Watership Down by Richard Adams

(Book Review)

A few years ago, I was at some festival or other in Japan and I saw another American friend reading this book. “Watership Down?” says I. “What is that, some sort of book about a naval battle?”

“What? No!” he says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of this. It was one of my favorite books as a child.”

Well, somehow or other I managed to make it all the way through childhood without ever hearing of this book. Although, as often happens, once I heard of it the first time, I began to notice it popping up all over the place.

For example, I notice that many of you, my fellow bloggers, have this listed as one of your favorite books. Also Stephen King made a reference to “Watership Down” in “The Stand”, which I read last spring.
So, I decided to make up for lost time, and read this children’s classic as an adult.

If you, like me, have been oblivious to this book, I should explain that the title is a bit misleading. It has nothing to do with ships on water going down, or anything like that. “Watership Down” is apparently the name of a geographical area in England where the book takes place. This book is actually about a bunch of rabbits.

And, although I’ve called this a “children’s classic”, it is actually written more for the young adult, pre-teen audience. In the introduction, the author talks about his trouble getting the book published, because publishers thought young children wouldn’t be able to read it, and older children wouldn’t be interested in a book about rabbits.

And, with apologies to the many fans of this book, after reading it I think I come down on the side of the publishers. Not that it matters because this book has obviously done quite well and gone on to become a modern day classic without any help from those stuffy publishers or me. But I can’t imagine myself reading this book as a pre-teen. Once your reading level has become that advanced, there are so many other interesting things you could be reading with your time. I found this book just sort of blah.

It is, however, the kind of thing I could easily imagine a teacher reading to me. Or being assigned reading in middle school. It just feels like the perfect kind of “school book” that teachers or school librarians would go nuts over. There’s a journey in which characters develop and under go changes. There are some life lessons learned. And it’s very inoffensive. Very little violence, unless you count the rabbits fighting each other, and throughout the whole book almost no one dies.

My main criticism of the book is that it was too long for the type of story it was telling. The author adds a lot of realism to this book, so that simple things, like crossing the river, become a big deal for these small rabbits. That was interesting at first, but by the end I wished these rabbits would just overcome their difficulties a lot quicker.

The strong point of this book, however, is that the author does a very good job imagining the world as a rabbit might see it. The rabbits have their own mythology, folk heroes, and language, all based around the fact that rabbits are food for just about every other animal in the forest. So they’ve created this mythology about how the thousand enemies are always trying to do them in.

Despite the fact that the author states clearly in the introduction that he does not mean this story to be taken as any sort of analogy, it is hard not to see parallels between the different types of rabbits and the different types of human societies. And whether intended or not, parts of this book do seem to reflect Richard Adams own experience as a British World War II veteran, with the good rabbits making a last desperate stand against the “nazi” rabbits.

However these nazi rabbits are in the vein of the “Indiana Jones stock villain” nazi rabbits. Examination of the nature and causes of fascism found in “1984” or “It Can’t Happen Here”, will not be found in “Watership Down.”

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The Yakuza is a 1975 post-noir gangster film written by Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader and Robert Towne and directed by Sydney Pollack. Following a lackluster initial release, the film has gained a cult following. The film has influenced such contemporary movies as Black Rain (1989), Brother (2001), Kill Bill (2004), Into the Sun (2005) and Blade Runner (1982)

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