by Richard Adams

copyright 1972

I found it fascinating that Adams invented a myth/God structure for rabbit society and I enjoyed El-ahrairrah’s trickster stories.  They reminded me a bit of America’s “Br’er Rabbit” stories; how Br’er Rabbit was always outsmarting Br’er Fox, like El-ahrairrah outsmarts Prince Rainbow and King Darzin.  I liked how Adams used storytelling and myths to help us understand rabbits and also how the rabbits used the myths as inspiration for their own lives.

Adams’ descriptions of the countryside are beautiful.  This first paragraph describing Watership Down from Chapter 18 allows me to enter the landscape. He captures the quality of light at sunset perfectly. I can see and hear all that is described as if I were there, in that moment.  We are brought from the largeness of the Down to the hidden tiny world among the grasses and back out to the larger world.

“It was evening of the following day.  The north-facing escarpment of Watership Down, in shadow since early morning, now caught the western sun for an hour before twilight. Three hundred feet the down rose vertically in a stretch of no more than six hundred – a precipitous wall, from the thin belt of trees at the foot of the ridge where the steep flattened out. The light, full and smooth, lay like a gold rind over the turf, the furze and yew bushes, the few wind-stunted thorn trees.  From the ridge, the light seemed to cover all the slope below, drowsy and still.  But down in the grass itself, between the bushes, in that thick forest trodden by the beetle, the spider and the hunting shrew, the moving light was like a wind that danced among them to set them scurrying and weaving.  The red rays flickered in and out of the grass stems, flashing minutely on membranous wings, casting long shadows behind the thinnest if filamentary legs, breaking each patch of bare soil into a myriad of individual grains.  The insects buzzed, whined, hummed, stridulated and droned as the air grew warmer in the sunset.  Louder yet calmer than they, among the trees, sounded the yellowhammer, the linnet and greenfinch.  The larks went up, twittering in the scented air above the down.  From the summit, the apparent immobility of the vast blue distance was broken, here and there by wisps of smoke and tiny, momentary flashes of glass.  Far below lay the fields green with wheat, the flat pastures grazed by horses, the darker greens of the woods.  They, too, like the hillside jungle, were tumultuous with evening, but from the remote height turned to stillness, their fierceness tempered by the air that lay between.