Watership Down By Richard Adams

Watership Down

By Richard Adams

"You needn't worry about them," said his companion. "They'll be alright - and thousands like them."

Richard Adams was born May 9th in 1920, in Wash Common near Newbury, England.  He attended Bradfield college from 1933 to 1938, moving on to Worcester College in Oxford to study modern history.  In 1940 he was drafted into the British Army, and served in Palestine, Europe, and the far East as a member of the Royal Army Service Corps (which served as the logistics wing of the British Army) but saw no direct combat with Axis Powers.  After being mustered out in 1946, he returned to Worcester College and earned a Bachelors in 1948, and an MA in 1953. In 1949 he married his wife Barbara. After gaining his Bachelors he went into the British Civil Service and started writing in his spare time.  His first book, the subject of our review, was released in 1972 after several rejections (let that stand as a reminder to keep trying young writers!) and received immediate acclaim. Mr. Adams would go on to have a long successful career as a writer. He would pass away on Christmas Eve 2016 (Damn you 2016!), and is survived by his daughters, grandchildren and great children, as well as the books he left behind for all of us.  There are worse legacies to have.

Watership Down actually started as a story Mr. Adams told his daughters in a car ride, this was before you could hand your kid a phone or tablet to keep them busy on long rides and fathers were obliged to entertain their children before they found their own entertainment.  The story was good enough that his daughters insisted that he write it down and wondrously enough he did. The book would earn a number of rewards, winning the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association and in 2003 was voted 47th best book of all time. It would have a sequel released in 1996, Tales from Watership Down and has been made into a film, a cartoon series, and this year will be made into a miniseries by Netflix.  The movie is well known for being marketed as a children’s film and having cute bunnies killed all over the place and being a bit disturbing if you're a young child; especially once the main villain shows up (I think there could be a sort of meta-story about this.  A children’s book titled “Little Timmy’s First Childhood Trauma” or something along those lines; about a six year old watching Watership Down.). Still not a bad run for a car ride story.

Watership Down is a story about a band of rabbits fleeing the foretold destruction of their home and attempting to build a new life for themselves in a hostile and dangerous world.  The story manages to mirror elements of both the Aeneid and the Odyssey. This is done both with the set up; a vision of coming destruction compels a young leader to gather followers and flee into the wilds, and the plot itself;  the characters have to resist temptations and dangers both hidden and overt in a long journey home. This is reinforced by the characters who match a number of archetypes. Hazel is the clever and wise leader who uses his quick wits and the ability to manage his rabbits abilities to solve their problems.  Fiver, the rabbit who gives the prophecy that starts the whole thing is the adviser with one foot in the spirit world. Big Wig is the large, strong, brave hero, confronting the dangers of the world with grit and pure raw force; being willing to fight cats, stoates, and other predatory creatures (Which totally breaks my suspension of disbelief because if you’ve ever seen stoates go after rabbits, the one thing you can hear in your mind from the other rabbits is “better you than me, buddy!”).  We also have rabbits like Blackberry whose ability to understand and grasp concepts that other rabbits can't is very helpful; and Dandelion the story teller who provides us a number of tales within the tale.  There are in fact a good number of characters in the story and if I'm gonna be honest, there might be too many characters, because a good number of the rabbits start blurring together after a couple of chapters.  That said there are rabbits that stand out like the ones listed above, but they don't get as much time on center stage as I would like so outside of Hazel and Bigwig, they seem a bit underdeveloped. However, the interactions between the rabbits and their shared struggles does help cover for that and carry the book forward.

What sets it apart from many other stories is the attention to detail to the cultural life of the rabbits and their religious and social beliefs.  In short the rabbits don't feel like humans wearing fursuits. While they're presented as close enough to human that we can understand and sympathize with them, they’re different enough that you are constantly reminded that these characters are not human and you shouldn't think of them as human.   This is partly done by the stories told within the story of El-ahrairah, whose name literally means prince with a thousand enemies. El-ahrairah serves as a rabbit folk hero, role model, and figure of hope and deliverance. The book is peppered with small tales of El-ahrairah battles with foes both supernatural and natural as he attempts to provide for rabbit-kind and show proper rabbit behavior.  He does this by out racing and out-witting his many enemies. Because if they catch him, they will kill him, but first they must catch him. We also see in the story that El-ahrairah is the combination of all heroic rabbits, as we see the actions of mortal rabbits woven into El-ahrairah tales. In this way El-ahrairah becomes the promise of immortality for rabbit-kind, while Hazel and Big Wig themselves may die and even be forgotten, their deeds will live on as part of El-ahrairah.  This is even referenced in the rabbit's creation myth, which states that while individual rabbits may die, as long as they are cunning and alert, they can never be destroyed. So even if individual heroes may be forgotten, their actions remain remembered through El-ahrairah (I’ll admit, I kinda like this).

