In the spirit of adventure; The Cave of the Crystal Skull

What would you do if your consciousness were suddenly and truly expanded, and you could perceive beings and visions from a parallel universe? What would you do with this dangerous knowledge?

The prospect sounds exciting and dreadful all at once—the essence of adventure. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull is an adventure written for middle grade readers that explores consciousness and parallel realms. While a quest involves a search for something of great value as its mainspring, adventures turn on the undertaking of a hazardous enterprise, one whose outcome is doubtful.

Adventures usually begin in happenstance, a happy coincidence or unhappy accident that leads to a situation so hazardous, the main character is tempted to turn away.  Only the concern and care for others is enough to motivate the character to go forward. 

Cousins Sonia and Eric stumble on a cave while exploring Black Mountain. When they encounter “a mystifying crystal skull” and “a menacing pool of bubbling mud,” the cousins recognize they are in danger. Still they vow to continue exploring the cave but to keep it a secret.

However, the powers that lie hidden in the cave don’t intend to stay hidden.

Eric does not question his sudden focus and confidence in his soccer game. Sonia, however, experiences a shift in consciousness so profound, she grows increasingly uncomfortable as she is transported to neighboring realms and begins to question her everyday world. 

Sonia becomes more obsessed and defiant, unable to resist the lure of the cave even as she realizes the risk.  Each time she exits the cave, she experiences a shift in consciousness that expands the boundaries of her known self. She begins to believe the crystal skull might have healing power and when a younger cousin becomes ill, Sonia engineers a plot to test her theory.

While on a quest, the hero must defeat the guardian of the treasure in order to bring the valuables home, in an adventure, there are no “others” who have to be destroyed. That’s part of what makes Huck Finn, Gulliver, and Robinson Crusoe so eternally refreshing. 

As one enthusiastic, middle-grade reviewer noted, there are “no bad guys” in this story. They aren't needed. Adventures tell a different kind of story, one that reveals the character's growing consciousness as she encounters her marvelous world. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull  is available in Kindle and Print at http://www.amazon.com/The-Cave-Crystal-Skull/dp/B00KLIVVOU. 

Expendable Characters

I first read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in high school. At least, I read most of it.

 I stopped in Volume 4, Part 4 when I realized Petya was going to die.  At seventeen, with friends leaving for Viet Nam, I didn't want to see a young recruit killed in battle.. It was my first encounter with the expendable character in the hands of a master novelist.

It was a bad translation anyway, with high-flown Victorian language. I finally picked up a new copy a few summers ago, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and I surrendered to the pleasures of re-reading—returning, in part, to the girl I was at 17 while re-imagining St. Petersburg and Moscow, the march of Napoleon’s armies, and weaving all of that into today’s news, the laundry and gardening, stories and essays to be graded.  

There on page 1058, through smoke and dust of war, I watched Petya on his horse, galloping across the manor courtyard, slip sideways in his saddle, the horse rearing, the boy falling to the wet ground, his head pierced by a bullet.  Tolstoy sets the expendable character’s death against the improbable happiness Pierre finds with Natasha in the end.

My husband and I make a game of guessing who the expendable character is in TV crime dramas. These characters play an essential role in film and in mainstream and suspense novels, allowing an opportunity for the villain to demonstrate his villainy. Problem is, they are usually too obvious.

You can spot expendable characters by their vulnerabilities and a spark of goodness that puts them at risk. They are to be found among the marginalized.  The man who has already failed once or the woman who abandoned her children is a sympathetic sinner who can be redeemed by death. A main character’s brothers or sisters, the rookie, the room-mate, are especially vulnerable because they live in the protagonist’s shadows where the villain is also lurking.

Because the reader must root for expendable characters, they need a significant story problem. Petya is the darling, the youngest, favorite to both Natasha and her mother. He is stifling in a world of fading gentry, caring for the women while his older brother marches off to glory. His youth and idealism make him vulnerable to the rhetoric of war, and the reader sympathizes because Tolstoy has already demonstrated that war is madness and war rhetoric is absurd. Petya’s sin is to be naive or callow enough to believe that he can make a difference where his elders have failed; these are sins of youth we have all had to forgive.  

Finally, he’s the rookie soldier. After the defeat of the French when Napoleon’s troops are in retreat, Petya is killed in a local partisan action, a death both random and devoid of purpose. This turn in the expendable character's fate reveals the villainy in Tolstoy’s tale—a deep cosmic irony, cruel at times but also comic as witnessed in the marriage at the end.  

In the face of this cosmic irony, we must act as if everything depended on our actions, all the while laughing at ourselves for believing we might make a difference. 

I kept Petya alive through two translations and many years because, in the hands of a master novelist, the expendable character is as memorable as the protagonist.