Watership Down

This book was read to our class by my fourth grade teacher, and I had such fond memories that I was afraid to go near it again. I did finally begin reading it to my son recently, and was soon racing to the finish on my own. It is just that good, then and now. Richard Adams captured an animal's perspective in a manner that I think stands as the model for all time and against which many, many others pale. There's of course some personification that stretches credibility, but these rabbits don't wear clothes or smoke pipes, etc. They live as real rabbits do. The author built a world around them that coincides with the world we know, but drawn from the rabbits' perspective in a most convincing way that feels more immediate than artificial. show more For added depth he grants them a mythology, and these myths alone are worth the cost of admission, a key ingredient that hung in my memory and lived up to it again. The rabbits are as well drawn as human characters and their lives become yours, for the space of time that you spend between the covers. The threats they face are real, and there is often violence to contend with; this is no gentle pastoral that a teenage boy could sneer at. It's a novel that commands respect. To top it all, it has one of the best endings ever written. I knew precisely what was coming and it still got to me again even so (perhaps even more so, with the years behind me), the kind you have to pause over afterwards before starting another. Read it and read it again. show less

A marvelous book that takes a simple story, a group of survivors looking for a new homeland, and turn it into a huge delightful journey, filled with danger and adventure. The fact that the group is made up of rabbits makes it even better. The author does give these rabbits some human aspects, but they remain fundamentally wild animals, as they battle obstacles both from outside and within their own group. Especially wonderful is the rabbit mythology and folk tales that make up the rabbit belief system. This book will totally capture the heart of any who read it and it's a perfect read-out-loud book for children that will still captivate adults.

This second reading -- perhaps 35 years after the first and prompted by a Netherland Dwarf doe joining the family -- as good as I dared hope. That's rare & fine, though I seldom revisit even favourite books.

Of my first reading, I recollect only being strongly impressed by a quality superior to my usual novels, and that the plot was a journey prompted by Fiver's vague premonitions of danger. This second reading affirms the literary achievement, it's a compelling story and notable as well for the naturalist's observations, the peek into the rabbit's social community, and the beguiling narrative voice.

About that voice: Adams gently addresses the reader but avoids infantilising, uses invented lapine mythology and language yet remains a show more human observer. Placenames are human (which the rabbits could never know and so never use), but apart from the map and the narrator noting arrivals and departures, landscape descriptions are from a cunicular perspective, not human.

This reading (and I recall, my first) had a very strong sentimental dimension. It's not clear precisely why, though that may sound daft to anyone not having read it: "Anthropomorphic rabbits looking for a home and escaping danger, what's surprising about the sentimentality?!" It's not that sort of sentimentality, though. The experience is more akin to reading myth or capturing the finer aspects of social good, friendship, and a sense of beneficent nature. I'm reminded of my intention to read more deeply into Hutcheson's arguments regarding moral sentiment, and related aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Watership Down is an example of incredibly efficient storytelling, especially the first third. So much happens in very few pages, yet the pacing is never crazed nor the plot labyrinthine. Revisiting the characters and especially, the world they live in, was so pleasing I'm uncertain whether I should continue with the series (which unusually I never did when originally reading the novel), or leave it on the shelf for another visit in ten years' time. show less

“Watership Down” by Richard Adams is a classic novel that had been on my “to read” list for a long, long while. However, a storyline about a group of rabbits searching for a new home couldn’t quite compete with the thousands of other titles on my list with more adult themes. Not long ago, I discovered a dog-eared copy in a box of musty smelling paperbacks that the local library was selling. Fifty cents seemed like a steal, so I purchased it along with an armload of others by Ray Bradbury and Arthur C, Clarke. After sitting on my nightstand for several months, I finally opened the little paperback and began reading. When finished, I was deeply regretful that I had waited so long in life to read this wonderful tale.

It didn’t show more take long to suspend disbelief and plausibility as I became attached to the story’s central characters. Unlike many Chief Rabbits, who rose through the ranks simply by virtue of size and strength, Hazel, an unassuming rabbit with a knack to recognize and marshal the talents of his comrades, becomes the group’s accepted leader. Though Hazel’s brother, Fiver, was the shunned runt of their mother’s litter, he could foresee perilous happenings during their journey that might be eluded or altered. Bigwig, an Owsla of their former warren, was large and fierce, a protector and strategist. Blackberry had a capacity for figuring out simple mechanics alien to his species, like how a piece of wood might float a weaker member of their clan over a water crossing. The fastest of their group, Dandelion, was also a gifted storyteller, who could inspire his companions when circumstances were bleak. And, many more delightful and fearful characters…

Mr. Adams invents an entire rabbit lore explained through a series of tales within his tale. Dandelion recites several stories about Frith, the Rabbit Sun-God, and El-ahrairah, a folk hero of extraordinary cunning, and the Black Rabbit, a menacing death figure.

