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(More customer reviews)When I went off for my first semester of college my father gave me $100 with which to buy textbooks, which certainly dates me. After buying everything for my classes I had enough money left over to buy a hard cover copy of "Watership Down" by Richard Adams for $6.95, which for people who love books is certainly a great way of representing the ravages of inflation over the years. I decided to read a chapter of "Watership Down" each night before going to bed, thereby marking the beginning of my obsession with reading a chapter of something each day that has nothing to do with school. When my dorm roommate became as hooked on the story as much as I was he and I would read chapters aloud. Fifty days I got to the book's epilogue with the same sort of sadness that it was all over that I experienced getting to the end of the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Living in the Sandleford Warren with its Chief Rabbit and Owsla maintaining a comfortable social order, Hazel and his little brother Fiver are content enough. But Fiver has the gift of prophecy, and when he warns that the warren has to be abandoned right away or they are all going to die, Hazel and a small circle of friends believe him and leave despite the fact that have no idea where they are going. Fiver envisions a great high place where they can be happy and safe, but there are a series of imposing obstacles to overcome, from not only humans and predators, but other wild rabbits as well. Consequently the basic story of "Watership Down" is the ancient quest for home, although in this case it is a new home that represents a wild rabbit's idea of utopia.
The greatness of "Watership Down" rests on the sense of realism that Adams brings to his story wild rabbits. Adams studied Lapine life in R. M. Lockley's "The Private Life of the Rabbit" in order to keep his rabbits real. But beyond the way rabbits live in nature Adams provides them with a history and a culture, represented not only in the stories they tell of El-ahrairah (the Prince with a Thousand Enemies), but their beliefs in Frith the lord sun, and their simple games such as bob-stones. When confronted with sticky situations they are able to use their ingenuity to come up with surprising solutions that are still within the realm of possibility for real rabbits. I always liked the way Hazel, Blackberry and the others have to work out these puzzles, straining for a leap of intuition and cognitive insight that seems just beyond the reach of their relatively simple minds. So while these rabbits are capable of doing more than others of their kind, Adams keeps their efforts remarkable rather than magical.
We also pick up a few choice words from the language of the rabbits (e.g., "silflay" is to go above ground to feed, "homba is a fox), which ends up paying off with one of my favorite moments in the book when Bigway utters a simple but effective curse. The lesson of the story is clearly that bigger does not mean better, for Hazel is neither the strongest nor the smartest of the rabbits that he leads, but he had the best qualities of leadership. Each of the rabbits that join Hazel on the quest to find Watership Down and build a new life there offers something to the ground, and the distinctive personalities that Adams creates for each of them adds to the novel as well.
Of all the books that I have that I like to pick up from time to time and read again my favorite parts, "Watership Down" is the oldest. As a children's story is it simply one that is too good for most children, but without the deep allegorical elements that afflict so many other great children's stories. Perhaps that is why this novel has become so beloved, because it speaks to the child in all of us and the simple virtues that we all want the world to embody. Having read the book again from start to finish, I was not surprised to find that it is still as good as I thought it was when I first read it many years ago.
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