When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you’re supposed to have a “hook,” an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question. Maybe an anniversary-of-publication, maybe an authorial death, maybe a Nobel Prize. I have none of those for this column, but I think my hook is better: I’m writing about “Watership Down” because I’m reading Richard Adams’s 1972 novel to my daughters, and in that reading I’ve decided that the book has real relevance to the crisis of the liberal order in the Western world.

Comes the reply: You mean the book about the … rabbits?

Yes, I do, and that frequency of that reply is another reason for this column. Adams’s novel was a huge best seller in its day, it’s been the basis for an animated movie and a recent Netflix mini-series, and it’s obviously well-regarded and much-loved. But I find that many educated people who pride themselves on being cultural completists (whether that means the whole of Shakespeare or the entirety of Harry Potter) haven’t read the book, and indeed have a mild allergy to the idea: Perhaps because they assume it’s just too childish, too Beatrix Potter or Brambly Hedge, or perhaps because they’ve seen a snatch of one of the adaptations and can’t quite take seriously rabbits arguing with one another in actorly English accents.

To these doubters I offer varying suggestions. The anthropologically inclined can approach the book as a portrait of a lost hominid subspecies, complete with its own mythology and linguistic tics, and gradually accustom themselves to the references to hind legs, ears and burrows. The religious can just approach it as an extended parable. The ecologically minded can come for the very English style of environmentalism, the lyrical depiction of the natural world, the evocation of nature’s harsh harmonies and the dissonant cruelty of humankind.

But really the reader should just come for an exercise in epic storytelling — Odyssean adventure and Aeneidan dramaturgy — that exceeds most modern imitations of the classics. One of the virtues of reading a narrative aloud, to children or indeed to anyone, is the way that vocalizing a story clarifies its power, especially in the quavering passion that you try to keep from your voice (because you don’t want your kids to think their dear dad is too emotional) but that bleeds through in spite of everything. And with a hundred pages to go I can already tell that when I get to the climax of “Watership Down,” I’m going to be a wreck.