The author’s prose is meticulous, yet simple and refined enough to be understood and appreciated by children and adults. Mr. Adams doesn’t shy from the cruelties of nature, especially when rabbits are preyed upon by every predator imaginable. Some violence and death are integral to the narrative, which is occasionally grim, but I believe these particular passages are written in such a way that most children wouldn’t find especially distressing.

Although the story is illustrated in human terms, the author does a clever job weaving in and around the imagined psyche of rabbits.

The first half of the story is a bit unhurried as the journey progresses, but the second half picks up speed. Once settled into their new home, Hazel ponders his group’s continued survival, so elaborate plans are made to gather willing does from an unfriendly, faraway warren. I found it difficult to put the book down during the final chapters.

Although I can’t prove, I like to believe in the presence of souls in all living things, so for me, the book’s poignant epilogue wrapped up the story nicely. show less

Richard Adams, in a new introduction, swears he was not trying to write any kind of allegory—just a tale about rabbits. Whatever his intentions, he certainly taps into the philosophical question, whether security or freedom is more valuable. The first rabbits they meet have complete freedom—freedom to write songs and create art, freedom from want and from enemies. But they are entirely unsafe—they can die at any time, with no power to protect themselves. The hutch rabbits are entirely safe, but have absolutely no freedom. The Efrafa rabbits are very safe, but in some ways have even less freedom than the hutch rabbits—does, for instance, are not allowed to choose their own mates, but must mate with whatever of the officers show more request them. Hazel and his friends seek the right mixture—to be as safe as possible without sacrificing their rabbit nature as some of the other rabbits do. Their hierarchy exists, but is less rigid.

Reading Watership Down is also a refresher in cultural relativity. These are intelligent, thinking, planning beings—but they are rabbits, with their own mythology and their own special rabbit values. show less

I picked this book up 20 years ago, hit the page where the tiny rabbit, Fiver, starts giving a prophecy and tossed it for weird. I’m glad I gave it another chance.

So, where to begin?

THE TEXT:
The visceral experience of this text is not to be believed. Adams paints lush and vivid landscapes with more than imagery – one can feel the air, smell it, taste a freshness, a freedom. In reading it, I felt light rise, grow warm, and fade, heard birds chatter as sweetly as if they were outside my own window, heard the wings of owls in the night, felt air unbearably stifle underground then, with a quick movement, breeze again over my skin. Oh my word, I wanted to eat vegetables. But even when I didn’t have any, I could taste them – smell show more them – feel them towering over me in long, fine rows, like green skyscrapers with silken hair clipped with honeybees. This type of scene setting is extraordinary, especially when it is done to move a story along instead of stopping it. Adams accomplishes this. I admit that the first two pages of the book prepared me for completely the opposite experience, but after that, his pen prowls the field with a deftness that is unparalleled in my mind. BUT, beyond this wooing of the five senses, Adams does something even far more impressive.

SOUL:
Alongside the scenery he constructs for his rabbits to physically inhabitant, Adams pauses, and with the same sort of tenderness and studious care, creates small refreshing little pools of stories inside the story, weaving a mythological realm. He gives them a soul. Magically, this interjection of story here and there doesn’t feel like an interruption at all, rather, it perfectly deepens the world that is already centerstage – it enlarges the warren, gives it heritage and hope. Of course, all that and you can still have a book that goes nowhere.

STORY:
You need a story that is in and of itself, and here there is no lack. There is conflict – oh so much conflict – and drama, and deus ex machina. The pacing is…absolutely perfect. The reveals, the tension, the dialogue. Adams writes a perfect book of action, with as much swashbuckling blood and girth as a pirateship. It feels remarkable to say that about a book of rabbits – RABBITS – but he does. And then... it still goes further up and further in.

