"I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story."In 1972, an unknown British novelist named Richard Adams published his debut novel with a rather misleading title, Watership Down. After being rejected 13 times by various publisher it was finally accepted by Rex Collings, a one-man company which worked on a shoestring and couldn't pay Adams any advance, but had important connections in the London literary scene and made sure that it was read by everyone who mattered. Rex Collings believed in Watership Down; Adams credits him as the person who helped give the book its title (apparently he thought that Hazel & Fiver didn't do it justice). Everything seemed to suggest that the whole affair would be an abject failure. Watership Down was a debut work by an unknown novelist, published at a high price by a small fry who could afford only a plain dust jacket. Collings published his books in small print runs, which were then sold in specialist bookshops with little or no publicity, and the initial print run of Watership Down amounted to just 2000 copies. But this seemingly ugly duckling soon transformed into a beautiful swan; It sold quickly both to children and adults. Britain fell in love with Watership Down, and with time so did the whole world. Now tourists from as far as Japan journeying to Richard Adam's homeland to see the areas which inspired their favorite book. The quotation which opens this review comes from London's The Times, where the reviewer was barely able to contain his enthusiasm. Watership Down originally began as a serial bedtime story told by Richard Adams to his two little girls, Juliet and Rosamund. Adams later expanded it during long car journeys that he took with the girls to Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of the world's most famous bard. The story was improvised, but based on Adams's real life experience in the British Army. Adams served as a lieutenant in the 250 Company of the 1st Airborne Division, and named the Battle of Arnhem as inspiration, and the officers he served with as models for Hazel, Bigwig and other rabbits of Watership Down. When the story was finished, young Juliet said "you ought to write it down daddy, it's too good to waste!". Although Adams initially resisted, being busy with work in the Civil Service, she and her sister were very persistent in urging him to write it as a book until he finally surrendered, and then urged him to get it published. Watership Down is rightfully dedicated to these two girls, who were so generous as to make sure that their dad would share the story they loved with the whole world.Watership Down was initially rejected on the grounds that older children wouldn't like it, since it was about rabbits - which they thought was good for babies, and younger children wouldn't like it because it was written in too adult a style. Before Rex Collings decided to give it a try, Richard Adams experienced plenty of frustration with explaining that he didn't even had children in mind and that Watership Down was really about Hazel & Fiver and their rabbits, a book which anyone, young or old, could buy and enjoy, and that the age group of his audience could roughly be contained between 8 and 88. It is interesting to note that Watership Down is sold also as a children's book only in the UK - everywhere else in the world it's sold purely as a mainstream title for adults. "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."Rabbits are prey animals, and in the wilderness almost everything will try to capture and eat them; predators include foxes, dogs, hawks, racoons, owls, snakes - and humans. Luckily for them, nature has provided the rabbit with several features allowing for survival against these odds. Rabbits have eyes on both sides of their heads which give them nearly panoramic vision, allowing for detecting predators from all directions - even from behind. They can hear and smell exceptionally well, and are able to turn their ears to better capture the sounds they're listening to. Since making noises is a dead giveaway of their position, rabbits communicate with each other quietly, with the position of their ears being an important part of the rabbit language.As useful as these may be, rabbits cannot survive on sight, smell and hearing alone. And this is why nature has endowed the rabbit with its best feature - ability to achieve amazing speed very quickly. Most of their mass consists of muscle, and their strength is focused in their long hind legs - they allow them to leap as high as one meter and as far as three. An average rabbit can run between 25 to 40 miles per hour, make quick turns and even turn directions while in the air, leaving other animals in the dust.However, even this magnificent speed is not enough to protect the rabbit. Due to their low skeletal mass rabbits are very delicate and prone to injury, and can easily break their own bones if they struggle. If they kick to hard, they can even break their own backs. Stress can have a long