19 September 2012

Lloyd Alexander: Westmark's Theo


For the enjoyment of our readers, we have blown the dust off a former issue. This article concerns a character in Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy. If you have not yet discovered this series, we urge you: find out what you're missing.

Saving Taran Wanderer of The Prydain Chronicles, Theo in Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark is his most developed hero. Born an orphan and raised a printer’s devil, Theo has a strong conscience and heavy unwillingness to break or appear to break the law. He is an innocent, idealistic wight, a fellow who knows how things should be done, but possesses none of the know-how to do them.

He falls in with a pair of mountebanks—Count Las Bombas and Musket the dwarf—meeting a young street urchin named Mickle, who joins up with them. Eventually, however, Theo cannot bring himself to continue helping deceive the peasants with the groups’ trickery and leaves without a farewell. It is this decision that leads him to a character studied in-depth further in: His name, or what he calls himself, is Florian. With Florian, Theo begins to see a bit more the way things are, and he starts to lose some of his idealisms, being replaced with realisms. Still, he manages to retain a strict conscience, something few characters in the series—or any series—possess or have the patience for. Warning: Spoilers here and further in. Use your discretion.

Theo cannot bring himself to kill a man when faced with it, and in so doing, he almost lets one of his friends get killed. The inability to do what needed to be done haunts him the rest of his life.
Even at the end of Westmark, Theo lets Cabbarus live, a decision that torments him often: should he have killed him and had the villain’s blood on his conscience? Did saving his life enable the subsequent bloodshed? The answer is never clearly given. It is these gritty questions among others that lend to Westmark’s gritty realism, and without a Christian world- view, things may seem rather hopeless.
In The Kestrel, Theo’s character begins to develop even more. After losing one of his closest friends to the invading Regian army, Theo undergoes a change. During the previous days of the war, he had learned to kill—but he never liked it. Now, he is no longer Theo but Colonel Kestrel, the bloodiest captain in the war, whose followers scream the hawk’s ferocious cry as he leads them into battle. Colonel Kestrel loves killing.

It is difficult for us to watch this transformation, and in his new guise, Kestrel almost kills the one he loves more than anything else. After this happens, the grip that the madness of killing held him with slips and he returns a bit to his former self. And yet, as with everything we do, our actions never leave us. Kestrel never dies, even if Theo buries his darker nature most of the time. Alexander never portrayed a greater truth than in his depiction of the evils of war and the realism of what happens to her victims left alive.

At the end of The Kestrel, Theo locks himself away in the attic of a friend’s house, refusing to see even Mickle. He sits down to draw, to paint—using his own blood and the dirt and grime he collects in the streets of Marianstat. He paints soldiers he fought with; peasants he met; people he killed; people who died with him—everything he experienced in his time as Colo- nel Kestrel. And when he is done, the haunted look in his eyes disappears. He set himself free from it, as far as is possible.

The Beggar Queen gives us a last look at his dynamic character. We see him after his days as Kestrel, and he has changed. The change is so natural, his character so real, we scarcely notice it until someone—or thing—reminds us.

Theo fears what he was as Kestrel, but he becomes something even worse, for a time, in this final book. He becomes so different that for a time, we know him almost as much as he knows himself—very little indeed.

In the final chapters of The Beggar Queen, as the cli- max has been reached and we prepare to leave the characters for the last time, we all know Theo very well. We know him so well because Theo is us. Maybe even more so than Taran Wanderer. Male or female, it matters not; if you are human, then you know what Theo went through, you know what happened, and you know what he is feeling. Westmark is real; it is truth. Lloyd Alexander shows us weakness, he shows us strength. He shows us life. Theo is weak and human. He fails, badly. But what he becomes is what we all wish to become. He is not arrogant; he is not proud of his accomplishments—yet, he has gained a great deal. He did not subdue life and, as it were, fate; instead, he learned from it. His story, like ours, is far from over. 

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