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I love this book, love it, love it, love it, I read it once a year. It’s a comfort blanket book. I think it's brilliant in all sorts of ways, however, before I wax lyrical about all the things I like about it I want to note that there are somethings about it that leave me uncomfortable. The first thing, which Id actually never noticed before, shame on me, was the casual racism the author used and the assumptions of cultural superiority.

The first instance was very near the beginning of the book when the rabbits are getting ready to set out on their journey


"Rabbits, of course, have no idea of precise time or of punctuality. In this respect they are much the same as primitive people, who often take several days over assembling for some purpose and then several more to get started. Before such people can act together, a telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are to begin"



This is really the noble savage ideal of “primitive” humans being both less than human and so closer to animals than us “civilized” humans and having special almost magical talents that we no longer have.

Then when explaining the rabbits relationships with storytelling Adams writes
a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight thereby stereotyping an entire race of people as mindless violent thugs.


The last one that jumped out on me was when the rabbits were crossing the bridge on the river Test and Adams was describing what the experience was like from hazels perspective


Similarly, simple African villagers who have never left their remote homes may not be particularly surprised by their first sight of an airplane: it is outside their comprehension. But their first sight of a horse pulling a cart will set them pointing and laughing at the ingenuity of the fellow who thought of that one.


As if all African villagers everywhere on the whole continent have the same experiences, and as if nowhere in Africa uses wheels or has seen an airoplane. I may have missed some other instances of racism but I don’t think so. It just seems really odd that these were included at all as they are completely unnecessary. It’s not even as if the author could disguise it as a characters opinion because all the instances are from the narrator not from any of the characters

Then obviously the other thing that bothers me about this book is the gender politics. Obviously the fact that there are no does is vital to the plot development but it really bothers me that they are effectively just portrayed as breeding machines. I don’t buy the explanation that it’s because they are supposed to be rabbits and that’s how female rabbits are treated. Yes they are rabbits but they are supposed to be people, and there are plenty of other human type things that the characters did that real rabbits don’t do.

I’m well aware that the race issues and the gender issues are an issue partly because of the age of the book, it was first published in 1972 when these types of racism and sexism were seen as normal but I don’t think this means we should ignore that they exist in this book.


Anyway, onto what I love about it. It actually really reminds me of The Lord of the Rings not stylistically but thematically. It's about linguistics, invented myth cycles, the development of adult masculinity, and meditations on landscape and loss.

I’m really interested in invented myth cycles and I love the one Adams has woven around the character of El-ahrairah. (Though there are issues of cultural appropriation here to do with the fact that the El-ahrairah stories are based on Brer rabbit who seems to be a mutation of north American and African trickster gods.) However the entire myth cycle is beautifully done, from the creation story:

Long ago, Frith made the world. He made all the stars, too, and the world is one of the stars. He made them by scattering his droppings over the sky and this is why the grass and the trees grow so thick on the world. Frith makes the rivers flow. They follow him as he goes through the sky, and when he leaves the sky they look for him all night.


To the darker tales and beliefs about the black rabbit of Inle,

” He is a rabbit, but he is that cold, bad dream from which we can only entreat Lord Frith to save us today and tomorrow. When the snare is set in the gap, the Black Rabbit knows where the peg is driven; and when the weasel dances, the Black Rabbit is not far off. …The Black Rabbit brings sickness, too. Or again, he will come in the night and call a rabbit by name: and then that rabbit must go out to him, even though he may be young and strong to save himself from any other danger. He goes with the Black Rabbit and leaves no trace behind. Some say that the Black Rabbit hates us and wants our destruction. But the truth is”or so they taught me “-that he, too, serves Lord Frith and does no more than his appointed task〞


The fact that the rabbits effectively have a whole culture and [proto type] religion because of their myth cycle and their love of storytelling is one of the charms and strengths of this book. I love trickster figures in myth they fascinate me but I also really like that like that El-ahrairah is not just a trickster figure, that he is a complex character who cares about his people. He is often portrayed just as wanting to create mischief and have the good things in life but in the somewhat disturbing story El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit, Dandelion narrates how El-ahrairah is willing to sacrifice everything for his people:


"At last El-ahrairah felt quite desperate and one night, when he had been risking his life again and again to bring down a few mouthfuls of grass for a doe and her family whose father had been killed the day before, he called out, 'Lord Frith! I would do anything to save my people! I would drive a bargain with …Black Rabbit of Inle.



