By Kathleen Kern

In adolescence, I maintained a fierce allegiance to three countries: Narnia, Middle Earth and Prydain.

Of the three fantasy series, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain chronicles were the funniest. Taran, the assistant pig-keeper — the main protagonist of the Prydain series — also struck a more intimate chord within me than did hobbits or upper-middle-class British children.

Like me, Taran was an awkward kid who yearned to be heroic. From him I learned becoming truly heroic usually involves giving up dreams of heroism.

Another thing that set Prydain apart from Narnia and Middle Earth was Lloyd Alexander’s revulsion of war and the toll it takes on ordinary people whose lands become battlegrounds.

Taran’s mentors take more pride in domestic pursuits than they do in their war records. One of them tells him, “I have learned there is greater honor in a field well-plowed than a field steeped in blood.”

Alexander expanded on this antiwar theme in his Westmark trilogy, which for my money contains the best fictional description — young adult or otherwise — of how tyrannies, wars and insurgencies operate.

Westmark, The Kestrel and The Beggar Queen follow the adventures of Theo and his companions who defy a dictator, Cabbarus. Cabbarus suppresses civil liberties to consolidate his hold on power and later, with the backing of Westmark aristocrats, persuades a neighboring country to invade.

Those loyal to the true monarchs and anti-monarchist partisans join forces to fight the invaders, which results in a brutal crackdown on civilians — most of whom had no interest in resisting until those in power executed friends and family members.

The reader identifies with Theo and the other partisans, but Alexander shows how the battles they fight debase them and even compel them to harm the ordinary people for whose cause they are fighting. (He dedicated The Kestrel to “those who know that they are only human, but who try not to be any less.”)

He resists glorifying protagonists who die in battle. After the enemy is through with Theo’s friend, Stock, his body looks like “a side of beef” and his mouth appears to be “full of red mud.”

An enthusiastic partisan then acclaims Stock as a “great poet” and laureate for their cause. Theo tells him, “No. He wasn’t a great poet. He was a good poet. He might have been better. That’s the real loss, don’t you see?”

In college, I wrote Alexander, asking if he had intended Westmark to be an allegory of wars and insurgencies the United States was involved with in Central America. He wrote back, telling me that he had been thinking of Nazi-occupied France. (In World War II, he had been in a unit that was going to parachute into France to help the French Resistance.)

“Whatever my own reference points,” he wrote, “you’re quite right in seeing parallels with Central America. For me, the shocking thing was to find things I had invented turning out to be happening in reality. It’s impossible not to be horrified and discouraged — but wrong, I think, to despair.”

In another letter, he wrote: “I know that feeling of weariness, that huge efforts for human rights have such small results, and the sensation is nothing to be ashamed of. It seems to me that one just keeps doing — then there’s always a chance. Without doing anything, there’s no chance at all.”

Lloyd Alexander died last month at the age of 83. I suspect I’m not alone among his readers to feel as though I lost a friend.