Watership Down

Watership Down

For a best-selling novel Watership Down (1972) did not have an auspicious start. Conceived in the late 1960s Adams found it difficult to find a publisher willing to accept his novel about Rabbit life, and it was not until the Penguin (actually, Puffin) edition of 1973 that the novel began to take off (largely on the basis of recommendation amongst parents anxious for suitable reading for their children). It was the film version (together with its successful soundtrack), which assured the novel's success, and made the novel a phenomenal best-seller. Even Adams himself was apparently astounded by the success of the novel, although his subsequent attempts to follow up this success, in The Plague Dogs and Shardik, have not proved to be as successful.
Watership Down is a novel about Rabbits, just as Animal Farm is a tale about cows and pigs! In retrospect it is possible to place the novel within a tradition of anthropomorphic tales of animals, including Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows and possibly also Tolkein's The Hobbit. One of the strengths of this sort of novel is that its use of the animal perspective provides a kind of 'defamiliarising' slant on human life and values, and Watership Down is no exception to this. It is a novel which can be read as one of the first modern 'Green' novels, achieving an ecological awareness through the reliance on the point of view of the rabbits, and allowing us to see the modern technological and industrial world in a new, fresh and disturbing way, from the vantage point of an idealized and almost Elizabethan vein of English rural pastoralism. It is also a novel that replays mythic and universal human values in the tradition of the 'heroic quest' narrative: Hazel and his groups attempts to find a new home bears some comparison with both The Odyssey and the Book of Exodus. But Watership Down is also an emphatically social and even 'political' novel, in its treatment of social values and different types of society. As we shall see, it is possible to see the novel as an allegory, in the manner of Animal Farm, with its portrayal of three very different rabbit societies, and with the novel offering a very pointed preference for the final conservative/liberal democratic consensus of life at Watership Down at the end of the novel.
These three slants ('Green', 'Mythic' and 'Political') on the novel have, of course, been picked up by various critics, and I would like us to be able to explore each of them so that you can make up your own mind about which you prefer. Before that it is worth bringing in some relevant critical commentary which shows how the novel has been seen. Fred Inglis, for example, makes the following comment on the novel:
"There is, as they say, something for everyone. For the intellectual child or adult there is rabbit lore... and there are the makings of other cultures. Crossing into this territory, there is ecology and the heady stuff of the conservation polemic, lapsing at times into an involuntary parody of The Observer Book of Wild Flowers. Woven into this thick Technicolor, with all its living detail... is the war thriller."
Christopher Booker, in his survey The Seventies, picks up on the novel's aspirations towards 'mythic' status, transforming 'a stretch of our own, familiar, Home Counties countryside into a vast, seemingly mythic, realm':
It takes a great feat of the imagination to transmogrify the contemporary English countryside, with its broiler farms, barbed wire fences, motorways and housing estates, back into a 'faery-realm' of romance and high adventure. But by diminishing his heroes to rabbit size, it is that which Adams has achieved - thus creating the most successful 'pseudo-mythic' landscape since the imaginary world conjured up by Tolkein."
The most interesting and revealing comments, however, have come from Adams. He writes:
In a sense.... the book is about my war. I must confess that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath."

It is even more revealing that Adam has commented that the character of the bunny-hero, Hazel, was actually based on Adams' commanding officer in the war! Given that the novel is about a group of rabbits and their adventures in the Berkshire Downs, this reference to the war might seem little short of bizarre, until one starts exploring the parallels: Hazel and Co. have to take on a totalitarian regime (led by the fascist General Woundwort), and to see through the decadent and therefore dangerous ('Weimar Republic) world of Cowslip's warren, in order to establish a new and viable rabbit community based on values of tolerance, meritocracy, freedom, order and security, and a community also that is 'at one' with its environment and the spirit of rural continuity represented by Watership Down. Christopher Pawling, in his article in Popular Fiction and Social Change, takes the parallels too far, I think, when making (admittedly semi-humorous) allusions to Hazel as 'Biggles' and 'Bulldog Drummond', but the parallels are there. Pawling comments that Watership Down is a tale which "focuses on the values of male comradeship and leadership in wartime". He comments that "in pure boys' adventure style, Hazel's band manage to outwit an enemy which is superior in numbers by employing secret weapons such as Kehaar the seagull who provides air cover at crucial moments, and the little mouse who leads resistance behind the enemy lines.". He goes on to quote from Richard Boston's summary of the novel:

