Watership Down

Young adult rating

Older adult rating

A 1972 adventure novel in which the protagonists are rabbits

In this occasional series, we look back at our first pop culture loves.

When a friend first suggested Watership Down as reading material many years ago, I was skeptical.

I wasn’t alone. Publisher after publisher had turned down British author Richard Adams before a small, independent firm took it on in 1972.

The book won a couple of literature prizes before being adapted into a film six years after its publication and later became a television series, which ran for three seasons. Adams wrote a sequel of sorts — a series of short stories called Tales From Watership Down — in 1996.

I read the book as a young adult back in the early 1980s and, despite some initial hesitation — after all, it’s a tale where the main characters are rabbits — I plowed right in. I was very glad I did.

Adams drew some of his inspiration from a book by British naturalist Ronald Lockley called The Private Life of the Rabbit. (The two became lifelong friends.)

The rest, including a language he called Lapine and the plot — about a small group of intrepid rabbits who struggle to find a new home and then struggle mightily to keep it — comes from Adams’ own rich imagination.

I was soon engrossed as I followed the travails of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and a handful of others as they leave the security of their warren to find a new home.

Fiver, the runt of his particular litter, is imbued with a sort of extrasensory perception that tells him his current home is doomed and he’s proven right before long.

The first warren the rabbits come to proves to be a tender trap of sorts, a place where the bunnies are fat and seemingly content, but it holds a terrible secret.

When the all-male band finds its way to Watership Down — which is a real place is south England (“down” is a British word for a rolling hill) — they realize there can be no future without does.

When the group locates a second warren called Efrafa with the help of a grateful gull, their requests to bring away some females are sternly rebuffed.

Efrafa may be well-organized and well-hidden from the eyes of humans and elil — the term Adams invents for predators like foxes and stoats — but it’s also a prison where siflay (grazing) is strictly controlled and does routinely absorb their unborn babies into their bodies rather than bear them.

Hazel’s group soon earns the eternal enmity of Efrafa’s dictatorial leader, General Woundwort, leading to a final bloody and suspenseful confrontation.

After reading the book again after more than three decades, I have to say it holds up surprisingly well.

Adams’ prose is rich in detail, especially about the vast variety of colourfully named plant species in that part of the U.K. It’s also rather leisurely, with the book clocking in at almost 500 pages.

Adams also creates a fascinating mythology for the rabbits, who worship a supreme being called Frith, fear a figure of death known as the Black Rabbit of Inle and revel in the tales of a legendary trickster rabbit named El-Ahrairah.

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The book also serves as a powerful allegory about the nature of tyranny and the devil’s bargain we undertake when we give up personal freedom for security.

It’s a lesson that resonates especially now, in a post-Sept. 11 world, where our governments seek to chip away at civil rights in the name of protecting us from the evil of terrorism.

If there are flaws, they are minor ones. The dialogue among the rabbits is vintage English public school (which actually means private school) and though the language is rather quaint, it does feel outdated and archaic. (There’s a reference to the purported Irish penchant for strong drink that is sure to offend Emerald Islanders).

Even the main characters like Hazel and Bigwig aren’t particularly well-drawn and there are so many of them that it’s difficult to differentiate between characters like Bluebell and Dandelion.

But Adams’ novel is so beautifully wrought and so wonderfully engrossing, it shouldn’t be pigeonholed as children’s literature. I’ve read it twice as an adult and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone seeking a challenging read that combines inspired imagination, captivating storytelling and important life lessons.