For the YoungChitra Narayanan WATERSHIP DOWN By Richard Adams Puffin Books (Reprint), Delhi, India, 1975, 478, 0.60 VOLUME I NUMBER 2 April - June 1976 Watership Down is an incredible book. It is the story of an
epic journey of a small band of wild rabbits. Fiver, the prophet, predicts
imminent destruction and, under the leadership of his brother Hazel, the
rabbits leave the familiar security of their warren and brave the unknown
countryside in search of a new home. Unconsciously, the reader slides into a
completely new dimension, joins Hazel and his friends, sees the world through
their eyes, smells the dangers, suffers the hardships and terrors till they
reach the perfect home Watership Down. But the journey does not end there.
Does (female rabbits) are required to establish the warren and the search
begins again, leading to fearsome adventures in the dictator-state warren
Efraha ruled by the terrible General Woundwort. Eventually the odyssey ends
with a tragic but triumphant battle and Watership Down flourishes as a
prosperous warren.
This is no once-upon-a-time story. It is a novel of very real rabbits who
feel and think as wild animals. Richard Adams has studied the life-style of
rabbits and substantiates his work with references to R.M. Lockley's The
Private Life of the Rabbit with footnotes. The book reveals an incredible
insight not only into the minds of rabbits but also of human beings.
When Hazel and his friends are later on joined by refugees from their old
home, they hear of the terrible destruction and death by poison gas caused by
man to level the ground of their old warren into a building site. ‘Their
feelings were not false or assumed. While the story was being told, they heard
it without any of the reserve or detachment that the kindest of civilized human
retains as he reads his newspaper.’ The comparison between rabbits and human
beings (usually unfavourable to the latter) leads to some delightful
observations about what animals think of us. Hazel, frozen with fear in the
grass on seeing a man nearby, realizes he is safe, thanks to man's passion for
'the little white sticks' that they burn in their mouths. ‘He could smell the
man. The man could not smell him. All the man could smell was the nasty smoke
he was making.’
One of the most beautiful passages is Hazel's first glimpse of a road which
he mistook for a river—black, smooth and straight between its banks, yet a
spider could run across it. To him it was not ... Table of Contents >> |