Nilanjana S Roy: Lord of the rabbits

'Watership Down' remains one of the biggest bestsellers in the world

As a boy, growing up in a large family house (“Oakdene”) in Wash Common, Richard Adams often lay still among the bushes of Bull Banks, watching thrushes, chaffinches, blackbirds. 

His earliest memories were of walking through the paddocks, about three years old, the long grasses and moon-daisies taller than his head. He watched slugs and millipedes, felt sorry for the wasps who were drowned in a mixture of jam and beer in large glass jars every year when the nests grew too plentiful, learned the names of birds. To the south of the garden, he could look across the “open country of ploughland, meadows and copses” towards the distant line of the Hampshire Downs, including Watership Down.

Adams died at the cusp of the old and the new year, at the age of 96. Watership Down, which he wrote in 1972, remains one of the biggest bestsellers in the world. He would go on to write several other books – Shardik and The Plague Dogs among them – and nature diaries that remain bright and inviting even today, but it was his long tale of Hazel and Fiver, and the warren’s adventures as they set out into the great unknown, that became immortal.

Readers were quicker to sense the quality of Adams’ classic novel than critics were. The New York Times critics reviewed it twice, and got it wrong both times. One wrote an admiring but slightly supercilious review — “Straight faces, please, and no tittering from the back of the room. Because the subject today is rabbits, yes, bunny rabbits…While Watership Down isn’t in class with, say, The Wind In The Willows, it is still an unusual book…” 

“I think its power and strength come from being a story told in the car,” Adams said in one of his interviews. He used to tell his children stories – sometimes scary ones – and “Hazel and Fiver”, his original title for the book, came out of a long car journey in 1967. It took him two years to write Watership Down, and then he shopped it around to publishers, fruitlessly, until he got his lucky break. His rabbit odyssey was rejected by seven publishers before Rex Collings finally agreed to print a small edition — no more than 2,500 copies.

Adams was 52 years old when he became a writer. He’d read history at Oxford, seen service in World War II. Fiver, the rabbit who’s smaller than the rest and who sees visions, was based on Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess who was cursed that her prophecies would never be believed. Hazel and Bigwig, the quick-thinking, responsible leader of the warren’s rabbits, and the big, muscular buck with endless courage, were based on two of his wartime mates. Kehaar, the seagull who is helped by the rabbits and helps them in his turn, was based on a Norwegian resistance fighter he’d met during the war.

Adams instinctively followed the rules that underpin the best fantasies, from JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and J K Rowling’s Hogwarts to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books and Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea. The greatest and most complex imaginative worlds are built on the solid bedrock of internal consistency — rabbits aren’t talking people in rabbit-skin costume, they must think, and act, smell, fight, flee and mate, like real rabbits, just as elves must have their own mythology and history if they are to be more than humans with pointy ears. 

As he followed Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, Hyzenthlay and their companions through the dangers of the open, saw them face predators from man to foxes to farm cats, led them through the strange and bitter poisons of the warped warrens of Efrafa, Adams displayed the other talent that the great fantasy writers possess — the ability to build a believable world. 

Part of Watership Down’s appeal is the singular power of Adams’ imagination — who would have dreamed of rabbits, fleeing human construction, embarking on a great odyssey across the English countryside?

But only part of an imaginary world is purely imaginary. “The Ordnance Survey map for this area is Sheet 174, which includes Watership Down in square 4957. This and Sheet 185 cover the whole area of the story,” Adams wrote. He met the English naturalist R M Lockley, and consulted him on the private life of the rabbit — later, the two men became great friends, even embarking on a cruise to the Antarctic together. And where human language fell short, he came up with a rabbit language, Lapine, to express concepts that humans might not feel or need. 

The appeal of fantasy goes well beyond entertainment or escapism. The greatest fantasies, including Adams’ saga, answer something dark and ancient within us: This is the most ancient of storytelling forms, after all. When I began writing fiction some years ago, instinct took me to fantasy, not the realist novel — between Indian folk tales and the great fantasy novelists of the 21st century, that territory seemed not just familiar, but natural. 

Some critics remarked that it was unusual to write about the inner lives of cats, but it was not. Kipling had been there long before me, and so had Adams, towering above anyone who aspired to write about the imaginative lives of animals. My fantasies were far less ambitious than theirs, and I wrote with an amateur’s enthusiasm, not aspiring to the grand sweep of Adams’ epic tale. But he had made it possible for readers — and writers to step confidently into that kind of territory. 

Almost 45 years after he wrote Watership Down, his rabbits stay alive in our imaginations, sniffing the air for foxes, vanquishing the terrible General Woundwort, the does and bucks and kittens finally at home in their burrows. 
 

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