Maatstaf. Jaargang 22

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Gerald Williams Watership down

watership down, number one on America's fiction best seller list for some months now, is an oddity. It's a story about a break-away band of rabbits in search of a new place to live. Various reports have it that the author, Richard Adams, made up the episodic tale during Sunday afternoon drives to entertain his two daughters. It is a charming story - adventurous and inventive enough to keep children from being bored on do-nothing days. Homeric in scope, watership down, is essentially a survival story, and perhaps this is partly the reason why it has harnessed the fancy of American adult readers, these times being the times they are.

It is possible, too, that the book's popularity marks in a definite way a trend that has been long growing: adult interest in fantasy-oriented or old-fashioned-style children's books. For years, adults have been buying children's books for their children (and themselves), or just for themselves. Cults have been formed around such talented artist-writers as Maurice Sendak (some months ago the New York Times featured a fullpage ode to Sendak) and Tomi Ungerer... and they are to be taken as seriously as those formed around Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, or even Norman Mailer - more seriously, perhaps. Reprinted Rackham-illustrateds and Beatrix Potters are purchased by adults who are not so much childish as sentimental. Bored and worn down by present-day realities - in both their factual and fictional forms -, they want books that comfort and calm and can help them to dream back to the time when. Butley, of the play of the same name, is not impossible to believe when he reads (in the American Film Theatre version) a book by Beatrix Potter while riding in the Tube, or recites pieces from her appley dapply to amuse himself and (presumably) others who are caught in the parched web of senseless academism.

Contemporary children's books for children is another story altogether - or getting to be one. It is no langer the elves-living-under-toad-stools fare that is still prevelant in other countries. Children's books in America seem to be bent on giving today's child a true-to-life picture of the world we live in, however unappetizing it may be (to some adults, anyway). Subjects handled (in most cases, deftly and commendably) nowadays include the perils of urban living, drug addiction, astronautics, homosexuality, divorce, and weight problems. Gone, too, to a considerable extent, are the ‘charming’ pastel-toned fairyland drawings that parents remember and revere. Today's styles and packagings are Mad Ave slick and sophisticated. A real market for ‘adult’ children's fiction does exist. (This taste has been nurtured by the professional and grown-up-style fare for children that is available on American television (zoom, animated science fiction serials, etc.) as well as by the childish adult fare concocted for grown up consumption (mary tyler moore show, the waltons, etc.) Book-minded children, apparently, do not want to be coddled by introvert-fantasies (did they ever, really?); they

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want the real thing. Some book-minded adults, it would seem, do not.

Richard Adam's watership down, in spite of the impression one gets from the ads, has not been kindly reviewed by all of America's ‘significant’ reviewers. By some it has been written off as a sort of jonathan livingston, rabbit or passable summer reading. The New York Times's Christopher Lehmann Haupt sarcastically refers to one of the book's important climaxes as ‘The Rape of the Sabine Rabbits (or better, Seven Does for Seven Bucks).’ Melvin Maddocks of Time claims that the readers' interest will depend on his tolerance for the author's ‘conceit that rabbits “are like human beings in many ways”.’ The Village Voice reviewer wrote that he ‘balks when an author tries to teach (him) how to turn into a British rabbit’. In spite of these nasty digs and others, watership down is being kept in the number one slot by enormous sales resulting from readers' curiosity or interest.

The author dedicates his book to his daughters, Juliet and Rosamond. In his Acknowledgments, he mentions his indebtedness to R.M. Lockley's the private life of the rabbit^1. which struck me as strange, for the knowledge he claims tot have acquired from Lockley's unique study is sometimes difficult to discern within the pages of watership down. Adam's rabbits are most manlike.

The book's beginning is successfully engaging. The description of the rabbits, their surroundings, and their ways of doing is affectionate and knowledgeable. The author's love of nature is one of the sustaining forces of watership down. (English words for various kinds of woodland growth are sprinkled generously throughout the book. Fanciful and magic-sounding in themselves, they sometimes save a poorly plotted section by their poetic appearance; words like blue brooklime, kingcups, spindle, self-heal, and tormentil can whet the appetite of a romantic imagination.)

1. Lockley, R.M. The Private Life of the Rabbit; A Survival Book, edited by Colin Willcock. New York: October House, 1966.

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The book's principal characters, rabbits Hazel and Fiver, are given a well-drawn sketch-of-an-introduction, and the story is off.

Author Adams has made up rabbit talk - quite a lot of it (there is a glossary containing some 40-odd words in the back of the book) - and he is wise in getting the reader used to it right from the start by asterisking (*) hrair and Owsla, which appear in the first chapter. Still and all, it continues to jar somewhat, especially during the first third of the book. A reader's interest can be significantly cut when he forgets that fu unle means ‘after moonrise’ or that Roo is ‘used as a suffix to denote a diminutive. e.g., Hrairoo,’ and has to jump to the back of the book. (What about the author's ‘indebtedness’ to Lockley? Rabbits, except for a sounds,^2. don't talk but communicate nonverbally. In watership down they're loquacious. All right: for storytelling's sake, they talk British English, but why take excessive liberties by inventing the cumbersome Lapine?)

Upon the advice of the frail, psychic rabbit, Fiver, Hazel (the story's hero) and a small group of followers, decide to leave their ‘doomed’ (Fiver's hunch) warren and set off for a new place to live. The rest of the long story concerns the adventures and mishaps they encounter as they struggle toward this goal. It, in many respects, is not unlike other tales of this ilk (odyssey, sinbad the sailor, even pinocchio) and, in some instances, is not as good. The construction and plot devises are rather threadbare and overly familiar. Their lack of tension is not due to the fact that they have become cliches but rather because the author does not clothe them with enough concern. Toward the middle of the third part of the book, it becomes fairly simple to predict what will happen from one chapter to the next. From this point on, watership down is just as easy to lay down as it is to pick up, in spite of one's curiosity about the final outcome.

As is often the case, a book of this sort lends itself innocently to all kinds of interpretations. Some overzealous reviewers have heaped intricate political allegories upon its fragile construct.

watership down was published in England in December 1972 as just a children's book. Taken as such, it can be enjoyed as light and entertaining reading.

2. Ibid., pp. 23,55.