RIP Brian Jacques

Brian Jacques, the affable author of the internationally successful Redwall series, died a few days ago, 5 February 2011, of an aortic aneurysm. He was 71.

Redwall was an important part of my youngest son's life. The books are set at Redwall Abby in the high Middle Ages. All of the characters are talking animals but the mice at the heroes. As a youngster, there was nothing my son enjoyed more than mice and knights and this series brought both of them together.

I read to my kids from the time the oldest was about 6 or 7 months old until the each turned 12 and preferred to read on their own. While the older kids, both in their 30s, are bookworms, the youngest seldom reads for pleasure.

They preferred science fiction, alternate history and fantasy to other genres and the oldest still do. However, when the youngest latched onto Redwall, reading became difficult. The animals do not simply speak, they speak with the accents of rural Britain. The books are written in dialect and they are more difficult to read than Mark Twain. Twain recorded the accents of 19th C. America (accents that have changed since then and some that have died out), his characters speak as Americans and there is something familiar to American eyes in Twain's recording of their speech patterns which might enable American tongues (I do not know this to be true as I never read Twain out loud).

Brian Jacques, on the other hand, created a record of the accents of England, many of which are unknown to Americans. Reading Jacques aloud is extremely difficult. While I read the books to my son, I selfishly hoped that his interests would shift to other writers.

While my youngest was in the throes of his love for all things Redwall, Brian Jacques was on a book tour that stopped in Concord, MA. I reserved a space for us and I am glad to this day that I did.

Born in 1939, Jacques was "a half generation older than me." He was a short, bald man with a warm personality and an affable manner. He told the crowd at the packed store how he was a lorry driver who traveled all over England. He then imitated the accents that I found so difficult to recreate and told how he used the voices he had heard so often for the characters of his books. He was charming and charismatic.

I filed away the fact that Jacques was a working class hero.

NPR honored Jacques this morning with a remembrance. A children's book expert discussed his work, noting that his first book ran more than 300 pages and featured talking animals, bucking the 'conventional wisdom' of the time that kids would not read a book longer than 200 pages and that kids wanted to read about themselves. Hiss, Boo, for the research of market experts which ruins everything and stifles creativity.

Jacques, as was the custom for working class people then, left school at 15. He became a longshoreman and a truck driver, as was his father. However, his father loved to read and he encouraged his sons to read as well. According to Wiki, family favorites were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

This working class hero wrote more than 20 books which multiplied into 20 million copies that were translated into 28 languages. The University of Liverpool gave Jacques as honorary doctorate of letters.