lasting effect on a rabbit, even after its source is removed - and fear can cause a heart attack, even if the threat is not real. Their physical and psychological fragility and proneness to being preyed upon made the rabbit need a safe place to live. Some species live above ground, but the best know one - the European rabbit - digs burrows underground, and connects them into a network which is called a warren. In these warrens rabbits find safe shelter from their predators and harsh weather, store food and have their young. When they're not feeding, European rabbits spend most of their time underground.The rabbits of Watership Down are very much like ordinary rabbits - Richard Adams has studied Ronald Lockley The Private Life of the Rabbit - but at the same time they're human like, with each having a distinct personality and different characteristics. While Adams clearly anthropomorphizes his bunnies, he doesn't go the easy way of making them humans in bunny suits. His rabbits' understanding of the world around them is carefully limited to make them lapine enough - men are identified by the "white sticks" they leave behind (almost every human character in the novel smokes - it were the 70's). human inventions are understood through the mind of a rabbit, and the challenges they experience on their way are also of the type which would trouble one. All of it works splendidly though, and the language that the rabbits developed to describe everything is a small joy to see.Among many things which I found lovable and admirable in the rabbit protagonists of Watership Down is their love of stories. Rabbits love gathering together and listening to the tales of the legendary rabbit hero, their beloved El-ahrairah. El-ahrairah was a rabbit trickster and the legendary Prince of the Forest, who lived long before Hazel, Fiver and the rest of all rabbits. Together with his fellow rascal, Rabscutle, El-ahrairah uses his ample wits to commit plenty of mischief: getting lettuce out of an impenetrable fortress, outsmarting bigger and stronger creatures to achieve his goals. El-ahrairah is fast, cunning and proud, but he's also honorable and loyal to his people. The stories of El-ahrairah and his adventures are sprinkled throughout the main narrative, and serve as inspiration and entertainment for the rabbits, and as a way to find courage in hard times.A reviewer in the New Statesman praised Richard Adams for writing a big, tense, picaresque story; these three adjectives probably best describe Watership Down. People have seen in it a riff on The Oddysey, an allegory for human struggle against totalitarian oppression, fascism, the Cold War...but at its heart it is a wonderful story about a group of rabbits searching for a new home, and their efforts at establishing a warren. They provide for interesting protagonists, and as they journey goes on so do their respective roles develop. These are to a degree archetypal, but Richard Adams is careful to make sure that each rabbit retains its individual characteristics and grow as the story progresses. Relations between the characters are not black and white, as in many books for children - even though the villain figure is portrayed with obvious negativity Adams makes an effort to show why it would be influential and admired by many other rabbits, all the way to the very end. Occasionally Adams will do some authorial intrusion and explain the rabbit habits of his protagonists, but he did write this book based on the stories he told their kids, and they probably asked many questions concerning these matters - as most kids would. It's not a big problem at all and can actually be seen a nice reminded about the roots of Watership Down.It feels as if I have been writing this review for a very long time and have barely said anything I wanted to say. This happens when I encounter something which moves me and inspires me, and which stays with me and makes me experience and think and feel my humanity by doing so. Curiously, these feelings have been aroused by a book about a group of talking rabbits. But it works! By God, people, it works. Since it's summer I started to enjoy reading in a park near my home, just sitting on a bench away from the main lane in the quiet and the shade. This was where I started and finished Watership Down, and after I cleaned my eyes I wanted to immediately begin it all over again. I can't remember the last time that happened, and it's a great feeling. I can't wait to run down this burrow again and see what else I'll find there.Praise be to Richard Adams for being a wonderful father to his two little girls and a great writer who shared his beautiful book with us. 5 stars.Be sure not to miss an interview with Richard Adams, which made me like and appreciate Watership Down even more and want to seek out all his other works. It was filmed in November 2012 at Whitchurch Arts Show in the UK, where he's rocking the house at the age of 92. What a wonderful and lovable man! May he live a thousand years.
