Watership Down by Richard Adams

"Watership Down" is a unique book. In the beginning, it reads very short. Conversations seem short, chapters seem short, most everything seems truncated. It feels somewhat amateurish for a book proclaimed as such a classic. However, as the book progresses, this appears the be the intentional style because his characters are rabbits. He explains the psychology of rabbits some, in the book, or at least how he imagines rabbits would think. There are some points I would contend with (rabbits would probably be hyper-specific, like horses; meaning any 'new' thing is a thing to be afraid of, even if it was the same object just approached from the other side), but that is neither here nor there. That is arguable. He did do some research on rabbits.

However, back to the style, it could be that he hadn't hit his stride with the book until mid-way and the dealings with Efrafa because he becomes more fluid here. Then again, it could have been that he was better at writing the kinds of stuff that happened in the second half. I think the latter is more likely.

Still, it is a "Fine Read" if you can get over how much he uses the term "rank and file". It is nearly as good as it could be given the limitations inherent in the format that Adams used for the book. One of these limitations is that there are simply far, far too many characters! You cannot possibly keep them all straight. At times, it seems like you are expected to keep track of them all; but you can get away with not knowing anyone. However, I still find it annoying when a character is mentioned and I have to pause and say, "Ok... who's that again?" Perhaps a character glossary would have been nice, but my copy had no such thing.

"Watership Down" glosses over a lot of topics, not addressing them specifically but mentioning them in such a way that you can get a grasp on where Adams stands himself. The worst of these is his stance on the female. Like Tolkien, his book is very highly male oriented. When I read that new warrens are, in reality, often started by females and warrens are, in reality, matriarchal, his sexism is very apparent. The book also has a very karmic overtone...

Spoiler alert:

Both of these appear to me in the same way: it is in who Adams kills. The beginning of the book tries to be all "the world's dangerous for rabbits! We're all gonna die!" without killing one character. The first character to die, that it's an enemy (they die really easily because they are bad guys) is a female. Two of them die really quickly, but none of the main male characters will ever bite it. Until they die of age, of course. But like Aragorn they live weirdly long.