Demigods and Monsters (5 page)

When you fight a friend who's turned into an enemy, you risk destruction not just of who you are in the present, but who you've
been in the past. Why? Because you have to battle both your adversary, and your own remorse for having been fooled in the first place, for not having known that he was a bad guy in time.

It's enough to make a hero nostalgic for the days of freaky garden statuary and killer waterbeds. Surely facing a monster that can turn you into stone is easier than staring into the face of someone you used to trust and then raising your sword. Because when you do that, there's always the chance your own feelings can be turned into a weapon to be used against you.

Let's face it. Monsters who wear the faces of friends play serious hardball.

In short, Percy Jackson continues to face pretty big odds. My personal guess is they'll just keep getting bigger as the series goes along. Things are just getting good. Why stop now? Only Rick Riordan knows what will happen next, of course. But whatever it is, I think we can all be certain of at least one thing: No matter where the next adventure in his destiny leads, Perseus Jackson will
not
be taking along any Ancient Greek gift cards.

Cameron Dokey has more than thirty young people's titles to her credit, including
Wild Orchid, Belle, Before Midnight
,
Sunlight and Shadow
,
Beauty Sleep
,
Golden
, and
The Storyteller's Daughter
, all for the Once Upon a Time series. She's also proud of the romantic comedy
How Not to Spend Your Senior Year
.

Cam's interest in Greek mythology made it a particular joy for her to write about Percy Jackson and the Olympians. When she's not writing, Cameron may be found working in her Seattle, Washington, garden. She has four cats named for characters in Shakespeare. None of them have ever been chased by bears.

G
rowing up is dangerous. Being yourself is dangerous.

In the classic Australian film,
Strictly Ballroom
, the chief character, Scott, wants to dance his own steps and wants to do it his way. And all Hades breaks loose!

Scott's attempts at becoming an individual, at becoming
himself
, are seen as a crime, an act of rebellion, against the social “group” of which he is a member because Scott is not fitting in; he's not
conforming
.

Well, neither is Percy Jackson.

Percy is dyslexic, has Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and is always getting into trouble. In most school systems, and society at large, that pretty much makes Percy a loser, the kid least likely to succeed, the kind of kid who'll never amount to anything and isn't worth the effort anyway. Ever heard that one before?

Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson series, turns these so-called flaws on their heads.

Like many kids in his position—labeled a misfit, looked down upon, shoved to the side lines—Percy feels shut out, left behind, and is beginning to feel frustrated and anxious about it. He can't work out why some of the teachers always pick on him, why things always go wrong even when he tries his hardest to do the right thing.

Of course, once you've been stuck with a label—like dyslexic, disruptive, troublemaker—it's pretty hard to change things back, because you're dealing with people's
perceptions
. They don't see “you” anymore, they just see the label.

In its own way,
The Lightning Thief
is a classic “Rags to Riches” plot, a type of story we've heard over and over again since early childhood:
The Ugly Duckling
,
Cinderella
,
Aladdin
, King Arthur, Star Wars,
David Copperfield
,
Jane Eyre
, Harry Potter,
Rocky
, the biblical Joseph and his brothers, and many, many more. They are all essentially stories about growing up, about coming into the power and responsibility of adulthood, and about the dark forces that try to stop them. They begin, usually, with a child or youthful hero/heroine who is often an orphan or part orphan (like Aladdin, Percy has “lost” a father) and who has been marginalized, forced to live in the shadows like Cinderella: neglected, scorned, undervalued, overlooked, and mistreated.

This story is found in every culture and every time, including that of the North American Indians prior to the arrival of the Europeans and as far back as ninth-century China (and there is no reason to think that was its first occurrence).

So why is this particular plot so important to us? What is it
really
about?

Well, I'll tell you. It's about rebellion.

It's about people growing up and becoming
themselves
. Just as Scott tries to do in
Strictly Ballroom
, just as Harry Potter tries and every person who has ever lived has tried. Just as a fair few of the heroes and heroines of Greek myths have tried.

And this is no accident.

The gods of Olympus—all-powerful, simultaneously good
and
bad, unpredictable, oddly
human
in their flaws—are stand-ins not only for the establishment (school, society, church) but also for those other godlike beings: parents.

Rick Riordan has rightly seen this and created a story about the children of the gods, who are in precisely the same power relationship to their very-much-alive-and-kicking gods as children in our world are to their parents. And this, I think, is one of the secrets to the success of the series: It mimics the experience of everyone growing up—and of every person's troublesome need to become him- or herself.

The Lightning Thief
is also about “seeing clearly”: the schools Percy has attended (six so far) and the various teachers he's had, as well as his smelly unpleasant stepfather, have marked him down as a troublemaker and a no-hoper. When something goes wrong, it must be Percy's fault.

