Still bright-eyed after all these years
a childish book for adults, Watership Down has not been out of print since its publication in 1972. Its success enabled its author to give up his job in the civil service and devote himself to his interests in Jungian theory and animal-anti-cruelty activism.
Mostly, however, Adams liked to tell stories. Watership Down grew out of incremental tales he made up to entertain his daughters, Juliette and Ros, as he drove them to school each morning.
“The stories I told in the car had nearly always been shaped and cut and edited by myself for oral narration,” he said in a 2014 Telegraph interview. “When I was lying down to go to sleep in the evening I would think out the bit of story I was going to tell the girls the next day.”
He was always adamant that the dark tale of displaced bunnies in search of shelter and solace was not an allegory or any sort of a political treatise, but that has not stopped the over-analytical from imbuing it with hidden meanings.
In an article for Moment magazine in 2011, Rachel Kadish compared the journey of Adams’s rabbits to the Zionist focus on a homeland, but playfully turned her pen upon herself when she discovered “plenty of other people have seen their histories in that book … Watership Down can be Ireland after the famine, Rwanda after the massacres … an adaptation of Homer and Virgil, or the life of Jesus, or of Native American religion.”
In today’s world it is perhaps a story that helps readers to understand and feel compassion for the many, many migrants who flee war and chaos and deprivation, who face hatred and danger and death in their quest to find somewhere, anywhere, to belong.
Fiver the psychic rabbit who foresaw cataclysmic events in his tortured visions, Hazel the wise leader and Bigwig the testosterone-driven buffoon who provided the muscle might all be much more human in their behaviour than the average twitchy-nosed rabbit — they might even be archetypes — but in the end this is really just a good book, and all the rest is bonus. And I’m sure when I read it again I will cry, again. LS