Watership Down

Have you read Watership Down? If not, why not?! It's amazing and beautiful and exciting and filled with adventure and adults can read it and kids can read it too (if they're not too easily scared) and oh... I just think it's one of the best books ever written. I would place this in my top five favourite books ever.

Basically, it's about a bunch of rabbits who flee their warren after one of their number has a premonition that it will be destroyed. The rabbits must trek across the countryside to find a place to start a new warren. After a disturbing encounter with some strange rabbits they eventually find Watership Down, an ideal place to re-settle, but their troubles are only beginning... a nearby warren of rabbits are about to make things very difficult for them.

It might not sound like much, but Richard Adams virtually created a whole genre with this book. The rabbits are not really humanised all that much, they remain very much rabbits and Adams has gone to great lengths to build them a suitable culture and mythology to make them realistic, even inventing for them a language called 'Lapine'. At times it reads like a fantasy novel, especially when the rabbits encounter other species or groups of rabbits at odd with their own ideals, but there is no magic or elves or anything along those lines. The closest the book comes to the genre is in its use of the rabbit mythology and their mythical hero, El-ahrairah, with Adams incorporating the trickster-hero archetype and many other facets of folklore into the fibre of the story.

Also, Adams' treatment of the other warrens that the rabbits encounter is kind of frightening in the way it reflects the messed-up governments that we sometimes settle for just to get by, in particular fascist and tribute-paying states. There are subtexts at work here that deal with the destructive nature of governments that rely on religion and tyranny to exert control over their subjects. It's not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a book about rabbits, but this is part of what makes it such a fascinating and astonishing read.

That sounds kind of heavy, doesn't it? Rest assured, whilst it can sometimes be disturbing for a book primarily concerned with talking rabbits, it still remains very much an adventure story. An epic one at that, and it's very satisfying and enjoyable and just writing about it here has made me want to go and read it all again.