sworn to help and not kill), but that he would be the Abbey’s protector. The Abbot gave Matthias and (now wife) Cornflower the gatehouse as their cottage.
Redwall is an animal fantasy book, part Brother Cadfael, part Watership Down, part Wind in the Willows. It is young adult fiction, but is fun for adults, too. The animals live in a sort of Merry Old England, with the Abbey providing a quiet, country life for the creatures in its district. It is a life of vegetable gardens, fishing, cream, and fresh fruit from the orchard, before Cluny forced them to become warriors. The plot is remarkably twisting for a children’s book, and each of the creatures has their own uniqueness to them.
Perhaps this would have been different had a I read the books as a kid, but I found the characters to be interesting and varied, but lacking the spark that really endears the reader. The characters are all very different, but each has basically one motivation and little depth beyond that. Aside from Matthias, who goes from timid novice to expert warrior, the characters do not change or grow. However, the sheer number of them adds a depth of its own, making the world feel very populated, despite being only several miles in size.
It was hard for me to tell if the animals were supposed to be animals or stand-in humans. One problem was size. Trees and vegetation seemed to be their normal size, yet the mice raised cabbages and other vegetables in the garden, which would seem to be entirely impossible for mice to handle. Orchards would seem to be out of the question. Also it was not clear if the buildings where of human origin or entirely animal. They were occupied entirely by animals, suggesting the latter, but then there were difficulties like how would a monastery for mice accommodate a badger or a hare on the rampart? If they could fit on the walls it would be entirely too large to be of use for mice. And how would two rats kill two foxes?
While it felt like Redwall was missing the spark, nonetheless it is an enjoyable read. Some of the twists are unpredictable even for adult readers, which helps balance out problems like the puzzle of Martin’s sword being solved fairly linearly and rapidly. The world is very rich with variety and Jacques consistently takes the space to paint condensed but thorough picture of the environment. Despite the size issues, Redwall Abbey definitely feels real. Matthias becomes an expert soldier entirely too quickly, but it is a young adult book, and that is what the hero’s journey and self-discovery is about. The book also touches on deeper themes without feeling the need to point them out. Cluny’s rule by fear is definitely contrasted with the Abbey’s consistent love and concern. Likewise, the clerical “love everyone even if they are enemies” is seen as naive by the more worldly badger; yet the Abbot defers to the badger and the hare who have less generous values as he recognizes the fit of the Abbey’s need and their competence in warfare. I think kids will love the book and adults will find it rich and fun.