Watership Down

Watership Down: the amazing rabbit Odyssey from the 1970s, and yes, it works.  How shall I count the myriad pleasures this book has given me in the intervening years?  The heart-in-the-mouth story-telling power, to begin with, as one exciting climax is piled on to another.  When I first read it, my favourite character by far was the dashing Bigwig, and my favourite chapters were the ones in which, like some World War II secret agent, he infiltrated the hostile warren of Efrafa to arrange the does’ escape.  I still think this section is a masterclass in how to tell a story: the mind-bending claustrophobia, the lowering threat, the way in which the best-laid plans go astray and have to be replaced by inspired improvisation, the apparently hopeless last stand and last-minute rescue ... brilliant!   On growing up, however, one learns to appreciate the organizing genius alongside the lone hero.  Hazel’s steep learning curve as he cajoles and co-ordinates his motley crew of rabbits, suiting his tactics to their characters, and finally becomes their recognised chief, is absorbingly depicted.  The third of the leading trio, Fiver, I’m not quite so sure about.  I always found his prophetic visions a tiny bit contrived: whether any modern, rational writer can really ‘do’ mysticism is moot. But in the narrative context these doubts are easily swept away.

The in-depth descriptions of the natural world seem to hold up the action at first, but on further readings are relished as providing the solid underpinning of reality for this apparently whimsical tale.  The epigraphs from poetry and prose that open every chapter are a joy in themselves, incredibly well chosen, and anchor the book without pretension in the great sea of literature. For instance, the Threarah, a one-rabbit distillation of the Establishment, whose equivocal leadership is wholly inadequate to the challenge he faces, is introduced with lines from Henry Vaughan’s Eternity that are almost more telling in this context than in the great original poem:

‘The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog, moved there so slow,

He did not stay, or go.’

The gem-like stories within the story, the rabbits’ creation myth and legends of their folk hero, El-ahrairah, the Prince with a Thousand Enemies, are endlessly apt and resonant, ranging from uproariously funny to deeply serious, as when El-ahrairah confronts the ‘Black Rabbit of Inlé’, the embodiment of death:

‘The Black Rabbit drew his claws along the floor.

‘”Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah,” he said.  “There is not a day or a night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit’s.  Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not.  But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.”’

And now the pleasure has been multiplied by being able to read the book aloud to my own children and see its language pass into family parlance – especially the bits that convey the rabbits’ touching conviction of their own centrality in the universe, the ‘Great Indestructibility of the Rabbits’.  ‘You must realise, Lord Frith, how important they are and not interfere with their beautiful lives.’  ‘Oh, Frith on the hills!  He made it all for us!’ And the ever-popular ‘Hoi, hoi, u embleer Hrair ...’  

In interviews since Watership Down became a world bestseller, Richard Adams has been at pains to downplay the ‘political allegory’ and ‘symbolic meanings’ read into the book and to emphasise the spontaneous, storytelling aspect, and he is right.  Adams the artist, letting his patterns emerge by feel, is far better than Adams the conscious thinker.  This is clearest in the treatment of the female rabbit characters.  The emphasis on male adventure to the almost complete neglect of females has earned him a lot of adverse criticism, understandably when you come to passages like this:

‘The kind of ideas that have become natural to many male human beings in thinking of females – ideas of protection, fidelity, romantic love, and so on – are, of course, unknown to rabbits ... they are not romantic and it came naturally to Hazel and Holly to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren.’

This makes it sound as if, for Adams, the only possible male approaches to the female are pedestalization on the one hand, or dehumanization (derabbitization!) on the other – you are either a shining ideal, or you are ‘breeding stock’.  Fortunately, things look up as soon as he introduces any actual female characters.  When Bigwig goes undercover in Efrafa, he is far more concerned with the reliability of the does as fellow conspirators than with their ‘breeding’ qualities.  The undoubtedly eugenic Nelthilta almost betrays the whole attempt with her big mouth (in a subtle touch, Bigwig admires her ‘spirit’, not quite realising that she is an immature version of himself – Bigwig the way he used to be before the wide world taught him better).  On the other hand, Hyzenthlay, although on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is Bigwig’s real equal in courage and intelligence:

‘Bigwig realized that he had stumbled, quite unexpectedly, upon what he needed most of all: a strong, sensible friend, who would think on her own account and help him bear his burden.’

Notice, too, that Hyzenthlay is less prone to uncritically accept the culture of her warren than are the males.  She neatly analyzes an Efrafan’s face-saving, conformist behaviour for Bigwig’s benefit.  ‘But you’re an Efrafan,’ objects Bigwig.  ‘Do you think like that too?’  To which Hyzenthlay wryly replies, ‘I’m a doe’.

Actions speak louder than words in Watership Down – and to those who are against the very idea of a male-dominated quest narrative, I would gently say that storytelling is many thousands of years old, while gender equality is in its infancy.  It may be a long time before stories catch up, and it’s a bit unfair to expect individual authors, like Richard Adams, to pull it off all at once.

What I find as disturbing, or more so, is the treatment of art and what we usually think of as civilisation.  The rabbits’ tales emerge from the ‘collective unconscious’ in a very Jungian way: handed down from one storyteller to another but with no identifiable authors.  During its travels the rabbit band arrives at a luxurious warren where the stories of El-ahrairah are considered old-fashioned.  The rabbits here go in for experimental poetry, and have also discovered the concept of visual art (‘shapes’ made with stones in a wall, meaningless to our heroes).  But this artistic development comes at a terrible price: it emerges that the warren has lost control of its fate, being fed and protected by a local farmer who sets snares around it for a constant supply of rabbit meat.  These rabbits’ advanced culture is merely a distraction from their helpless state.  Does this mean that Adams thinks that a tribal society is natural and best for humans, and that civilisation is literally a ‘snare’ and a delusion, in which our vital survival skills are atrophied by the social and technological defences we have set up for ourselves?  If he did, I would think him seriously mistaken – but in fact I think that is only one position in the complex dialectic of Watership Down, belied by Adams’s revelling in the depth of his own literary culture. 

This aspect of the story, however, was taken up with enthusiasm by the conservative journalist Christopher Booker (in The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade).  For him, Watership Down was a protest at the way our technological civilisation dehumanises us while despoiling nature – though a protest that was likely to stay on the level of fantasy. ‘It is all very well to dream of getting back to a simpler, more natural world where we might once again become fully human.  But in the conscious, outward world, the truth is that we are still doing almost everything we can to ensure that we are travelling self-destructively in the opposite direction.’  Well, as a mere ‘doe’, I have to say that Booker’s notion that we might be more fully human in a state of raw nature fails to inspire me, and indeed strikes me as false and sentimental in itself.  Humans are technological animals by nature, and the ‘drive to subject nature to our own use and comfort’ – when it results, for instance, in hospitals and libraries – is far from self-destructive, ignoble or lacking in compassion. 

Again, Adams is a more subtle storyteller than all this might imply.  The rabbits themselves are not averse to technological experiment – an old pallet that floats across a river, for instance – and human intervention more than once has a positive, rather than a destructive effect in the story.  The rabbits, of course, are human, more than anything else in their tricksterishness, their adaptability, and their playfulness.  It is more than anything the sheer spirit of play, of thought-experiment, something that would be lacking in ‘mere’ nature, that suffuses Watership Down with joy rather than doom.