To Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon
Ah Watership Down. Finally, I’ve come across a classic. I’ve read it before but had sort of forgotten it, although there were one or two sections of the book that I remembered. I had seen the cartoon too and also vaguely remembered it. I was very surprised at how good the book is.
The story begins with Fiver, a small rabbit who has an awful vision that he can’t interpret but he knows that the rabbits must leave their warren immediately to avoid a tragedy. No one believes him apart from his brother, Hazel and they manage to convince a small number of rabbits, including one Bigwig, to join them and set off on a journey. A journey always makes a good story, in which the journey taken is not just the physical one. It’s the perfect tool for character change. As we all know, being out in the open away from the warren can be a very dangerous place indeed for rabbits, so this story is about how the rabbits try to find a suitable place to live, whilst traversing all the dangers they encounter, then finding female rabbits to reproduce with. The book culminates in Bigwig, one of the protagonists, trying to liberate female rabbits by infiltrating a prison-like warren dictated by a ruthless leader called General Woundwort. As the name suggests, the General organises his warren like a prison guarded by regiments and there is a clear hierarchy of power. Each rabbit is bitten and depending on where he is bitten, he is allocated into a Mark, a group of rabbits who are guarded by officers and sentries who are overlooked by a Captain. Above the Captain are the Council rabbits who look after an area in the warren, e.g. one is responsible for feeding, one for breeding etc. Similar to a dictatorship in real life, the ordinary rabbits suffer whilst the ones in power have privileges, which makes ordinary rabbits aspire to become an officer, which self-perpetuates the whole system. This book is about survival and it makes for great reading.
Adams clearly did his research about rabbits and he credits the book The Private Life of the Rabbit written by, and very respectfully referred to as Mr R M Lockley. What was good about this book was that not only did I believe that these were actually rabbits I was imagining, but Adams managed to make me care and sympathise with these rabbits as if they were human characters. It is a very clever device as I was totally consumed by the action and willed the rabbits to succeed in sticky situations. The way Adams did this was by using the usual character devices: insight into characters’ feelings and motivations, distinctive character traits and idiosyncratic ways of speaking. Even the peripheral characters have one or two sentences about them that sum up who they are which is emphasised by their actions. What made the rabbits comparable to humans was that Adams gives them a language and a belief system. Like other writers who try to create a different world, Adams copies Tolkien by giving the rabbits their own language so that we humans, have to be told what each lupine term means. He does this by using footnotes to tell us how to pronounce words and their definition. The rabbits also tell each other stories of El-ahrairah, a cheeky and mischievous rabbit who was the prince of the rabbits. Like a naughty child, he tries to avoid and outwit Frith, the creator of the world. El-ahrairah reminds me of the Monkey King (the cheeky monkey in the 70’s cult classic Monkey Magic or for the more literary, the cheeky monkey in the Journey to the West, one of the four great classical novels in Chinese literature) as he is naughty but ultimately a good rabbit. The myths inspire the rabbits in their plans to help them ro rescue female rabbits from General Woundwort. At one particularly tense fight in which Bigwig is blocking the entrance to his warren against General Woundwort, Bigwig’s friend, Bluebell is telling a story about El-ahrairah talking to a fox to calm the does. It is a vicious fight and when General Woundwort is winning, he tries to get Bigwig to join his side. This is when Adams mixes the dialogue between General Woundwort and Bigwig with El-ahrairah and the fox. This is the only time in the book when the myths and the main story collide. It creates drama and suspense and works very well. He also uses other stories to reflect the action in the main story – every chapter begins with a quote from other writers such as Shakespeare and Yeats.
I could go on (and I clearly have) but I realise that this may bore some readers so I’ll cut it short. Adams’ sense of drama and how he manipulates the story and its format is very clever. The urgency of life and death and how one desperate plan relies on another and how each intersperes one with another, makes for a gripping read. So much so, that I missed my stop on the train and had to get off the next station. I also ran the risk of walking into lamposts by trying to read whilst walking to work. For me, this is clearly a sign of a great book.
The Reading Marathon 