I just finished reading the book. I had seen the cartoon movie when I was young but didn’t really remember it. I had been wanting to read it for a while and finally picked it up.
It was a delightfully easy read but managed to maintain depth. I didn’t pick up any real parellels to modern society as I did when I read Animal Farm but I was reading it for brain candy.
For discussion purposes we can talk about the main characters most notably: Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig and to a lesser extent: Wormwort, Strawberry, the ostensible leader of Strawberry’s warren whose name eludes me at the moment, and any others.
WD is one of my most dependable comfort reads. I think I read it first when I was about 12, and I’ve returned to it many times. (I have no interest in seeing the cartoon – I love this book so much that I would get miffed if the cartoon differed from it in the least respect.)
So … what do you want to talk about?
I think my favorite thing about the book is the little bits and pieces of lapine language you pick up. By the end of the book, when Bigwig says to Wormwort, “silflay hraka,” you get this dawning realization: “I know how to swear at someone in Rabbit! That is so cool!”
My favorite characters are probably Fiver and Blackberry. I think it’s interesting how Fiver, who is deeply intuitive, and Blackberry, the obvious brains of the outfit, often arrive through their different routes at the same conclusion.
It is my comfort reading. I too saw the cartoon as a kid and then picked up the book a few years ago and loved it.
I’ve been using the word tharn to describe my own emotional exhaustion last week.
I love that that the outspoken rabbits all maintain respect for one another and belief in each other. And I love the quotes from classic literature at the beginning of each chapter.
I loved that book. Like you, I saw it as a cartoon when I was little, and I don’t remember too much about it (the cartoon). I had the good fortune to read the book about a year ago.
It reminded me of a book of Native American animal stories that I had as a tyke. I think the style of story-telling within the book gave it that resemblance.
I don’t remember the other rabbit’s name (the one from Strawberry’s warren) – I think it starts with a C.
Why don’t we start out with Hazel’s leadership abilities?
Hazel wasn’t the biggest, strongest, wisest, or most insightful. However he was the only rabbit that had developed diplomacy skills. The problem was that even though he could be diplomatic he was the most impulsive of all the rabbits and that got in his way. For example, he led the raid to get the hutch rabbits despite Fiver’s warnings. This led to him getting shot and having a permanent limp.
What could have happened if his impulsiveness got even more in his way? I think he would have probably gotten the other rabbits killed. His impulsiveness was in stark contrast to Wormwart’s calculated planning. It really appeared that Wormwart made a better leader if leadership’s only goal was to get the job done as efficiently as possible. I suppose this is wear Hazel’s compassion severely outweighed Wormwart’s fascist regime. I suppose this is why the rabbits willingly followed him because they could see that he was dedicated to helping the rabbits while actively pursuing avenues to accomplish his goals regardless of his personal danger.
I could go on but I would rather hear other’s input on this. Please feel free to change the topic of the characters to whoever you please. Try to discuss the rabbit in question and how his talent effected the warren.
I honestly don’t remember the book all that well, but I always liked the genesis of Fiver’s name: most litters only contained four rabbits, and if there was a fifth it was usually a runt that died soon after birth.
So Fiver was a rabbit who’d beaten all the odds and went on to be essential to his warren’s founding and salvation. A perfect triumph-of-the-underdog story.
I love this book! I saw the cartoon as a child, and picked up the book for the first time when I was in high school, and have read it many times since. For what it’s worth, the cartoon is pretty good – not quite as good as the book, but all things considered (fitting a book of that length into a movie), it’s quality.
The episode that always haunts me is the one where the rabbits visit the warren that has art and poetry. In addition to not understanding the artwork, Fiver immediately picks up bad vibes. I still can’t figure out if the author was trying to show that particular art was evil (because the rabbits had more leisure time) or if there is something intrinsic about abstract expression that is unsettling to rabbits.
It’s funny trying to explain to someone who hasn’t read/seen it that a book about rabbits isn’t at all cute or cuddly. It’s also amazing to me how interesting it is to read about the rabbits figuring things out, such as door latches and hinges, in “rabbit time” – we see them mull over it, and make different suggestions, and try different things, and yet it’s not at all boring.
Hazel’s talent was personnel. He wasn’t the smartest rabbit, but if he needed someone to solve a problem he called on Blackberry. If he needed strength, he tapped Bigwig or Silver. Speed: Dandelion. He brought out the the best in his “men,” if you will.
For instance: the scene in which Bigwig is caught in the snare, outside Cowslip’s warren. Hazel gets the other rabbits together. He gets a possible solution to the problem from Blackberry, which he and the others implement. When it seems that the plan hasn’t worked, he worries they will all be paralyzed with despair, so he tries to take their minds off it. When it becomes clear that they have to get out of there, he gets them moving.