I love what Adams does with language in this book, that he makes up an entire language for the rabbits, silflay, flayrah, tharn, owsla, hrududu, fu inle, hlessil, elil, and that he creates grammar and syntax for it, and he uses this language to say things that may very well have been deemed inappropriate in a book like this otherwise. In the battle for the warren Bigwig says to Woundwort Silflay hraka, u embleer rah which literally translated reads as eat shit, you stinking prince

The language is probably the main thing that give the story the strong sense of the rabbits culture. Language and culture are so intertwined. Our memories , our myths, all the things that are important in a culture are coded into the language we speak, it is very often languages that set cultures apart, that give them their uniqueness and strength, which is why language annihilation is something that oppressor/imperialistic nations aim to do ether actively or passively.


I think the exploration of masculinity in this book is fascinating, Like The lord of the Rings it is not an adolescent masculinity that is being explored, which is something we get way too much of in our cultural artifacts, but is much more an exploration of the outplaying of adult masculinity, as well as being an exploration of the different types of adult masculinity. Blackberry the thinker, Hazel the non aggressive leader, bigwig and silver the warriors, dandelion the storyteller, fiver the seer, it's made clear that not all the rabbits are fighters and that’s okay, and even the ones that are fighters they are still complex characters, Bigwig especially is shown as complex, he is compassionate such as when he tells Hyzenthlay that his is going to rescue blackaver

"Blackavar? How? He is guarded by the council police"
“I know. It adds very much to the risk but I’ve decided that I can’t leave him behind”



And Bigwig is superstitious despite the fact he is strong and brave which comes out when he hears the distraught Holly coming up the hill calling him and assumes that it is the black rabbit come for him.

Bigwigs compassion is learnt though in the course of the journey, right near the beginning when they realize they are in danger he says those who can swim, swim. The others will have to stay here and hope for the best without the character strengths of Blackberries problem solving abilities and Hazels focused leadership skills not all the rabbits would have made it across the river, and this was one of the first of many times non macho behaviour got them out of a situation relatively unscathed. And it's made clear in the book that without all of the characters different strengths they would never have got, to Watership down, would never have got the does out of Efrafa, and would never have won the battle at the warren. Too often the way we construct and portray masculinity is to have males fighting over who can be the biggest, strongest, best rather than them working together to create a working coherent community

This book is a meditation, a love song to the Hampshire/Berkshire landscape, it effects me deeply because I know that landscape, I grew up in and around it. But I think even those who didn’t would find the narrative passages on land and nature beautiful

June was moving towards July and high summer. Hedgerows and verges were at their rankest and thickest. The rabbits sheltered in dim green, sun-flecked caves of grass, flowering marjoram and cow-parsley: peered round spotty hairy-stemmed clumps of viper’s bugloss, blooming red and blue above their heads: pushed between towering stalks of yellow mullein. Sometimes they scuttled along open turf, colored like a tapestry meadow with self-heal, centaury and tormentil. . . .Some time before ni-Frith, in the heat of the day, Silver paused in a little patch of thorn. There was no breeze and the air was full of the sweet, chrysanthemum-like smell of the flowering composite of dry uplands--corn chamomile, yarrow and tansy.


Probably this is my favorite meditative passage on nature and landscape:


The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as we think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so think and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. it does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity - so much lower than that of daylight - makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.



lastly, like the Lord of the Rings this book is a meditation on loss, on change, on the way time moves inexorably forwards, From Fivers premonition of the destruction of the sandleford warren at the beginning to Hazel laying his body down at the end this is all about the things that get left behind, and how the things that get left behind are part of what make us who we are.


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