On Books That Are Short

Two weeks ago, working my way through a gift certificate to a used bookstore on University Way (Twice Sold Tales), I picked up all five of Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain Chronicles":  The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, & The High King.


I read these in the third or fourth grade and remember adoring them, though I didn't get, at the time, any of the references to Welsh legends (many characters are covert homages or open imports from Welsh mythology) or many of the archetypes at work in general.  This was the first fantasy epic I remember reading, even though "epic" might seem a strong word for a series with no installment over 300 pages, especially in the age of Harry Potter.  Before rereading them this past week, my strongest memories of this series were the completely awesome bard with the polygraphic harp (it breaks every time he exaggerates, and he exaggerates, as one would expect of a storyteller, all the time) and the fact that one of the chapters in the first installment ends with the bonechilling line "Before Taran could reach for his sword, the animal sprang."  Because I'm a loving older sister, I stopped the book THERE for the night when I was reading it to my six year old brother.  I'm pretty sure I also hissed "The animal sprang!" at him periodically throughout the next two or three days before finally relenting and reading him the next bit in the story.  Miraculously, we're still talking to each other as adults.

Going over them this time, I appreciated an element that I missed entirely the first time around.  These are books filled with archetypes, not to say stereotypes: the callow farm boy with dreams of shining armor and gallant charges, the slightly airheaded rebellious princess whom he hates on sight and who's clearly destined for him, the strong, silent warrior, doubtless older than he looks, who lingers on the sidelines of his quests to mentor, reprimand and generally save his rear end when required.  There's even a sort-of-animal sidekick in Gurgi, whose catchphrase "Crunching and munchings?", as delivered by my fifth grade teacher, could send us all into stitches.

The story is more predictable and the language simpler than a lot of what's exploded into Young Adult Lit over the past ten years, especially in the fantasy department.  But I was still giggling at snarky exchanges and weeping at the finale, and it's because there's an economy of expression in these books that's been almost abolished from modern literature.  I'm much more of a Les Miserables than a The Old Man and the Sea reader myself; I appreciate those big sprawling stories that you can lose yourself in for days, make into four-hour-long movies, and, in a pinch, use as a footstool to reach the top shelf.  By thirty pages into The Book of Three, the first installment, we've already introduced our hero, established his main predicament, removed him from his comfortable, if boring, home and plunged him headlong into danger accompanied by a heroic mentor whose own mission lies parallel to the hero's and will be compromised if he turns aside to help.  Just for comparison's sake, this takes Tolkien about a sixth of The Lord of the Rings.

(For the record, this is comparing apples and oranges. I have actually written papers arguing that the entire structure of Tolkien's epic falls apart if you don't pay attention to those interminable first chapters that introduce the Shire, establish the Hobbit friendships and take our four diminutive heroes through a sort of Basic Training.  But Alexander certainly gets the job done faster.)

The thing is, while moving the plot at such a rapid pace, Alexander isn't sacrificing character development or world-building; he's just doing it in clear, broad strokes, letting the reader's imagination do a lot.  He's not using ten words where two will do.  And he's taking advantage of the fact that his audience, children and young teenagers, are storytellers at their core and will create the story's world with only minimal input from him. The language is spare and the emotions of the characters are put out bluntly, but the story unfolded in my mind as vividly as any other.  Maybe even more so!

There's a number of shorter young adult series and trilogies that I read in my childhood which I'd like to see enjoy some of the benefits of the explosion of the genre:  Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea trilogy, for one, and John Christopher's The White Mountains and its sequels.   Some of the tomes my students have read last year and this year didn't actually seem to have enough story to justify their great weight of words.  And especially this month, with my students (and me!) frantically throwing pages at our wordcount goals, I'm thinking about the importance of a good story at the core.

Lloyd Alexander's shorter books not be much more than 50,000 words.  But every word is a crucial part of the story he's telling.  Just something to think about.

And now, back to my own word count -- far behind where I should be today! Time for Write Or Die!