Our Hen House

Book Review: Watership Down

Posted on 24. Jun, 2010 by Kyle Knies in Reading the Animal

I have a meat-eating friend who I have tried to convert to veganism for years. I have told him all the facts and statistics, showed him pictures and videos of the unsupportable cruelty that is behind these foods, and most of all I have fed him the best vegan food I can make or find. He is very sensitive and cares about what I tell him, but try as I do, he continues to eat animal products. But when he finished reading Watership Down, a 1972 novel by Richard Adams about a society of rabbits in England, and told me that this book was the deal-breaker for him — that it finally convinced him to live his life without hurting animals anymore — I knew I had to read it immediately.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Hearing a description of the story of Watership Down, you might imagine that it is a children’s book, a fable about talking animals reminiscent of Beatrix Potter. This isn’t entirely untrue, as in the 2005 paperback version I read with an introduction by the author, Adams describes how the characters and settings for this book evolved from elaborate made-up bedtime stories he would tell his young children. What sets the book apart from most children’s literature is its length — in paperback it is 474 pages — and its prose, which, while simple and unadorned, is exquisitely rendered, full of rich descriptions and passages of haunting beauty and brutality. The story follows a band of rabbits who, based on the prophetic vision of Fiver, a small, unimposing buck, leave their secure home warren in the idyllic English countryside. Fiver knows something horrible will happen to their community, and after failing to convince their Chief Rabbit of its urgency, a ramshackle group of rabbits decides to embark on an uncertain journey to find a new life elsewhere. The plot takes many twists and turns, and the rabbits alternate between being blessed with life-saving luck and cursed to some very dangerous and volatile situations.

The book is mesmerizingly detailed about the intricacies of rabbit life. Adams is painstaking in his accuracy about how wild rabbits live, and although these rabbits are fully developed characters that often remind me of the British gentleman who wrote them, they are only able to do things that any wild rabbit can do. They speak their own language, Lapine, a complex and exotic-sounding language full of onomatopoeia (an insult: silflay hraka, u embleer rah!). The tradition of folklore is very important to these rabbits, who worship the Lord Frith, a blinding light that moves across the sky each day, and in the comfort of their burrow they listen intently to their storyteller Dandelion as he speaks about the fabled rabbit folk hero, El-ahrairah. Most rabbits are unaccustomed to long journeys across open land and prefer the safety of an underground burrow. It is by adapting to their circumstances that these rabbits forge a new way of life: they form relationships with a large gull, Kehaar, off his course on the way to the sea, and save the life of a helpless mouse, only to benefit from the trust and knowledge of these other species. Unlike other rabbit warrens, which are a rigid dictatorship, they make most decisions as a group, each individual placing complete trust in his companions. It is this vision of cooperation between species — the idea that all creatures can benefit from respecting each other — that is ultimately the lesson learned by the warren. The exception, of course, may be the most dangerous animals on the planet — human beings. The downs of England — a pastoral farmland of small hills and countryside — are just beginning to be colonized by men, with their hrududul (tractors or cars), foul-smelling little white sticks in their mouths, and of course, guns, snares and poison gas.

The miracle of Watership Down is the exceptional generosity with which Adams creates this rabbit universe: he does not impose a man’s point-of-view onto the rabbit’s lives, but instead imposes a rabbit’s point-of-view onto the world we see. The overwhelming sense is that humans have created the illusion that this world exists to be “ours.” There are next to no human characters in the book, only a few fleeting moments seen at a distance by the rabbits, and their strange Cockney language is less intelligible than Lapine. These interactions are all negative, and the men are always trying to find a way to “remove” these rabbits because they are on “their” land. In the book’s action-packed climax, a young human child named Lucy offers us a glimmer of hope to the possibility of what humans can help accomplish if we exercise something we have been given the unique capacity to possess in abundance: compassion.

This epic novel grabbed me by the gut and didn’t let me go for 474 pages. I was enthralled by this unique glimpse of a world — glimmering with dew and starlight — that belongs to rabbits alone. Before I started reading Watership Down, my friends and I were all assigning animals to each other that best fit our personalities. My meat-eating friend told me I was a rabbit. I felt kind of offended, thinking that rabbits were simple, uncomplicated “prey animals.” After reading this book, I realize what a great compliment this was. And by accomplishing with my friend what I was unable to do alone, Watership Down is helping us all make the world a better place for creatures big and small to live.

Photo at top of blog: from House Rabbit Society