Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

In children's literature, it sometimes seems that the lines of good and evil are very clearly drawn, in classic "Western" style: the good guys where white, the bad guys wear black, the innocent scurry to get out of the main street lest they get shot. This is illustrated, to give one big example, in the Harry Potter books. Whatever the charms of J.K. Rowling's novels -- and there are charms a plenty in them -- moral ambiguity is not one of them. (I'm talking real moral ambiguity here, of the type where what is right and what is wrong are blurred and when right can possibly arise from wrong and vice versa; not the "mistaken identity" or "evil in disguise" that is a common thread in the Potter works.) There is a Dark Lord, and a host of heroic figures arrayed in opposition to him, and that's that.

But the lines are not so clearly drawn in many other works of children's lit. One of the finest examples is Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy. This series tells the story of a kingdom whose monarchy is controlled by corrupt forces, and whose populace is slowly moving toward revolution. It is almost a French Revolution story, except that it doesn't occur in France; it occurs in the fantasy realm of Westmark. A young printer's assistant named Theo is working in a time when the presses are being told by the government what to print or, even worse, shut down entirely. Theo's master is killed by the King's men after he prints something he shouldn't have, and Theo flees. He then encounters two roaming criminals, a ragtag group of university students led by a particularly charismatic man who has revolutionary thoughts brewing in his mind, and a girl with a hidden past. As would be expected of such a story, moral questions arise constantly: if the monarchy is failing, do the people have the right to do away with it, or the responsibility to repair it? Are men to be given self-rule? And, most importantly, is it ever right to take the life of another, even in the pursuit of the most lofty goals?

Alexander's books address these questions, and many like them. Easy answers are not forthcoming, but in a way that is more satisfying than if they were. The books are not merely studies in morality, though -- they are rollicking tales of war and deceit, adventure and mayhem, crime and revolution. If the plots rely a bit heavily on coincidence of the "chance encounter with some unnamed character early in the book turns out to be a crucial event because of who that character was" variety, it can be forgiven on the grounds that everything else in them works so well. Alexander has always been best known for his wonderful Prydain Chronicles, an epic fantasy based in part on the Welsh epic The Mabinogion, but Westmark is almost as good.