THE RIGHT SORT OF MAGIC:
The flight and plight of these tiny animals is humanized in such a way that does so without removing them from their own non-human reality. You never see rabbits making tea, for example, or wearing tiny gloves. There are no wallpapered houses, and rabbit sized fairy cakes. These rabbits are, with the exception of some second sight dreams and premonitions, mere, ordinary rabbits. But you see them. I mean, you SEE them. Doing what, you might say? Well, you seem them experiencing what we know to be scientifically true about them – attachment, grief, play, sheer terror, possibly affection. I applaud Adams for keeping the rabbits as rabbits, albeit with some more sophisticated thoughts and feelings. Why is that important? And how can that possibly be interesting? Those two questions are what led me to dismiss this book so quickly as a twenty year old. Now I know better.

I know that if we are to see other men – to really see them – to become, for a moment, them, in their skin and with their ways and in their world and within their pain - we don’t change the nature of the other man – we change our own.

And I think this is why, even though Adams admits that he set out “just to write about rabbits” he hits on a deeper thing.

CONSTRUCTION:
In his decision to reject heightened fantasy for myth that heightens reality, Adams builds a story that is at once both very real (we see rabbits around us almost every non-winter day) and yet filled with wonder. Through the creatures in our own yard - not little white rabbits wearing waistcoats and carrying pocketwatches with their secondhands in Wonderland, but "just rabbits" looking very much as they are here and now - he creates a deeper magic. Through their small, formerly insignificant eyes, we are recalled to that forgotten struggle for survival going on around us each and every day, a struggle that so much of humanity has been privileged to throw off - and so many haven't. He takes the "ordinary" world and texturally enriches the images that are already there. It isn’t really real to read of Rat and Mole making tea by the fire in Wind in the Willows. Though charming in its own right, it is not to be believed even for a minute. However, a reader setting aside Watership Down will never look at a rabbit in his yard the same way again. He will make eye contact, see the trembling of those whiskers, the widening of the eye, and wonder what wonders Frith has spoken about him to this wee, furry neighbor. Possible, yes? After all His eye IS on the Sparrow.

MEANING:
And that is the magic of this backyard tale. It doesn’t show us a new thing, but an old, familiar thing in new light. It replaces the wonder that’s been lost since we left that Garden where the innocent creatures living beside us had more honor – where they received the wonder they deserved as the small miracles that they are. These days, humans seem to treat animals as either gods or rubbish and rarely anything in between. Watership Down invites us to again be their caretakers, and through that thing called empathy, better caretakers of men. To appreciate and value all “little” lives. To honor their bit of earth. Whereas tales which make mice like humans entertain us, Adams, by making humans briefly into rabbits, makes us deeper humans.

Years from now, when I need to taste sunshine, feel comraderie, witness leadership and cunning and heroic self-sacrifice, or simply hear the sounds of twilight with a more thrilling awe, I know I can pick up this tale of “the least of these” and find all of that in abundance. Because nature itself declares what is good and perfect and worth fighting for. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2721814.html

I must have first read Watership Down when I was about nine, and then saw the notorious film when it came out a couple of years later. I was captivated then, and I am captivated now, four decades on. It's a great epic on a small scale, with Hazel leading a breakaway faction from a doomed warren, escaping many enemies, and then winning a conflict with the Efrafran rabbits led by the fearsome General Woundwort, to earn a just retirement. There is a lot of back-story mythology as well, centring around the trickster rabbit king and hero, El-Ahrairah. It has some beautiful descriptive passages:

The sun, risen behind the copse, threw long shadows from the trees southwestward across the field. The wet show more grass glittered and nearby a nut tree sparkled iridescent, winking and gleaming as its branches moved in the light wind. The brook was swollen and Hazel’s ears could distinguish the deeper, smoother sound, changed since the day before. Between the copse and the brook, the slope was covered with pale lilac lady’s-smocks, each standing separately in the grass, a frail stalk of bloom above a spread of cressy leaves. The breeze dropped and the little valley lay completely still, held in long beams of light and enclosed on either side by the lines of the woods. Upon this clear stillness, like feathers on the surface of a pool, fell the calling of a cuckoo.

Of course, now that I am older I'm more sensitive to the background of the story, which reflects Adams' wartime experience (especially Operation Market Garden) in the same way that Tolkien's work reflects the earlier war. As a child, I found chapter 31, The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé, very very creepy indeed; as an adult, I was immensely moved by the ending in which the war veterans return to the warren they have saved, to find that their sacrifice has simply been forgotten by the next generation. There are some off-notes (the does come into the story rather late; there is a racist remark about Irish people; what is up with the sculptures and poetry in Cowslip's warren?) but in general it has kept its charm. show less