Book Review Contest Runner Up: Watership Down by Richard Adams

by Hal Johnson

Hal Johnson is the other runner up from this year’s Book Contest! Enjoy - FdB

Some books come with origin stories, and this is Watership Down’s: A father, accustomed to telling his children stories, told one that was, they avowed, superior to all others. He wrote it down, but when shopping it around to publishers met only with frustration. Finally it was picked up by a small press and became a surprise hit snowballing its way into a bestseller.

This is an irresistible meet-cute, but it conceals, perhaps, the essential strangeness of the book. Another way of framing the origin story would be: One day in the 1970s a WWII vet decided to use his wartime experiences to rewrite Virgil’s Aeneid with an all-bunny cast. What resulted is perhaps the final, and only truly postmodern, national epic in Western literature.

The Aeneid is itself a rewrite, of course, a pastiche of Homer’s two epic poems juggled so that Virgil’s Odyssey (the wanderings of Aeneas) comes before his Iliad (the war in Italy). It would be ridiculously anachronistic to call a two-thousand-year-old work postmodern, but the same impetus is there. Homer had so thoroughly claimed the epic that all that was left for an epigone like Virgil was to remix him.

The twentieth century would see its own remix of Homer, of course, but James Joyce was writing in the nineteen-teens and treated his subject, despite its levels of irony, with arch seriousness. A half century later we get bunnies, a fitting postmodern gambit.

Watership Down’s Aeneas is a rabbit named Hazel, who is warned, by prophecy no less, that his city, or rather warren, is doomed. He flees with a small retinue (including, like Aeneas, a smaller, weaker family member); and so begin the rabbits’ peregrinations in search of a new home. We follow the Aeneid if not beat for beat then at least in its broad strokes: Instead of stopping at, considering, and then leaving Carthage, the rabbits stop at, consider, and then leave Cowslip’s Warren. Instead of courting Lavinia and precipitating a war with Turnus, our rabbits court a doe or two from Efrafa and precipitate a war with Woundwort. In the closing pages we are assured that the new city on Watership Down will flourish into as great a destiny as might wish any emperor Virgil was kissing up to. Hazel, like Aeneas in later Roman tradition, is transported to heaven by a god.

All of this is delivered in a straightforward way that never acknowledges it’s playing a postmodern game. When I first read Watership Down as a kid I had no idea what the Aeneid (or postmodernism) was. I played the audiobook for my three-year-old earlier this year as I drove him around (it’s hard to find a book he’ll sit through that I can tolerate) and he became obsessed with a story he could only comprehend parts of, changing his name (for several months) to Fiver and insisting he was a very clever rabbit. Probably the usual way to read Watership Down is as an adventure story, or as a post-Tolkien epic. Much like your favorite fantasy novel, Watership Down contains both a helpful map and plenty of what we now call world-building: The rabbits have myths and legends (recounted at length) and a specific vocabulary (fleshed out in footnotes or, in some additions, a glossary appendix). 

But if Watership Down is an epic fantasy, it is hardly the kind of epic fantasy that prevailed in 1972. Early ’70s fantasy tended to be either pulp-based (Carter, de Camp) or New Wavey (le Guin, Zelazny), and Watership Down is neither. It stands out in part because it is more primitive, more like an oral epic (which in some sense it is): Its characters are at a pre-stone age technological level, after all, and some of Fiver’s trances are practically shamanistic. But in part it stands out because author Richard Adams does not believe this is a fantasy. After all, like the old legends, like Helen of Troy and Oedipus of Thebes, it’s set in the real world. It’s set in England.

And not a fantasy riff off England, but England with a  capital E. I mean an E even more capital than the E usually is. I mean that the English countryside has rarely been described so lushly and gratuitously as it is here. The book’s opening paragraph establishes the season solely through the description of primroses (they’re fading) and the remaining text is replete with paragraphs that run:

“The air was heavy with thick, herbal smells, as though it were already late June; the water mint and marjoram, not yet flowering, gave off scent from their leaves and here and there an early meadowsweet stood in bloom. The chiffchaff was busy all morning, high in a silver birch near the abandoned holes across the dip; and from deep in the copse, somewhere by the disused well, came the beautiful song of the blackcap [etc.].”

So many plants that barely register to me (sitting on a different continent with different flora) as plants: dog’s mercury and self-heal and kingcup; so many birds in the trees. But while these precious descriptions would be semi-pornographic in almost any other context, Watership Down justifies them. Of course rabbits, our viewpoint characters, are going to be noticing all the plants they push through, hide under, and eat. Dog’s mercury is poisonous, a trivia fact for me but a vital bit of metis for a rabbit! If Watership Down is just an excuse for Adams to wallow in the water mint and marjoram, it’s a very clever excuse.

