The later books might have been decent if he had swallowed his hatred of Clinton and written about reasonably real people, but he couldn’t and he didn’t and they aren’t. (It’s remotely possible that the last two Bean books got better, but the first two were so bad that I didn’t make the effort.)

I thought of Gurgi as a kind of ape-man with a sort of doggy/Cookie Monsterish face.

That said, the democratic temperament of the final two books has been an enduring influence on me. Again, it shouldn’t map onto any fleeting partisan political position. But much of what I believe–much of what I have argued here over the years–draws upon that temperament of Alexander.

On a completely different note–who else had an image of the Cookie Monster in their head when they read about Gurgi?

Interesting that others brought in Narnia; I tend to group Alexander with Susan Cooper, by preference. Her Dark is Rising series doesn’t tend so much towards Moral Instruction, though The Grey King is full of it, and the conclusion of the series is essentially a discussion of what human freedoms mean to us.

http://bigapplederm.blogspot.com/

Tim, if you’d just as soon not accept the post in your comments, due to length, that’s OK.

One nice effect of the authentic moral experience of reading the preceding stuff comes when the reader finally encounters the one “get out of jail free” card in the story. When Eilonwy’s ring means that she doesn’t have to leave Taran after all, it doesn’t feel fake and too easy, but rather, well, “magical,” a miraculous suspension of the narrative logic that has governed the rest of the story.