(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)
Link of the Day
Bush's SOTU: Nixon Would Have Been Proud
Watership Down by Richard Adams: Book Review (Scripted)
4 comments:
I saw this book came up, recommended at times. Tried to pick it up and dropped it at some points too. Now I just gave it a more focused read...
Many pages in and I suspect this is the sort of book an ESL reader, one who has no strong like for British culture, wouldn't be able to appreciate - the language sure is hard to read, ironic given that it's supposed to be a book for children over there. Formal exchanges are all over, not that I really mind this (I read half of War and Peace) but I find very few to extract from the dialogues. This just reminded me of how character names being hard to remember isn't really Chinese epic exclusive or due to Kanji/Hanzi names - been a while since I last read a Western novel. I see very few things that would merit to write a story about personified rabbits - saw no peculiarity when he writes about the rabbits. Surely the novel contains lots of meanings or allegories about human societies, but I don't care for what it subtly tries to say! There should be some name for the genre or the type of this novel and I sure have an aversion against it.
So basically I'm done with the book now.
Stay tuned for my onslaught of bad takes on other books. (I have nothing to do these days.)
Yes, I've gotten the notifications for your comments on the other posts. I'll try to work my way around to giving decent replies to all of them in the next couple days.
I have a confession to make: I actually did this book as an audiobook. I'm not sure I would have had the patience to do it as a real book. (I barely had the patience to get through it on audio).
That being said, I do feel a little guilty about only doing this one as an audiobook, and so someday may try to read it properly.
There is, by the way, considerable discussion about whether this book should be read as allegory or not. (At least according to the Wikipedia page). The author argues that it isn't an allegory. And yet, sometimes it's a bit hard to see what the point of this book is if it's not supposed to be an allegory about something.
The author does seem to adhere well to the dictum "show, don't tell" - although that doesn't seem to make the novel engaging for me. I guess after all dictums are just dictums - and even for psychological novels it's just hard, if not to say no way, to write one without telling more than showing. Or maybe he actually writes well and I just fail to appreciate the descriptions.
I guess it's always nice to have a novel that doesn't try to be allegoric. Still, what he intends isn't exactly what he ends up with, and the spirit of the novel seems to resonate well with those that loves to read epic meanings out of - the kind of spirit that I happen to have an aversion against.
And you don't have to reply to those other replies out of obligation by the way. There's a lot can be said but I regret many of the comments - if those were on my own blog I would even have deleted them right after having written (subjects I detest).
I don't mind. It's interesting to get some discussion going on some of these old posts.
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