In Richard Adams’s Watership Down a dozen males bond as they flee unknown danger into certain danger in search of a better life.
The adventurers are all rabbits.
The story opens when Fiver, a clairvoyant runt, senses disaster. He convinces his big brother, Hazel, to warn the warren’s chief rabbit.
Hazel’s warning is ignored but the brothers and nine other rabbits leave the warren, ready to risk life in the open until they can find safety away from men.
Their exit is not a day too soon.
The warren is bulldozed to make way for a housing development. Only one rabbit escapes to tell the story.
The rabbits soon realize the habits they learned as kittens won’t work on Watership Down.
They learn to work together drawing on each individual’s strengths, befriend animals with whom they have common enemies, and become masters of strategy.
Adams is marvelously inventive in giving each rabbit the lapine equivalent of a personality and creating a rabbit oral tradition on which readers may eavesdrop.
Watership Down is a real place in England’s Berkshires and the landmarks that figure in the story actually exist.
Adams is equally factual about rabbit habits, drawing on The Private Life of the Rabbit by R. M. Lockley.
Adams’s work ranks with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Tokien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, although it differs from them in one significant way: Its characters are all ones we’ve all seen.
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Macmillian, 1972, 429 p.
1974 bestseller #2. My grade: A
© 2018 Linda Gorton Aragoni
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