Masterful and enchanting, a timeless classic of children’s literature likely to be rewarding for most humans of the biped variety. I always avoided it, thinking why read some cutesy tale about goddam wimpy rabbits when I could have a glorious adventure with “The Lord of the Rings”, fight the evil French with Captain Horatio Hornblower, or be a space cadet in a Heinlein tale. Who could imagine that such fearful little vegetarian critters could work together under the right leaders to conquer their prey mentality and take brave action against a sea of dangers. Avoiding and outsmarting predators like owls, foxes, dogs, and cats takes skills and teamwork all rabbits can learn, but the real challenge is reading the threats from humans. Sometimes they are benign and oblivious to a bit of garden raiding, but other times they wage a brutal campaign with guns and poison. With all the dangers in rabbitty life, it helps if some with leadership and vision can take charge to chart a wise course for group decisions.Hazel is our hero with leadership skills and his friend Fiver is the one with vision (of the clairvoyant kind). Fiver has a dream that points to impending danger for their warren, which Hazel trusts to be true. They and a few others take the brave step of setting out with a small band to find an ideal and safer place to live. Their quest is a challenging adventure of the highest order, worthy of placement on the shelf with the best in literature that taps into such ancient traditions of myth and legend. Along the way they discover other rabbit societies that have made unfortunate adaptations to the dangers in life. The universal lessons about the corruption of power and about compromises which trade freedom and justice for safety are portrayed well enough to satisfy readers of all ages. Without disclosing plot, I can share a few things I love in this tale. Adams infuses enough veracity about rabbit nature and perceptions to move me beyond disbelief that they might talk and ponder human issues and concerns. That rabbits can fight predators or among themselves through kicking and biting is true, so it’s not much of a stretch to put violence of a human order into the story. Conversely, elements in the story reveal how certain rabbit approaches to life hold true for certain humans. To survive, they must be wary and use sneaky methods to go undetected. I liked how Adams has the rabbits have a tradition of telling stories of rabbit mythology which glorify ideals of trickery and subterfuge, much like Native American stories of the coyote as trickster. And I also grooved on the portrayal of rabbitty perceptions of nature, including aspects of attunement with its beauty and bounty and its continual changing. For example, here is a wonderful riff of Hazel’s about being out in moonlight: We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.In closing, I share a couple of quotes that highlight the wonder of Adams’ ability to foster thoughts in the reader about the similarities and difference between and within our species:Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
What do You think about Watership Down (1975)?
Most reviews I write just for the hell of it, for my own records and if some people like them I am just happy as a lark. For Watership Down however, I am just a little bit more ambitious. I would like to convince people who feel averse to reading a novel for children about rabbits to drop their preconception and give this book a chance. This is not a book about cute little bunnies running around eating carrots and being adorable 24/7. This is one of the most badass books I have ever read, and I have read books by Joe Abercrombie and George R.R. Martin. More importantly this is simply one of the all time great reads (in my humble estimation of course) that will stay with the readers for the rest of their days. Why, I have a memory like a sieve and I still remember it after all these years (OK, I have just reread it so that helps!) It all starts with a psychic bunny (stop laughing back there!) called Fiver who has a vague premonition of impending death and destruction coming to his warren. He convinces his best friend Hazel and a few other rabbits to leave the warren for a safer place to live (their attempt to start a total evacuation is quickly nixed by the Chief Rabbit). The first half of the book tells the story of the rabbit motley crew’s (or mötley crüe if you prefer) difficult journey from their warren to find a safe location to start a new warren. The second half is about their defence of their new warren against an older bigger warren ruled by a despotic dictator called Woundwort who is something of a monstrous mutant mega rabbit. Interspersed between the chapters are charming and wonderful folk tales about the adventures of a legendary hero called El-ahrairah.Plot, world building and characterisation are brilliantly balanced in this book. Even at almost 500 pages there is never a dull moment. Those looking for action adventures should really check out this book. There are hair raising chase scenes, espionage scenes, interspecies alliances, and a bloody fight scene that should be read with Survivor’s "Eye of the Tiger" playing in the background. On the characterisation side it is worth noting that the rabbits in this book are not anthropomorphized animals, they do not wear clothes, drive cars, watch TV etc. Yet there is also much humanity in their rabbitry, they can be compassionate, loving, kind, cruel, egotistical, melancholy etc. These humans traits are believably portrayed as rabbit traits through the incredible talent of Richard Adams. The prose is absolutely beautiful with wonderful metaphors like “an indestructible flood of rabbitry”. I can pick a great passage out of almost every page. Here is one awe-inspiring example: Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. To further distinguish rabbits from other species a little neologism is employed throughout the book, most of the words can be understood from the context they are used, if you want some extra help with these you can check out this Lapine_Glossary. You can even gloss over them without missing a beat of the book.Reading this book is a little like taking a magic potion and transforming into a wee rabbit. I am not normally all that interested in cute animals but after reading this book I really developed a huge respect for these little guys, the odds are really stacked against them yet they manage to survive and even thrive. Even though the book was written primarily for children, it is certainly sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by adults. I certainly prefer it to all the YA books I have read.Definitely worth more stars than the Goodreads system can accommodate.
