Watership
Downby Richard Adams [Adams or j Adams]
Some novels will feel
like an endurance test just four pages in. Without fail, whenever I read
Watership
Down, those four hundred pages feel to me like a summer holiday.
"The
rabbits arrived at their new home " but I'm not even halfway through the
book," my husband observed.
"What in the world can happen next?"
Richard Adams never ceases to amaze me with how he handles pacing. On the
surface, his rabbit tale is a fairly simple one: rabbits must escape their
doomed warren and find a new home. In less capable hands,
Watership
Down would have been half as long and packed with chases, storms, brawls,
and catastrophes. But Adams never hurries his tale. Adams also never resorts to
implausible plot twists. Instead he is perfectly content to tell his simple tale
and trust his readers to listen -- and so we do. I am also astounded at how
imperfect and yet captivating are Adams' rabbits. Take Fiver, a runt who has
been blessed with the gift of prophecy. Then there is Fiver's older brother,
Hazel, whose greatest strength is his ability to identify and trust the
strengths of others. Yet even he also makes errors in judgment. Darker
characters also exist. For example, Strawberry who lives in a different warren
almost becomes the downfall of one of Hazel's companions. Despite his betrayal,
he eventually joins Hazel's warren and becomes a great asset. These rabbits are
fallible, allowing Adams to present many stirring moments of heartache and
redemption. Adams considered the Berkshire countryside to also be a character in
Watership
Down. That's not to say Adams wastes time waxing poetic. In each paragraph,
he details the scenery but also the place of the rabbits within it:
"The May
sunset was red in clouds and there was still half an hour to twilight. The dry
slope was dotted with rabbits -- some nibbling at their grass". Those
paragraphs might be long, but they effectively establish a tone of peace, which
within a few pages is quietly interrupted. Readers are all the richer for how
saturated in reality
Watership
Down really is.
"No author today would think of writing a
four-hundred-page book about rabbits," my husband observed. Adams himself
did not begin with such an audacious goal;
Watership
Down started out as story told by Adams to his daughters on car rides. After
a small-time publisher accepted it for a two thousand copy run, it has
rightfully sold millions.
-- this review submitted by Allison H.-F. - a customer of the Bennett Martin Public Library
Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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