Watership Down (Watership Down, #1) (Watership Down Mini Treasures S.) (Scribner Classics)

by Richard Adams

Fiver could sense danger. Something terrible was going to happen to the warren - he felt sure of it. So did his brother Hazel, for Fiver's sixth sense was never wrong. They had to leave immediately, and they had to persuade the other rabbits to join them. And so begins a long and perilous journey of a small band of rabbits in search of a safe home. Fiver's vision finally leads them to Watership Down, but here they face their most difficult challenge of all...Published in 1972, "Watership Down" is an epic journey, a stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival against the odds.

• ISBN10: 0140306013
• ISBN13: 9780140306019
• Publish Date: 26 July 1973 (first published November 1972)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 24 February 2012
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Puffin
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 480
• Language: English

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

Watership Down is one of those books that was required reading in high school, and thus has a bit of stigma attached to it for that reason alone. I’ve been thinking about rereading it for a time – for me, this was Freshman English in 2004, half my lifetime ago! I didn’t remember much about it other than a lot of discussions about allegory and metaphors, and Richard Adam’s supposed conversations about politics and society within the rabbit communities.

All that made me chuckle, because re-reading it, it opened with a note from Adams about how Watership Down came about, and it was a story he was telling his daughters in the car. No deep political message intended, at least not at the get-go. Academia always amuses me like that, because we spend so much time in literature classes analyzing the deeper meaning of fiction that it often feels like we’re overthinking it.

Don’t get me wrong, the final version of Watership Down also contains conversation about hierarchies and survival and what not, but the fact that it was created with entertainment in mind strikes a chord. We often forget that books are out there for enjoying as well as discussion.

Digression aside – Watership Down. There were ups and downs to this book. I think I liked it well enough in high school – certainly enough that I don’t have harsh memories of hating it, which is something. Revisiting the book puts me solidly in the middle. There are moments that are interesting and I am invested in the rabbits’ story. There are moments where I found myself frustrated that things were just dragging along and it seemed the book should have been over by now. I have two major complaints about Watership Down for me as a reader, and the absolute first is the lack of an overall plot. One could certainly argue that setting up a new and thriving warren is the overall plot, but the way it is written is like a bumpy road with several small subplots that are solved in a linear matter. Getting away from the old warren, finding a home for the new one, farm raid, the Efrafa raid, and so on. Generally, though? This book dragged and dragged and dragged. I just read for it to be done and I’m not quite sure why it needed to be so long.

The format works really well for a story that is told in the oral tradition. You want the sort of thing that goes up and down in tension to be told over a multi-session period. It works much less well in a written book unless that book is a book of loosely connected short stories. But this one isn’t. So there.

As for its classification as classic children’s lit… whoever decided that is foolish. This book is violent. We’ve got one rabbit at Efrafa that is badly mutilated and put on display as a warning and that’s just a taste of the harshness. It doesn’t bother me, but as a book that is regularly taught to ‘tweens, it’s something to consider. Not that they couldn’t handle it, but it certainly depends on the person….

Considering that the book is more dialogue than description, the characters are mostly alright. I quite liked Pipkin and Blackberry. I thought Fiver was pretentious and Hazel selfish. You can get behind the characters for a little while, at least, but they’re not likable enough to dismiss the very slow and ambling tone of the story as a whole.

Watership Down is interesting because it’s different, but I’m not quite sure how it managed to reach this place of being a masterpiece and taught in school. I don’t mind animals as main characters, and I feel Richard Adams presented them fairly well – they felt like rabbits, not people, and I thought that was well done. I am glad I revisited Watership Down just on a the pretense of refreshing my memory, but this really isn’t the type of book I would excitedly recommend to most people or keep in my personal library, because I was bored. It was interesting and different enough that it’s the type of thing maybe I’d borrow and pick up every decade and a half… but I think even that’s a bit generous.

[mitabird]

New rating: 12/18 - 3 stars

Original rating: 2/17 - 5 stars

[teachergorman]

If you are one of the three or four people in the English-speaking world who, like me, managed to miss this book, allow me to give you the basics. It’s about rabbits. It’s a remarkably subtle blend of anthropomorphization and well-researched naturalism. It draws heavily on great human epics about heroes and journeys and battles. Essentially, a character named Fiver is Cassandra (the character in Greek mythology cursed to always tell the truth but never be believed), but his brother, Hazel, does believe him and takes a group of rabbits on a journey. Hazel turns out to be Odysseus, only instead of returning from a war to his beloved wife, he’s using clever tricks to get his rabbits to a new warren. Then there’s Bigwig, the old warrior who is brave enough to stand up to the monstrous tyrant who wants to destroy the new warren. I guess that makes him like Achilles or Beowulf, but in his defense of the warren on Watership Down, he’s more like Hector bravely willing to give his life for Troy and his brother’s honor. No, that’s not quite right, either. Anyway, they are all great characters who deserve to have their stories told to many generations of rabbits and humans.

One of the things that struck me was Richard Adams’ insistence that the book is not an allegory for any human events. I think he’s being totally honest that he didn’t intend for any allegory, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. Perhaps it’s a testament to the human need to create stories, just as the rabbits of Watership Down tell one another stories (beautiful stories interspersed throughout the book), that we connect this story to our own experience whether the author intends for us to do so or not. When General Woundwart, the leader of the opposing warren, comes to Watership Down and rejects the offer of peace out of fear and obsession, I couldn’t help but think of times I’ve made similar (though less deadly) blunders based on pride and a need to save face. I also thought of all the human wars started due to the same base motives. It’s not comfortable to discover a connection between my own failed attempts to maintain control in situations where I should have sought a win-win and times when whole nations flung themselves at one another because leaders made the same blunders on catastrophic scales, but that’s just the kind of connection that these non-allegory epic tales of adventure can produce if we are willing to let them.

I won’t spoil the ending here in a public forum. Suffice it to say that it was entirely satisfactory in that it resolved all the issues but made me wish Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig could get caught up in another series of adventures so that I could spend more time with them.

The writing is masterful. It’s always difficult to know how much to describe the natural world in a human story, and too often writers allow themselves to wax on and on about the movements of clouds and the play of sunlight through leaves fluttering in the wind without any thought to the fact that the human characters in the story don’t give a flying photon, and thus the readers don’t either. In general, these are prime examples of the darlings that must be killed. But in Watership Down, the descriptions of the natural world are direct products of the characters’ interests and their immediate sensory impressions. Just as a description of the direction of the wind is entirely relevant in a story about sailing ships, a description of scents on a breeze really matters in this book because it matters to the rabbits. That’s a good reminder for writers; if the reader cares about the characters, he/she will care about what the characters care about. But if you spend too much time on trivialities that are unimportant to the characters, the reader will not only lose interest in the story, but may cease to like the characters, too. I’ll be giving that more thought as I revise thanks to this novel.

Do not continue to make the mistake I made for so many years. Grab a copy of Watership Down posthaste.

…after you get a copy of The Sum of Our Gods, of course.

[arronkau]

More than talking rabbits.

[Jennifer | Pushing Pages]

I would be eloquent, but no. Instead I'm just going to say TERRIBLE book. I had to read this book for a project one year in school and I could not stand it from beginning to end. Thank God I had a partner who had to suffer through it with me...