Brian Jacques: ESE

"Call me Uncle Brian."

"The goodies are good and the baddies are BAD, no grey areas."

"I wrote the story as a read-aloud for blind children at a school nearby. I'd even get dressed up as Father Christmas in me cowboy boots and me big ten-gallon hat to do it."

Ask anyone who read the Redwall books what they remember, and a surprising number will say the same thing before naming a single character or plot: they remember being hungry! The abbey feasts, catalogued across paragraphs in loving, unhurried, mouth-watering detail, are the most distinctive thing Brian Jacques ever made. 

"It was a joyous meal for honest creatures. Dishes were passed to be shared, both sweet and savory. October ale and strawberry cordial, tarts, pies, flans, and puddings, served out and replaced by fresh delights from Redwall’s kitchens. Turnovers, trifles, breads, fondants, salads, pasties, and cheeses alternated with beakers of greensap milk, mint tea, rosehip cup and elderberry wine."

Stuff like this gave raise to various "Redwall Feast Generator" bots on social media. It is a rare reader who never had to go and find a snack. This already points to his type as ESE, maybe with some LSE paternalist and hard-working accent.

Jacques (1939-2011) was a child of wartime Liverpool rationing who got through the hungry years poring over the illustrated dishes in his aunt's Victorian cookbook, and then spent his adult life conjuring, for other people, the plenty he once imagined, eventually publishing a literal Redwall Cookbook. This is the type's defining gesture: the host's drive to gather everyone round a laden board and make them full and happy, broadcasting sensory and emotional warmth outward until the room glows. Redwall Abbey, for all its quests and sieges, is fundamentally a hearth — a place of hospitality, and shared meals, built by a man for whom feeding people and making them cosy was very nearly the highest good there was.

But it is a mistake to read him as only the soft sensory register, and the books make the correction themselves: they are startlingly violent for children's fiction. Pitched battles, real casualties, named heroes killed off (even young ones, on occasion) — for me, the first Redwall was my first book in which a good character actually died — and a martial-heroic backbone of warrior-mice, the sword of Martin, the dashing hares of the Long Patrol... The table and the battlefield are both rendered with total conviction and physical immediacy. Jacques' imagination was a very sensory one, loaded at both poles.

Across a quarter-century on Merseyside radio, careers in stand-up and folk singing, a stint as resident playwright, and decades of barnstorming school visits, Jacques performed in one consistent key: comic, hearty, convivial, generous. He wrote the first book as a read-aloud for blind children, deliberately overloaded the prose with sensory detail so they could see it, and turned up to perform it dressed as Father Christmas. Positive emotion, aimed at an audience, for the sake of their pleasure, start to finish —  very true to type.

Underneath the warmth sits the accent of the steady, productive craftsman. He found a sound, repeatable construction — the feast-and-siege architecture, the quest with its riddles — and executed it again and again to a consistent standard. This is also why the question of his intuition resolves the way it does. The inventive Ne faculty is clearly valued — he loved making up worlds, adventures, puzzles, and sustained the pleasure of it across twenty-two volumes. But a true Ne lead is centrifugal: expansive, forever opening new domains. Jacques is the reverse. He found one warm world and stayed inside it for twenty-five years, making minor changes on a fixed formula. He clearly was the type of person who'd feel comfortable living in a world where nothing substantial changes.

The moral universe of Redwall is (in)famously fixed at birth: 99% of mice, badgers, otters, hares are good; 99% of foxes, rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets are vermin, born bad and stay bad. Jacques stated the doctrine himself, flatly and without unease — "the goodies are good and the baddies are BAD, no grey areas." Over time this provoked something close to a fan revolt (it is, in fact, a rare Redwall fanfiction of any notable length that doesn't attempt to subvert this black-and-white morality), and it was not simply because "the morality is too simple." Simple morality alone is not particularly offensive. The fox in folk tales is always cunning, but nobody mounts a "social justice" campaign against Aesop, Lafontaine and their modern heirs. The folk-tale animal is a transparent cipher for a human quality: you read straight through the fox to general cunning, and there is no realized person there to be condemned by his species. Even the orcs in Tolkien's writings, while acknowledged as more problematic by the LoTR fandom, don't provoke such strong a counter-reaction.

What broke the exemption in Jacques' case was his own strength. His sensory functions just would not let the vermin stay thin. The stoats and ferrets and searats are given full-scale physical, particular existence — they eat and sweat and bleed and banter and feel the cold, their war-camps rendered with the same granular loving detail as the abbey kitchens. And once a creature is realized that vividly as an individual, condemning its entire kind by blood stops reading as folk-tale shorthand and starts reading as a claim about persons. The very realism that makes the world so vivid dragged the moral scheme out of the originally intended symbolic register.

For what the critics were really asking for was development in time — evil with traceable origins and a trajectory that might bend, a nature that becomes rather than simply is — and that is the machinery almost completely absent from the books. Outcast of Redwall is the exception that proves it: the one book that directly poses the developmental question — raise a vermin baby among good creatures, and does he turn good, or revert to type? — and it is telling on two counts. Jacques couldn't resolve it himself: "As to Veil and his final motives, I deliberately left that for the reader to decide. I have had many opinions and the jury is still out." And the narrative answers it the hard way: Veil dies saving the creature who loved him, and the verdict the text settles on is that inborn evil is irreclaimable — blood tells. The one flirtation with transformation collapses straight back into fixed kinds. Jacques kept flirting with vermin redemption for a while (see the kindly, a bit too-stupid-to-be-evil rat Blaggut and the most charismatic of his redeemed vermin, the sea ferret captain Romsca), but they avoided the "transformation" theme entirely, and he eventually decided not to pursue even this development. 

Socionics-Ni is, in its leading flavour, a dark function. To contemplate transformation all the way to its end is to arrive at dissolution ("My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...", "I head a fly buzz when I died...") Jacques' darkness is emphatically not this. In his books, good creatures die, and it's geniunely tragic, but the death is always framed and redeemed. Loss in Redwall is honourable, meaningful, and absorbed back into a warm enduring order — the precise opposite of the intuition that the order itself is provisional and hero and abbey alike are bound for nothing. 

There are schools that will read "rigid fixed-kind morality in a children's author" and reach for LSI. But the LSI children's writer has a different, didactic signature, with the moral delivered as consequence of broken rule established by the collective (see Der Struwwelpeter as the archetypical example). The architecture there is rule, transgression, inexorable penalty; goodness is obedience, badness is deviation, and the story exists to administer the sentence, like a strict judge. Jacques' moral world runs on the opposite logic. His good creatures aren't good because they follow rules; they're good because they're warm, loyal, brave, and generous. The closest Jacques comes to moralizing is his Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales, and even they, besides not being the work he's known for, are too playful for it. And even there, the villains are often cold-hearted abusers, and they're undone for their coldness, by the warm creatures and protective ancestors who look after the vulnerable child.

His resume was wayward: seaman, boxer, bobby, milkman, comedian, broadcaster (that's also why I rejected the SLI accent I once contemplated: Jacques is simply too high-energy). The person underneath was the same the whole way through — hearty, generous, convivial, industrious, certain that good shines through and bad blood tells, wanting nothing in the world so much as to bring everyone in out of the cold, sit them at a long table, and feed them a good story and a better dinner.