And that's because they don't see the real Percy.

Nor, for that matter, does he see
them
very clearly: He's unaware that his teacher Mr. Brunner is actually a centaur, that Mrs. Dodds is a razor-taloned Fury out for his blood, that his best friend Grover is a cloven-footed satyr, and that the three old ladies on the roadside are the Fates.

Later, he fails to see through the disguises the various gods or monsters adopt—sometimes until it's almost too late, as when the Mother of Monsters, Echidna, along with her doggie-who-ain't-a-doggie, tries to turn him into a smokin' shish kebab.

Percy's failure to “see clearly” extends to his “normal” life as well: His dyslexia, considered a handicap in our world, causes visual distortions. “Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards,” he describes it in
The Lightning Thief
. In reality, the dyslexia is the result of Percy's brain being hard-wired for Ancient Greek and is part of his uniqueness.

But most of all, Percy doesn't see himself clearly.

Like the schools and society that have labeled him as some kind of maverick and failure, he sees himself in terms of those same labels.

In the Rags to Riches story, the true focus is not so much on growing up, as it is one of its chief requirements: becoming
aware
.

It is learning to be
conscious
, learning to
see
clearly and wholly, that distinguishes these types of stories. Even Peter Rabbit manages to escape the dangerous farmer and the garden in which he eats and plays to his heart's content (like any egocentric infant) only when he climbs up high to get a better view of things.

Attaining consciousness—awareness—is the true mark of the rebel, and the greatest danger for those in power, whether they be gods or parents. It is no coincidence that authoritarian regimes, like Saddam Hussein's pre-invasion Iraq, seek always to control the media and to dictate what people can and can't know.

In his astonishing book
The Seven Basic Plots
, Christopher Booker outlines and explores the fundamental stories that have entranced, and continue to entrance, the human race. One of these is the
Rags to Riches plotline. While many stories combine more than one of these plots (
Star Wars
is both a Rags to Riches story and an “Overcoming the Monster” story, as is
The Lightning Thief
), I want to concentrate on the Rags to Riches plotline, in which, as Booker puts it, “a young central figure emerges step by step from an initial state of dependent, unformed childhood to a final state of complete self-realization and wholeness”—in other words, the hero gains maturity throughout the journey, or rite of passage, that he experiences.

Why is this story, above all others, told so often?

The quick answer is that it is the only one of the seven basic plots that charts the life of a human being from the limited awareness of childhood to the discerning perception of adulthood.

The Rags to Riches story is also designed to show us the
importance
of learning through experience. It shows us the early days of life when no one in the story sees clearly; how this permits us to be easily ruled by others; how cruelty and abuse rule through ignorance; how trying to see clearly becomes a threat to this domination and in what way, by passing through various grueling tests in which a near death occurs. Throughout all this, new powers of maturity are gained, self-mastery acquired, and a “happy ending” is defined as one in which everyone has begun to see more clearly than ever before. And as Booker points out, when people can see properly, they can move ahead and gain confidence and prosperity.

By contrast, this plot also shows how the great and fatal flaw of the dark figures in the story is always a kind of persistent or peculiar blindness, a distortion of vision, brought on by self-centeredness—that very trait that defines infancy and early childhood. The title itself tells us that the preoccupation in
The Lightning Thief
is with vision: Someone has stolen light—the very thing needed to see clearly! And the culprit? A god, of course. A god of war. A god of domination and darkness.

In this sense, we understand that the dark figures of the story are those who never grow up, who never see clearly and wholly, who remain blind and self-centered.

The Rags to Riches plot generally progresses through five stages intended not only to chart the human journey but also the journey of that most rebellious of human traits: consciousness.

Here we meet the young neglected hero and see the world he inhabits, a world of scorn and abuse (think of the Dursleys in Harry Potter). The importance of this stage is not just to show how things began but to draw attention to the
difference
between the hero/heroine and the darker figures around him or her—in Percy's case his stepfather, his math teacher Mrs. Dodds, the nastiest girl in school who torments him and Grover, and the school system itself. Note that in mythological terms, the lowly hero/heroine is also the “diamond in the rough,” that which is overlooked and treated with contempt for appearing to be plain and inferior.

Yet what is significant here is that while the dark figures in the story rarely change at all, the hero also does not change as much as characters in other story types . . . and that's because the Rags to Riches hero
already possesses the traits that will one day make him or her exceptional
. These traits are simply buried inside him, more or less invisible to the people around the hero, and to the hero as well.

The other crucial aspect of this stage is that we see the downside of not seeing clearly, of being in a state of limited awareness: Percy buys into society's labels (believing himself to be a loser and trouble-maker); he is exploited by his scumbag stepfather (he feels he has no power); he thinks there is something wrong with him, that he's bad