But Watership Down is a story about England beyond just fetishistic details about the countryside. Our stalwart, plucky heroes are (typed as) English, and everyone else, the book makes quite clear, is nothing but a foreigner. The seagull Kehaar is literally Norwegian (with a thick Norwegian accent)—but Kehaar is not even a rabbit, so perhaps this is not surprising. The rabbits, though: Cowslip’s Warren is populated by Gallic decadents, creating strange new art forms as they wait to die; and Efrafa is a totalitarian state led by a violent paternal figure—mostly Nazi Germany, but perhaps by 1972 also Soviet Russia. Only the stuffy, old-fashioned warren our heroes set out from is allowed to be a slightly parodic version of a dowdy England; the rabbits that leave it (on an imperialistic adventure? For the New World? This is never really examined critically in the text) are English at their self-perceived keep-calm-and-carry-on best.

Indeed, Richard Adams claims (in a retrospective author’s note) that he based the rabbits on fellow grunts from his (WWII) wartime service, which perhaps explains their phlegmatic self-possession. But surely this is only part of the story. The characters are to some extent archetypes, to some extent cliches, but to some extent just borrowings from older books. For example, the rabbits Holly and Bluebell not only (quite obviously) “are” Lear and the Fool, they “are” Lear and the Fool in the very same way that Isaac and Rebecca from Ivanhoe “are” Shylock and Jessica. The book is, as promised, a pastiche. I keep harping on the Aeneid, but the raid on Efrafa is also “the rape of the Sabine women” from early Roman history. El-ahraihah’s adventures are modeled after Reynard the Fox’s. Fiver, back in Troy, is Cassandra.

But in the end Watership Down’s rabbits—perhaps because they are simultaneously old soldiers and fictional borrowings and characters shaped by the exigencies of their novel—become something richer than this jumble might imply. They become, that is, characters in a novel. Bigwig especially benefits here, as a naturally brave rabbit forced to enter a nightmare he is not prepared for. He starts the novel almost callous about rabbit life, suggesting (at one point) that any rabbit too weak to swim a river should be abandoned to his fate; by the time he is raiding Efrafa he insists on a policy of no-bunny-left-behind. Hazel, too, matures as a leader. He learns to listen to his rabbits’ ideas; he learns to try to draw strangers in without dominating them; he learns when to risk his own fur and when to delegate. Most “good leaders” in literature come across as irritating, and I would chafe under their yoke; but Hazel, I will admit, seems okay.

Now, a jingoistic paean to England, whether flora or phlegm, should by all rights be intolerable, but, in classic beast-fable method, the curse is taken off it because these are, after all, rabbits. And of course, in this context—compared to the Cowslip’s despair and Woundwort’s brutality—the Watership Down rabbits, for all their Englishness, are legitimately the good guys. Whether or not Aeneas actually represents the virtues of Rome (as Virgil would have us believe), his fabled piety is, from a Roman point of view, admirable. And Hazel’s ecumenical tolerance may not sound particularly English to us, but it’s hard to read Watership Down and not think, whatever this is, sign me up!

People have, in the years since 1972, written postmodern texts crammed with references to older texts—sometimes joyfully (The Name of the Rose) and sometimes with the joyless obsessiveness of a Collyer brother stacking old newspapers (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spinoffs). People have, of course, written a great many fantasy epics. George R.R. Martin may be trying to do both at once, as E.R. Eddison did before him. But few have managed to do both while also creating something very like a national epic. A century and a half after Byron declared the epic dead, and only a satirical mock-epic viable in the contemporary world, Richard Adams snuck one in the back door, a pastiche of a pastiche, an adventure novel with rabbits.

None of this would matter (in the sense that we would not still be reading it fifty years later) if the book, as an adventure novel, or even as a pastiche of adventure novels, did not work. The adventure has to be adventuresome. But here Watership Down delivers. Rabbit vs. cat and rabbit vs. fox and rabbit vs. dog. Hairsbreadth escapes and haresbreadth escapes. Signs and portents. A nighttime raid illuminated only intermittently by lightning flash.

(To take one example) near the climax of the inter-rabbit war between Watership Down and Efrafa, Woundwort, the strongman generalissimo, faces Bigwig in single combat. Woundwort is the largest and toughest rabbit in the warren he leads; Bigwig is the largest and toughest rabbit on Watership Down, and naturally Woundwort assumes Bigwig must therefore be in charge, and tries to offer him a deal. But Bigwig turns him down, pointing out that he is holding his position by order of his Chief Rabbit.

“It had not occurred to Woundwort of any of his officers that [Bigwig] was not the Chief Rabbit of his warren. Yet what he said carried immediate conviction. He was speaking the truth. And if he was not the Chief Rabbit, then somewhere nearby there must be another, stronger rabbit who was.”

At this point, Woundwort’s officers fail their morale check and start silently slipping away. 

The idea that in Hazel’s warren something unique happens, that here it is not the strong that dominate, but the worthy—it is unlikely that this is going to be England’s legacy in history, but perhaps for a moment reading this book one is persuaded that the English wish it could be.