There's a fair bit of social commentary of a sort buried in the novel as well.  We are presented with four different rabbit warrens with different cultures, structures, and mores.  For example in the first warren, the one that Hazel and Fiver led the flight from, there is a fair amount of freedom but creeping inequality and an increasingly settled social structure means that Fiver finds a ready audience for his pronouncements that they must leave.  With the exception of Big Wig and Silver, most of the rabbits who follow him and Hazel are rabbits on the margins of that society. Refusing to listen to the rabbits on the margins spells doom for that warren as it is destroyed to make way for human development. The next warren is one that has traded freedom for safety and as Ben Franklin noted lost both; it's a warren that is being... Farmed by a human being.  He leaves food for the rabbits and kills off their predators but also leaves snares about the warren to kill a portion of their population for their meat and skins. Because food is left for them, the rabbits have a lot of spare time and have developed music, poetry, and art. However because they know they live in a giant trap their art has grown depressed and morbid. This warren comes off as a combination of the Lotus Eaters of the Odyssey and the Eloi from the time machine (with the human farmer as the Morlock).  If I’m being honest, I think the growing horror of the situation is very well done (And so are the rabbits.  Mmmm rabbit stew.).  The third warren is a dystopian police state run by General Woundwort and his hand picked officers.  Using the threat of discovery by humans, they force the rabbits living within to live lives of extreme regimentation.  Feeding and emerging from their burrows in shifts and divided into sections run by officers who dictate every facet of life within the warren.  This warren is presented as a short term success of sorts; it's suffering from overpopulation. In a normal warren this would be solved by some of the rabbits going off and forming their own warren but our power mad general will not allow a single rabbit to go beyond his ability to control them.  In addition to that he even grabs any rabbit he finds and press gangs them into his warren. It's this that generates the main conflict of the novel as the fourth and last warren, the one founded by our main characters, is an egalitarian warren. Hazel is chief rabbit not because he's the biggest and strongest or because of family connections but because everyone agrees he's the right rabbit for the job.  General Woundwort cannot allow such a warren to exist and present an alternative to his paranoid prison of a society so he must destroy it, especially after the rabbits under Hazel's command successfully defy him. For that matter it isn't strength that defeats the General but cunning, trickery, and good old-fashioned teamwork.

It's another piece of commentary that the main villains of the piece aren't stoates, hawks, cats or even foxes but other rabbits.   Despite being surrounded by creatures that literally want to eat them alive, they simply cannot stop fighting each other. General Woundwort would say that he offers total safety from the creatures that would endanger rabbit-kind but he does so by imprisoning the rabbits he says he would lead.  Hazel does not offer safety but freedom and trusts in not just his cunning and skill to maintain the rabbits in his charge but in the combined efforts of his rabbits. An extra bit of irony is the fact that General Woundwort never really understands that it's Hazel who is his main adversity here.   Because General Woundwort is so focused on physical and military strength, he fails to understand the nature of his enemy and that ends up being his greatest weakness. It's an honest point that unfree societies often do not and cannot understand free ones. To use real life examples, the Soviet Union never really understood the United States and it's internal workings despite their many espionage successes.  In one piece of history I read, Soviet agents were sure that the result of Nixon's impeachment would that a Democrat from the Senate would be installed as President and were flabbergasted when Ford actually succeeded to the office. For that matter their greatest danger before running into General Woundwort was the Lotus Eater Warren, where they were almost tricked into certain death by the rabbits here, who invited them in cynically knowing that having rabbits unused to being snared would increase their own odds of survival (That sounds more like real rabbits to me).  While Predators are present in the world of Watership Down, they aren't the main danger to rabbit-kind, instead it's the dark side of their own natures that often present the greatest of dangers to them.   

As for humanity, we're presented as a cross between fey creatures and ogres.  A rabbit cannot hope to fight or bargain with us so it is best that rabbits avoid us entirely.  Our technology is beyond their ken and our motives are senseless and gross to them. All rabbits know is that we do as we wish and they suffer what they must from us.  There's a bit of an environmental message buried in the book and Mr. Adams was known for his support of environmentalism and animal rights throughout his life (he was even the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from 1980 to 1982).  That said, the book doesn't beat us over the head with it and does make a point to show humanity's capability of benevolence towards animals as well. So the rabbits and their struggles remain very much the centerpiece of the book without veering into a polemic about the evils of humanity.  I found myself really enjoying rabbit culture and different societies presented in the book and I found the characters who were developed quite enjoyable but like I said earlier there are too many characters to develop them all and that means that some areas are not explored. For example Fiver's visions or spirit quests are something I wish could have been explored a bit more.  Additionally no female character gets much time or attention, making this a very male centered drama. To be honest I don’t see anything wrong with a male centered story or even a story made up of just one gender or another. But the female characters that do exist here are shown mostly as objectives for the male characters or as a means to an end. Most of the female characters aren’t allowed to have their own agendas or characterization; which frankly drags the book down.  This might be a reflection of the time the book was written in or may be a consequence of the already massive cast but it’s still not a great way to write female characters. So it drags down the story, otherwise it’s a good story with plenty of adventure if aimed at a younger audience then usual for this review series. I'm giving Watership Down by Richard Adams a B.

Next week, because you lot asked for it, we look at the cartoon series.  Season I. Keep reading.