Watership Down
By Richard Adams
Publication Year: 1972
Type: Fiction
Genre: fantasy, adventure
Read on 2019-09-10
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★☆
Found this pristine paperback edition at a thrift store in my hometown and semi-recognized the title and then just died laughing at the back summary which is so epic but then you discover a few sentences in its all RABBITS. Super super pleased with how truly epic this tale about rabbits indeed turned out to be, a sweeping semi-episodic tale of an Odyssey of rabbits, with very strong (as in well written) archetypal characters reminiscent of Les Miserables.
I was a bit troubled by the really casual way the rabbits and rabbit societies are just default patriarchal as FUCK and the female rabbits are not only barely represented in the story and have virtually no lines but are also fully casually treated as breeding chattel that the main group of defected rabbits just try to acquire to start their new warren. The author really tries to cite some random rabbit science book he read as scientific proof on rabbit breeding behaviors but like, this major plot point also fully anthropomorphizes an entire rabbit patriarchy in a pretty irresponsible way. I’m not taking too many points off because I think most readers can tell this whole like female rabbits as breeding chattel thing shouldn’t have human parallels, and also the book does assume fairly neutral, un-ecclesiastical stance on most other anthropomorphic elements of rabbit society, like their theology, politics, social order, climate, system of government (although extreme totalitarianism is pretty clearly not being endorsed).
It’s not quite man (as rabbit) vs. nature not is it man vs. nature (as rabbit). Really it’s just a long swashbuckling wild ride of a story set in the world of rabbits with very intricate and well-thought out worldbuilding (e.g. there’s a whole explanation for how rabbits can communicate with many other animals through an inter-species vernacular, wherein the other animals’ speech have been written with accents). The stories-within-the-story where certain chapters just have the rabbits gather to listen to one of them tell myths and fables about from their rabbit gospel is also really elegiac - it starts out as a way to build out the world of rabbits and ends so poetically as a commentary on the short memory of rabbits (and symbolically, of humans), the way stories are histories and vice versa, and how our individual lives and real people become mythologized and eternalized by history.
It’s really a book for readers and I truly genuinely loved every bit of the month it took for me to read it.
