Watership Down
© 1972 Richard Adams
413 pages
A small community sits on the precipice of destruction, but the few who realize it are unable to fully warn their comrades. A small band leave everything they’ve ever known behind, to face the unknown perils of the wilderness on their own – their only resources, one another. Their goal: to find a new home. The gifts of each will be demanded in full before they have found safe harbor again, and while their potential enemies are numberless, not every friendly face along the way proves true – and their best allies come from an unexpected source. Oh, and did I mention they’re all rabbits?
Watership Down is a rabbit adventure story, but you know that already. That it involves rabbits is Watership’s most salient fact, a bit like Gone with the Wind being a romance or War and Peace being big. Although the subjects are animals, this is not a cutesey woodland adventure: the stakes are high, nothing less than survival, and the way forward is one obtained only through blood, work, and ingenuity. Adams finds a way to make his subjects relatable, with distinct personalities and a shared culture, without overly anthropomorphizing them; there are no bunnies wearing suits and smoking pipes here, no monastery in Mossflower where woodland creatures in monks’ tunics bake bread and run about with swords. (I love the Redwall series, but its premise is silly on the face of it.) The rabbits occupy the same world we live in; Watership Down is the name of a place in England, in fact, and the author includes a map to demonstrate how closely he hewed to reality in creating the rabbits’ journey.
Our main characters include young Hazel, who is beneath respectability in his warren despite his intelligence and bravery; his brother Fiver, a runt with an uncanny sensitivity to danger; Bigwig, a bruiser who was one of the few prominent males in the warren to take Hazel’s warning seriously; and more as the story progresses. Being rabbits, they are exposed to danger for most of the novel; there’s no shortage of predators – cats and foxes being the most dangerous foes, but human snares and guns also coming into play. More interestingly, though, the rabbits-on-a-journey encounter two other rabbit warrens, both of which pose unique dangers to the intrepid band.
Watership Down was unexpectedly compelling for me, in part because of Adams’ Tolkienesque use of a rabbit language and even rabbit mythology to give his characters and world a certain richness, even beyond the full descriptions of the England countryside; tales about a rabbit hero-progenitor appear throughout the novel, as Hazel and Blackberry and others try to entertain their fellows, or bolster their morale. This adds more depth and interest to a novel that would already be appealing given the premise of plucky, humble characters overcoming serious challenges through their wits and hard work. I’ll be interested to see how Tales from Watership Down further develops the setting and characters!
Reading Freely 
i read WD when it first came out and liked it a lot… and i tried some of the Redwall series but it just didn’t have the same attraction. i haven’t really understood why not, but it wasn’t very readable for me… i believe Adams wrote more books, but i haven’t kept up…
Watership Down (1972)
The Tyger Voyage (1976)
The Plague Dogs (1977)
The Girl in a Swing (1980)
The Legend of Te Tuna (1982)
Traveller (1988)
The Outlandish Knight (1999)
Daniel (2006)
The only one I’ve read is Traveler — interestingly, another animal book, that one being a history of the Civil War through the eyes of General Lee’s horse.
I read this when I was in High School back when it was all the rage. I remember enjoying it but seeing it as a allegory (like Orwell’s Animal Farm). Today, I have a problem with non-human characters who talk.
Even the Rats of NIMH? (That’s one I haven’t read in a looooooooooooooooong time!)
Sorry, no… I just don’t buy it anymore.
I *think* I have a copy of it… somewhere. Never read it though or seen the whole movie. I might dig it out of its burrow (if I can find it) and dust it off.
Its burrow, eh? 😉
Couldn’t resist….. [lol]
I don’t know why but I cannot bring myself to read a story from a rabbit’s viewpoint. My problem.
I thought it would be a little silly at first, but it surprised me!
I’m looking forward to reading this book. I’ve heard it’s sad, so I’m bracing for impact.
I wouldn’t say so. It’s an adventure, so there are a lot of tense moments, but….well, no spoilers! 🙂
Watership Down was a pleasant surprise for me to. The depth of the content was unexpected. It must be the child in me but I like animal stories from an animal POV.
Have you read the Redwall series? It was my introduction to fanstasy.
I’ve really wanted to read the Redwall series but our library (actually is one of 26 libraries which are connected) is terrible at keeping books in a series and I’ve not been able to find the earlier ones. Would you recommend published order or chronological order? I feel I should do published order (the Narnia books are better in this order I believe) but I should ask an expert!
As long as you start with REDWALL, the original, the order after that doesn’t too much matter. There are a few I’d recommend reading immediately after REDWALL (Mossflower, Martin the Warrior), but it doesn’t too much matter. All the novels are self-contained, as I remember.
Wow, I’m glad you enjoyed this! I’ve heard nothing but good things about Watership Down. I have a copy, I just feel like I have to be in the right mood. But then again, maybe not?
It definitely strikes me as a spring, fun-type reason. It’s not Wodehouse — there’s real drama and pain here — but it’s so pastoral it made me long for April.