‘Watership Down’: Of courage, friendship & rabbits

A book is a door, and to read it is to enter as a stranger invited into sacred territory. Of favorite books I have only one, but memorable books dot the landscape of my life. Let me tell you about one of them.

But first, why memorable? Because, as all bibliophiles know, reading a book is more than just the act of reading itself. It’s an entire experience, a total immersion in a world that you help create with the author, an affair of the heart – une affaire de coeur, as the French say grandly – with characters you come to know who become, for the duration of the journey and even well after that, beloved companions and friends. The time of your life at which you read it – the personal circumstances you’re encountering, the swirl of events that attend you, even the way you chanced upon the book – will color your reading experience and give it a peculiar taste that will mark it, indelibly, as part of your iconography. Once you’ve read a book, it ceases to be just a book – it passes into the realm of experience, memory, spirit, desire.

So I roam my life for memorable book experiences that may engage my readers, and choose this one.

Scene 1 (the past): In a chance encounter, a classmate of mine from English class shows me his battered copy of Watership Down. What’s that about? I ask. A wonderful fantasy about a bunch of rabbits, he says, and I’ll be reading it after T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He mentions both books in the same breath, as though a novel about rabbits were of the same heroic stuff as that epic immortalized in film. Lawrence of Arabia I know – but Richard who? A tale of what?

Scene 2: A dreamy-eyed mother lies in bed nursing her infant son. Spread before her is the thick tome of Spenser‘s Faerie Queene. Beside it is Richard Adams’ Watership Down in paperback. She has read both books one after the other in a season of wanderlust – two unlikely books together, four centuries apart, one the staple of an English literature major’s esoterica, the other the highlight of a budding juvenile collection. But the strange juxtaposition doesn’t bother her. Aren’t all fantasies (to loosely paraphrase the Great Bard) of such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little lives rounded with story? So let the knights and princes, kings and wizards, hobbits and rabbits trundle on in their quests. The heart of fantasy is one and the same.

I first read Watership Down in the summer of the year my son was born, when the warm afternoons bore down on us like a huge tent that shut out all the sounds of the suburbs and enclosed us in a world of our own, the world I conjured with Hazel and Fiver, Dandelion, Blackberry and Bigwig, the rabbits of Watership Down. In that all-too-brief summer, I journeyed with this band of rabbits as they set out on their adventure, seeking their own place in the sun where they could be free to live and grow in peace.

The Quest Perilous is the motif that underlies this sage of enterprising rabbits. It’s an ancient theme, old as myth, yet as contemporary as modern man in search of the meaning of life. Hazel, who embodies El-ahrairah, the rabbit folk hero, leads a band of disgruntled rabbits out of their original home, the Sandleford warren, to escape the imminent danger posed by the encroachments of human development. Although the rabbits do not understand the nature of this ecological threat, Fiver, Hazel’s younger brother, senses it and warns them. Under Hazel’s leadership and guided by Fiver’s prophetic visions, the ragtag team launch into strange territory. Rabbits are not by nature peripatetic creatures, so to strike out on their own, leaving their home behind, is an act of desperate courage. After a series of nearly fatal encounters, they realize that they must set out for the high, solitary hills of the far country of Watership Down – an impossible foolhardy quest but one they must undertake in order to survive.

Richard Adams writes about his characters with no sentimentality at all. These are not the cutely-dressed-up rabbits of nursery tales that live in nice well-furnished burrows and conduct their daily business with the habits and customs of humans. These are creatures that claw their way into holes underground, scratch and bite each other, leave droppings called "hraka," feed on grass and plants more than on carrots and lettuce, and fend off as best as they can their natural enemies – the fox, stoat, ferret, weasel, dog, Man. In short, they behave with all the wild "rabbitness" of their nature.

Yet there is something strikingly human about their society. This, I believe, is where the genius of Richard Adams lies. On the natural level, the rabbits remain true to their creaturely selves as rabbits: allegorically, this story is about human relationships and structures, the passionately human quest for identity, integrity, friendship and freedom in a world that militates against it. For the world of Watership Down is a microcosm of our multi-racial, multipolar world – oftentimes strange and fraught with danger, yet holding rich opportunities for friendship, sacrifice, valor, beauty and joy.

In the course of their journey, Hazel and company meet other creatures of the wild. Their experiences enlarge them, teaching them respect for other creatures, especially those that are different, strange, or seemingly useless. In a precocious act, Hazel befriends the wounded Kehaar, a migratory gull from the arctic North, whose friendship becomes paramount in a crucial battle they must wage later. The rabbits begin to understand the interconnectedness of all creatures, and the importance of friendships and alliances to a species’ own survival. Their brushes with danger toughen them and enable them to begin to grasp the meaning of community: "Since leaving the warren of the snares they had become warier, shrewder, a tenacious band who understood each other and worked together... They had come close together, relying on and valuing each other’s capacities. They knew now that it was on these and on nothing else that their lives depended, and they were not going to waste anything they possessed between them."

More things can be said about this jewel of a book – but the best is Hazel himself. Hazel and his rabbits sustain themselves through sheer grit, and by drawing deep into their history and lore as a people and nourishing themselves with story. But it is Hazel–confident, unassuming Hazel – who holds them together with his quiet authority, the boldness of his vision, the tenacity of his hope, the generosity of his heart, and teaches them the meaning of true leadership – that the leader is not necessarily the smartest, strongest, cleverest or biggest, but the one who understands his people best; who can sustain them together, unflagging, towards a worthy vision; and who, with the courage of sacrifice, will walk through pain and danger ahead of them to show them the way. Through Richard Adams’ words, I entered Hazel’s world and learned of these things. I came away grateful for this hallowed gift of a world, and I’ve never been the same since.

Scene 3 (the present): My son is 13, a strapping young man of a boy. The words catch in my throat. How shall I tell him? Of the enduring battle that is life; the force of vision and desire that can hack out as road through the desert that is our life; the immeasurable loveliness of the high winds of freedom; the incomparable comfort of friends; the true grit of leadership; and the sweetness of home at the end of the journey. I shall tell him the story of Watership Down, and hope that by tasting of it he will accept its sacred invitation, enter its world, and be richer for it.