‘ And Frith called after
him, “El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it
so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and
whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you,
digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of
tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.” ’
[Excerpt
from Watership Down, Penguin, pg. 40]
Watership
Down is a book about rabbits. They are fluffy and they are
cute, with little twitchy noses and big sticky-up ears, and they lollop along
with their bounding gaits and they nibble the grass. This is what every child
knows about rabbits, so when Richard Adams presents them as terrified creatures
battling to survive in a hostile world, fighting with one-another tooth and
claw and thinking only of their imminent deaths and the necessity of sex, said
child might be very surprised at what they hear.
The story: Hazel and Fiver are two wild rabbits living in
rural England. Fiver is a small and timid little rabbit, yet seems to receive
random visions of the future in which he sees their warren being destroyed.
Fortunately for him his tougher, shrewder brother Hazel takes him seriously,
and after they fail to convince the chief rabbit to evacuate, Hazel assembles a
group of other discontented rabbits and they set off to found a warren of their
own. Among the group are the clever Blackberry, Dandelion the storyteller, and
the tough fighting-rabbit Bigwig. Guided by Fiver’s foresight, they journey
overland for whole miles, plagued by men, roads, dogs, weasels, foxes, badgers,
hawks, crows and even other rabbits, until they finally arrive at the hill of
Watership Down. And that’s just the first fifth of the book. Having braved an
overland hike, by no means an easy thing for a group of rabbits, it only occurs
to them afterwards that they neglected to bring any females with them. Rather
than let their warren die out within a generation and so lose everything they
had worked so hard to build, Hazel and company must locate a sizeable number of
does (female rabbits), and convince them to settle at Watership Down with them;
a task that can only be achieved at the neighbouring warren of Efrafa, and by
dealing with the tyrannical and bloodthirsty rabbit General Woundwort.
I like the way that this book tells a story from a
rabbit’s-eye perspective. It’s by no means a world of sunshine and fairy dust,
as Walt Disney would have wanted it told, but is instead a brutal and
terrifying place where everything and anything is out to kill and eat you. As a
rabbit, one is constantly on guard, under stress; everything in the world is
huge and hostile, and one false step could lead to death. In addition to this,
because the rabbit’s world is much smaller than that of other creatures’, there
are so many things that Hazel and his companions do not understand. The concept
of a raft, for instance – of a large thing that floats on water, which could be
used to support other things to float on water – is something that completely
flummoxes Hazel when he first sees it.
The world of the rabbits is enhanced by the occasional
intrusion of some sort of ‘rabbit language’, in which odd words, terms and phrases
are occasionally slipped into the narrative. It’s by no means on the scale of
Tolkien and his ‘Elvish’ languages, and I’m not sure it does all that much to improve
the overall texture of Adams’ rabbity world, considering that rabbits would not
have a spoken language anyway – it seems a little unnecessary to conjecture
about whether or not they would need specialised spoken words for things. There
are however two words in particular that are used most often, and have the most
potential use within the story as well as in English; those are Owsla, the generic term for a rabbit
warrior caste, whose role varies from warren to warren between a simple police
force, right up to an army. The other is silflay,
a beautiful word that simply means ‘to go above-ground and feed’. Rather than
going topside to eat, one just has to silflay.
If there is something about the book that I do not like,
then it is the actual style of the writing, the telling of the story. There’s
nothing bad about it, except maybe it feels a bit stilted at times, a little
formal and too devoted to telling rather than showing, which makes it feel
somewhat slow and rather grey at times. This makes the characters seem a bit
dull; by no means lifeless, they do however take a while in gaining any higher
merits as characters in their own right. As a criticism this is flimsy, I know;
and that’s because it is. I am doing no more than nit-picking, because
otherwise this book is nothing less than a solid, well-crafted piece of modern
literature worthy of unending praise; yet when I read it through, I could not
shake off one or two little niggling doubts about it. But it’s really good,
believe me; I’m just trying to explain why I was not wholly bowled off my feet
by it. Think of it as an antique silver sugar-bowl, gorgeously crafted and
patterned, but a little scuffed and unpolished in places. Something like that
I’d still happily put on display, and anyone who sneers at it can kindly get
out of my tree-house.
What I said before about the characters, about them being a
little underdeveloped and some of them perhaps being a little interchangeable
in places, ignore it. Watership Down is
not a short book, and as in the case of The
Iliad which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, you get to become familiar with the characters as they slowly take
on a life of their own. Though Hazel is bit of a boring protagonist, as the
story progresses you can’t help but take on a respect for him, and that’s
nothing compared to how one feels about the brash and up-and-coming Bigwig when
he finally faces down the General. By the time that Woundwort and his various
cronies enter the story, each character has grown into such an entity in their own
right that we are left in no doubt as to what is happening, and how tense the
trials have become.
And boy do things become tense! From the early chapters in
which the rabbits must navigate the life-threatening hazards of rural England,
through to the night-raids on Nuthanger Farm and the eventual confrontations
with Efrafa, the story is very good at ramping up the stakes – somehow making a
simple hike for survival pale into insignificance when the survival of the new
warren is on the line. The climax of the book is awesome, by the way, and takes
on almost Homeric proportions as the characters of Bigwig and Woundwort prove
themselves to be something of a modern-day Hector and Achilles. It is by no
means a book that peaks too early, and I can only stress how, as Watership Down gets going, it really
gets going.
Altogether, I feel that this book is a story about
coöperation between rabbits in the face of adversity. The rabbits have to work
together to survive, and they learn to adapt in ways which rabbits would not
ordinarily be able to do; such as boating, construction of the elaborate
‘Honeycomb’ in the warren, Bigwig’s leadership when dealing with Feline
aggression, and even General Woundwort’s uncanny management tactics in Efrafa.
But the best illustration of this is through the character of Kehaar the
seagull, whom Hazel and Bigwig befriend by offering food and shelter. Hazel
recognises the many limitations that rabbits have due to their size, timidness
and lack of flight, and by doing Kehaar a good turn he gains a powerful ally
for his warren. Kehaar on his part becomes a most useful friend, going above
and beyond the repayment of a favour by essentially giving the rabbits a means
to survival, fighting on their behalf as their own secret weapon. Kehaar is one
of the best characters in the book, strange and alien to the rabbits, a little
scary and difficult to understand at times, yet he is a firm friend and more
than worthy of respect.
All in all, Watership
Down is a ruddy good book; maybe a slog at times, it is nevertheless a good
and rewarding story, profound at times and gripping at others, filled with
originality, poise of character and a cracking finish. In here we find some of
the most humble creatures of all, the lagomorphs, treated with as much keenness
and respect as most writers give to their fellow humans, and so I can give it a
clean bill of health. Read this book.
Biblioship Down
Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Penguin. (1974 [First
Published 1972])
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