"Hazel did a good turn to a mouse once. As a result we have the local population on our side, providing crucial intelligence about enemy group activities. This underground resistance movement is made up of comic little foreigners who speak what is either organ-grinder Italian or onion-seller French. 'Is a plenty good a rabbits 'ere, is all my friends,' says the mouse who must surely be wearing a blue beret."

Of course it's easy to mock, and light-hearted though perspectives such as Boston's may be, they don't fully do justice to a novel which manages to be moving, entertaining and insightful at the same time. Adams' portrayal of the rabbits' mythology, folklore, culture and "religion" is extremely well done, and lifts the novel from subsequent imitators such as William Horwood's portrait of mole life in the 'Duncton' saga.

To take us into these issues I'd like us to work through the following:

Draw out a rough schematic view of the novel in terms of the places (Sandleford, Cowslip's warren ...etc) and, for each of these places, provide a brief one-sentence summary of the place, its characteristics, and what happens there. From that you should be able to draw out a rough sketch of the narrative's shape and some of its concerns. Does the novel appear to be a picaresque novel, episodic and with little apparent shape as such, or does it seem to be a quest narrative?

Perspectives on the human world. What strike you as the insights into human society which emerge throughout the whole novel? Look particularly at the ways in which the novel portrays human actions, achievements and values (the "smoking out" at Sandleford, the rabbit "awareness" of nature (p. 56) contrasted with human attitudes, the comments on industry and human social life, the episode with Lucy saving Hazel's life...). Does Adam's use of the rabbits' points of view provide a corrective or alternative view of human life and values? In what ways do you feel that Adams is consciously attempting to lead us into particular views of human culture in providing us with these perspectives?

Rabbit culture and ways of life. Adams obviously decided to provide us with this partly anthropomorphic account of rabbit life (i.e., making them almost humanized figures), rather than presenting them as completely 'other' to the human world. What do you notice about the ways in which Hazel's values are presented and those of the other rabbits? What strikes you about the portrayal of their culture, religion, beliefs and folklore? Is it significant that these rabbits do have a culture in which religion and mysticism play an important part? What particularly do you make of the 'Epilogue', in which Hazel is summoned into the next life - is it mawkish sentimentality or authentic and moving?

Four rabbit societies. In the course of the novel we are introduced to four contrasting societies: the initial order of Sandleford warren, the languorously decadent world of Cowslip's warren, the totalitarian regime of Efrafa, and the final order of Watership Down. What characterizes each of these four 'orders' and what does the presentation of these worlds tell us about the concerns of the novel and its preferred values? This is, of course, one of the most significant dimensions of the novel. I would suggest that Adams's preferred world is the final order of Watership Down, with its combination of liberal tolerance and mutual respect, liberty, order and harmony, rural feudalism, a conservative sense of social continuity, and an enlightened mysticism. For each of the societies look particularly at attitudes towards nature, attitudes towards sexual and gender relationships, religion and mysticism, social cohesion, and the basis for social order within the community. In looking at Efrafa I would pay particular attention to the characterization of General Woundwort, and in Cowslip's warren look at the poetry which Silverweed says aloud (Ch 16).
In an interview published in 'The Observer' (1971) Richard Adams commented that Watership Down was written to affirm the 'dignity of the child'. Do you find any evidence for this within the novel? If so, do you find it significant?

In the same interview he described his political views as "those of the great army of ordinary educated middle class opinion which finds nothing to support it in the trendy media which runs round chasing its tail all the time." He goes on to lament the lack of 'moral authority' which is prevalent in British society in the early 1970s, and saw this as a danger to established family values and its way of life. Do you see this as being significant in terms of the "message" of Watership Down? And do these attitudes and values have any bearing on the success and popularity of the novel?

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