—Apatt
Probably the greatest fantasy/adventure book I have ever read just happens to be for young adults and is about talking rabbits in search of a new home. I initially thought I'd be overcome with unintentional laughter and an inability to suspend my disbelief. I thought wrong. By the book's end, when this ragtag collection of refugees from the obliterated Sandleford warren reaches the end of their journey, I was figuratively elevating Mr Adams to the gold medal platform of fantasy writers, just above even the Holy Trinity of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling. Seriously.In creating a new world with its own culture, history, and folklore, nothing matches Watership Down's consistent inventiveness. Interestingly, this is a lean world, devoid of unnecessarily intricate machinations or cluttered details reflective of authorial indulgence. The characters are each distinct, richly drawn, yet refreshingly free of cliche. There are heroes and villains to be sure--"good" and "bad" rabbits as well as other animated creatures--but none lack depth or interest, none descend into parody. The storytelling pace, furthermore, is brisk, consistent, always thrilling. In short, I, without reservation, recommend this book to that broadest of all demographic groupings: children of all ages.
—Ernest
I think there are generally two classes of people when it comes to this book: those who see beyond the surface and love it, and those who just don't get it and wonder how anyone can praise a silly book about talking rabbits.Given my rating of it, I obviously fall into the former group. On the surface this is an engaging tale about a group of outcast rabbits who leave their warren at the promptings of one of their fellows who is able to foresee a great catastrophe on the horizon. Their adventures are varied and engaging, both while they trek to the place they will eventually call home (the eponymous Watership Down), and as they attempt to search for does to help re-populate their new warren from the militaristic Efrafa.Adams does a neat trick in dealing with his rabbit characters. They are not quite humans and the way they try to puzzle out the world around them in a very animal-like way makes them more than just people in bunny-suits, though at the same time they are human-like, and varied, enough to engage the reader. They have their own language (with words and concepts derived from their understanding of the world), and perhaps most engagingly, they tell stories and myths based on their beloved folk-hero El-ahrairah. These stories, peppered throughout the book as chapters, are some of the most enjoyable parts of the tale and add a depth and interest to the rabbits and their 'culture' that is very endearing.The rabbits themselves fill certain archetypal roles (the leader, the warrior, the seer, the scientist, the villain) while at the same time retaining individual characters and even developing as the story progresses. This is definitely not a children's story of 'fluffy wabbits' even if only taken at surface level; and when looked at below the surface it is a satisfying and fulfilling tale well worthy of the title "classic".Re-read, September, 2012: Yup, this is still a fantastic read. Man, that ending always gets me *sniff*. I think what really makes this story sing are the layers. Everything builds on all that came before it, whether it's plot, character, or theme. We grow to love a group of characters that may at first have seemed rather silly and what had started out as a simple here-to-there quest turns into, for me at least, something much more. Oh and one other thing: Bigwig is the man, his last stand against Woundwort is an amazing moment, but there's a reason why Hazel was Chief Rabbit.
—Terry
