The Scavenger Hunt Quest

My favorite local used book store had a sale last weekend. I managed to stop by in between doing the grocery shopping and going to pick up my dad up at the airport. I bought basically any book I could lay hands on before rushing out again, time constraints not allowing for proper book browsing procedures. 

One of my purchases was a book for children I'd admired at work. We have a poster of the cover hanging up in Cataloging. It's a striking cover that I've noticed every time I've run across it on one of the shelves so when I saw it in the store last weekend I decided to buy it and find out what it was about. It's a kids' book, that's the best way I can think to describe it. It was written by a father who originally thought it up as a serial to entertain his two daughters. It's not bad but it was written by someone without a lot of experience with writing or the genre so it uses a lot of cliches.

It has one of those contrived puzzle quests you might remember from when you were a kid. The kind where the protagonist stumbles across a historical artifact or factoid that starts them on a hunt to find a series of puzzles and riddles hidden around the old and mysterious building/town/forest they live in. The clues are recovered from hiding spots using a combination of kitchen science ingenuity and advice from wise elders in spectacles. Over the course of the hunt the protagonist will unearth a conspiracy/invasion/theft that will provide the suspense and danger. Both plots can only be resolved by the piecing together of the clues in time to thwart the conspiracy/invasion/theft and solve the ancient mystery. They make these for adults too only with more sex and international travel.

The point of these kinds of quests is to add suspense and make the reader an active participant in the story. The problem is that the clues and eureka moments often feel either too obvious or improbably convoluted. The reader, even a young reader, can be left wondering just why anyone would bother to do all this? If you really wanted to hide a dangerous magic artifact why would you leave a series of clues at all, let alone ones simple enough for a 12 year old to solve? Why can't any of these bad guys figure out these grammar school scavenger hunts themselves? The key from the author's perspective is to move the story along too fast for the reader to get around to asking any questions until the book is finished.

My favorite puzzle hunt book is Redwall by Brian Jacques. I can almost buy the basic premise of it too. Riddles were in fashion during the heyday of abbeys and I can see why an aging ex-warrior monk might amuse himself hiding clues around the abbey he was helping to build. My least favorite (leaving aside Dan Brown's books which I don't even want to talk about) is Harry Potter. I read the first one when I was eleven and really enjoyed it up until the end. Part of what I'd loved about reading that book was the sneaking around and defying the teachers (I was never a big fan of school). The way the defense of the sorcerer's stone was setup so specifically for each kid made it obvious to me that they had been manipulated into confronting Voldemort all along. Dumbledore's last minute awarding of the House points confirmed it. Not only was he awarding them like good lapdogs he was fomenting conflict between Gryffindors and Slytherins for his secret vendetta. It amazed me that Harry seemed to miss this. Obviously he was being trained all along to destroy horcruxes or whatever they were (I quit reading after book 6) from day one.

Which got me thinking after I finished reading this latest addition to contrived scavenger hunt literature. If you were a mystical hero of old caught in the web of fate and you knew there was going to be a little kid coming along to follow in your footsteps and you wanted to ease them gradually into the role you might decide to leave them a scavenger hunt. Kids love scavenger hunts, that's precisely why they're used so often in grammar school. It's a way of simultaneously exciting their interest in the topic, increasing their geographic and historical knowledge, and building their self confidence. You could leave clues under tables and above mantles and have adults miss them for years and years because adults generally don't look in those kinds of places whereas they're the first place a kid would look. That was how I discovered all the enlightening messages my uncles had left in magic marker in my grandparents' house when I was little. If you allow for the idea of fate then these puzzle hunt stories actually make perfect.

I still don't buy it in a Dan Brown novel though.

Note: You've probably noticed it's not Monday. If you've read my previous entry you might recall that I decided to update new posts every Monday. Well last week there was a family crisis that kept be busy Sunday and Monday and I don't have a lot of time during the rest of the week. Fortunately that's wrapped up and now everyone's more or less healthy. I'm still changing the schedule to whenever I do have time.