Imaginary Warriors

Gregory is reading The Warrior Heir by Cinda Chima. He says it’s “relatively exciting and interesting.” From a fourteen year old boy who’d rather look at the latest YouTube clips of the week’s best soccer goals, that’s high praise.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that we’d recently asked him to read more fiction. He reads all kinds of nonfiction, including, currently, The Isaac Newton School of Driving: Physics and Your Car, by Barry Parker; and Joy Hakim‘s The Story of Science series (he’s on volume 2), as well as lots of books on race cars, soccer, and cooking (especially Asian food).

Lately he’s been poring over his grandfather’s back issues of Auto Week and he reads a great many online news and sports sites, as well as World of Warcraft forums and blogs. But when pressed to explain why so little fiction has crossed his nightstand lately, Gregory explained that the books he loves are such good stories, he has a hard time finding anything that compares.

So I suggested we do a little sleuthing on the Internet and find reading suggestions for fans of his favorite books, (such as the Beaverton Library’s “Teen Spot Great Reads“) and The Warrior Heir came up in more than one list. He started reading it a few days ago, and explained last night that one thing he likes are the long chapters, which make it easy to get into the story quickly. If that seems like a contradiction, you should know that it’s actually a telling sign of Gregory’s reading style.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can stop reading mid-chapter, put the bookmark in, and set the book aside and those who can’t rest until they’ve come to the end of a chapter, a neat stopping point, before they turn out the light and go to sleep, or get on with the day. Gregory is a chapter-ender. He comes by that honestly, by the way — so is his mother.

I’ve heard lots of mothers on playgrounds over the years say they didn’t ever want weapons in the house, but their boy children just made guns and swords and other toys of destruction. We haven’t ever gone through that phenomenon — save a few ceremonial swords during Gregory’s peak Eragon reading (he also made the sofa sleeper into a passable facsimile of a dragon).

Gregory never wanted to pretend to shoot anyone, and until he got into World of Warcraft, he never really played games that included violence. I have to grudgingly admit that the WoW violence isn’t as bad as I was expecting, and it hasn’t, to my knowledge, manifested itself in any real world negative behavior.

Despite his nonviolent early childhood play and cautious nature, Gregory has always been drawn to books which tell thrilling tales of daring, adventure, mythic or supernatural forces, even war. My peace loving child, who has always despised seeing another child picked on, who asked worriedly in the days after 9-11 if the bad guys would come to New Hampshire (where we lived at the time), who wrote President Bush in early 2003 that he was worried about our country going to war — this child likes to read books full of warriors. Many of the books we’ve read aloud deal with the conundrum of fighting in order to establish peace — Susan Cooper‘s The Dark Is Rising series, Lloyd Alexander‘s Prydain Chronicles, Eragon, Harry Potter, C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

Gregory is mostly a fan of fantasy, not realistic war stories (although both kids enjoyed one of the most amazing stories we’ve ever read, set in WWII Denmark: Number the Stars) The classic juxtaposition of good versus evil is creative fodder for fantasy, and is one of the oldest types of literature. Humans have told stories laced with conflict since before there were books — Stith Thompson’s classic, The Folktale identifies dozens of story types related to these themes. Fairy tales and folklore are full of evil witches and wizards, devils, and other tricksters, who often meet their doom, sometimes in pretty graphic ways, at the hands of the hero or heroine.

Hansel and Gretel, for example, shove the witch into her own oven. Harry Potter engages in wand to wand combat with Voldemort. The children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe must go to battle to defeat the White Witch (and poor conflicted Edmund eventually fights for right, after he proves the important point that even good guys falter now and then). The Bible includes plenty of violence. In many of childhood’s most beloved stories, there’s a whole lot of fighting going on.

How to explain this? Are humans just naturally drawn to conflict? I think instead we are drawn to explaining it. Which is why I believe that books in which battle lines are drawn between good and evil are an important part of every child’s imaginative development and interior life. Books are a safe place to explore big ideas about right and wrong.

I would also say that stories about strife are much less scary than real life. Most kids get that an evil wizard is not going to come murder their family, but it may be comforting to read about Harry Potter standing up to such a horrendous monster, if you’re a kid who hears about a real murder on the news. I feel pretty sure that part of the reason Gregory enjoys the Alex Rider books, about a teen spy, is that he has grown up hearing about terrorism, and it’s satisfying to read stories in which vile criminals get their comeuppance at the hands of a clever kid.

Stories like these nurture the part of our human nature that believes good will prevail. Last spring I read The Healing Power of Stories by Daniel Taylor (the newer edition is called Tell Me a Story: The Life Shaping Power of Our Stories), which describes the strong effect of stories on character, moral development, and emotional well being. I think the lasting impact of stories is very real, and I think it explains why humans have told stories for as long as we’ve had language, and why storytelling is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Check out Jim Weiss, Odds Bodkin, Jay O’Callahan, and Story Corps for some audio well being of your own.

There’s a fair bit of hand wringing over moral relativism in the world today — the notion that in popular culture, everyone’s point of view is respected, and therefore none is more valid than another. According to this theory, no one has any idea of what is good and what is bad, because it all depends on the context of the situation and nothing is absolute. But the fear that ambiguity has taken over seems to be unfounded; in public library story times and read-aloud sessions with older kids, I’ve never met a child who couldn’t explain the difference between good and evil. Kids can do so easily — and they do it spontaneously, in my experience, eagerly calling out comments, because they can relate these concepts to a story they know. And that’s another great reason to read with kids.

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