A Book for this Time: Watership Down

This is not a gentle time.

People of the Word turn to words to step back from the events in the hopes of making sense of them. What to read in such a time as this?

1984 is too late, Brave New World still a bit early.

Ugly times demand a good work and It Can’t Happen Here really isn’t very good.

Let me suggest Watership Down, the most gentle of books on courage, culture building, and conflict. Richard Adams proves that writing one book very well is good enough for a career. He was a veteran of World War II who began the story for his daughters. Like so much that was good,  Adams did not survive 2016, though he pushed his fight to December.

The book is about rabbits, but don’t misunderstand how serious the book is. Adams is not writing about Peter Cottontail, but creating an alternative world where rabbits have understanding and folkways. The work is Homeric with battle scenes that echo those of the Iliad and a journey home like the Odyssey. The rabbit Bigwig is a better Achilles and the leader Hazel is a more virtuous Agamemnon.

The rabbits fight for freedom to be natural, as God made them. They face the choice between the decadence of those who have become effete slaves to sensuality or the decadence of an authoritarian that worships power. Wanting liberty, they resolutely choose neither!

The book is exciting, but gentle. It teaches, even preaches, but the lessons are in parables, dreams, and stories that make the truth palatable. Adams does not spare British culture (1972). He skewers those who have forgotten what the “old men” did for them in the Great Wars, who take peace as a birthright, and who refuse to notice external dangers.

For an American, it is a reminder of conservation, conserving the old while allowing the new to make their own way and build their own communities. It is a warning about unnatural deeds done to achieve some pleasures. The longest fight, however, is against doing great evil, giving up liberty, to secure safety.

Adams is no pacifist, but this book refuses the path of defeating the enemy by becoming worse than the enemy. Rabbits that can kill weasels have ceased to be rabbits and end up living worse lives than weasels. One of his rabbits is warped by ugliness and decides to end fear, but General Woundwort fails. He creates greater fear in trying to banish natural fears. General Woundwort strives to make rabbits “greater” than they were, but destroyed essential culture to do so. You cannot save a civilization by becoming brutish.

Read the book: it will make sense.

Despite dealing with death, nature, war, and the need to rebuild after a holocaust, the book is also gentle. There is nothing base, no gratuitous violence, or debasing of sexuality. 1972 has produced much that was once popular, but now unreadable without a history lesson. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull may have been better known at the time, but it is of its time. Watership Down is for such a time as this . . .and most every time.

Most of all, the book celebrates friendship and the power of a small group to rebuild, save, and thrive in the ancient ways.

Hazel-rah contra mundum!