He may not have Woundwort’s cunning, but he knows what every rabbit is capable of and he brings them together as a team. Woundword doesn’t care about each rabbit’s individual strengths and weaknesses: he just wants total obedience.
Nitpick. Rabbits can only count to four. Anything more than four is “five”, meaning “many”. So Fiver was the last baby bunny in the litter, but there may have been many more than five.
I think part of the sense Richard Adams was trying on convey here was the taint of humankind upon the rabbits of Cowslip’s warren. While they had picked up such things as art and poetry (I’ve always been oddly interested in Silverweed) they did so while forgetting the stories of Frith and El-ahrairah which are, presumably, the basis of lapine existance. No need to escape trouble or dodge the fox or raid the garden; they simply were fed by the humans and adopted some of their mannerisms.
I remember hearing once, during my art major days in college, that the ability to look upon a two dimensional image and mentally understand it to be a representation of a three dimensional object is learned, not innate. I heard of various primitive tribes that, when shown a photograph of an object – say a boat in the water – saw it merely as splashes of blue and red and white, etc on a sheet and could not comprehend it to be a boat. Now days, we’re taught from infancy to see a picture of a dog and recognize it as a dog by our parents. Whether true or not, I was reminded of it when Hazel and his band looked at the stone mozaics and could not understand what they were seeing. How could stones pressed into a wall make shapes? Cowslip and his warren were the advanced, humanized rabbits and Hazel and his band remained the rural bunch of bunnies.
Adding to this, we have Efrafa. Here, Woundwort has taken his rabbits and turned them into something that again isn’t quite lapine. Like Cowslip’s bunch, the Efrafa rabbits do not live in the constant low level nervousness and danger that Hazel’s rabbits do. Like Cowslip’s, they do not fear the fox nor worry about the garden raid. And again, their ability to relate to Frith and El-ahrairah is compromised. Bigwig returns from Efrafa saying that their stories were lacklustre and seemed to be told wrong. They’ve strayed from the “true path” so to speak. I suppose one could turn this into a compelling arguement that Watership Down discredits change. Evolution is frowned upon as something unnatural, at least to the lapines. I mentioned before in GQ that Richard Adams has gone on the record as saying there is no “secret message” to the novel, and since he wrotie it I have to agree with him but it does seem to be a theme behind the work.
I mentioned Silverweed earlier. In a sense, I wish Adams had wirtten more about him and in a sense I’m glad he didn’t and left him to our own imaginations. He’s the anti-prophet to Fiver. Turning away from Frith, he teaches a perverted faith of acceptance of one’s fate in death. El-ahrairah teaches life: the escape from the stoat, the outwitting of the pike, the joys of mating and raising up a warren with his best friend by his side. Silverweed teaches that life is safe with nothing to fear as long as you put aside your fears of an eventual demise and accept it as the price of your safety. The wind blows, the stream moves along, the leaves dry up with the ending of the season and another rabbit dies tonight. I wouldn’t call Silverweed a “favorite” character, but he did leave an impression.
Fiver, it cracks me up that you don’t know this book backwards and forwards! Nothing wrong with that, of course, I just think its funny.
Yes, Fiver was the runt of his litter, which may have consisted of more than five. He and Hazel are brothers, so I think we can assume they were litter-mates.
I will second the endorsement of the movie version. It isn’t as good as the book, but it doesn’t deviate all that much from the story. As best I remember, it just leaves stuff out, but doesn’t change the basic plot or add new stuff.
My favorite character is Bigwig (Thlayli). He is the “rabbit of action”, the John Wayne of the rabbit world. My favorite parts with him are when he is “under cover” in Efrafra. His mission requires him to behave in ways that are completely opposed to his personality: He prefers to act, but he must wait. He is blunt and direct, but he must be devious and subversive. He is used to doing whatever he wants (pretty much) but in Efrafra he must yield to superior officers and the Owslafa. It is a testament to his faith in his comrades and their need for female rabbits that he is able to pull his mission off.
I also like his final confrontation with Woundwort…a classic example of a bully (Woundwort) finally meeting up with someone smaller but braver than him, and being defeated. The only thing Bigwig feared was going down without a fight. Now that I think of it, in that way he is like Worf from Star Trek. Being defeated is acceptable, quitting or fleeing is not.
I’ve said before that for me the real strength of this book is in presenting a familiar world from such a different perspective that it becomes new. A narrow stream becomes a nearly impassable obstacle. A train becomes a messenger from God. A barnyard at night becomes a mortally dangerous trap.
Only slightly off-topic: I read a book a number of years ago that very much reminded me of Watership Down, and may be of interest to others who liked WD. The book is called Duncton Wood, but I can’t for the life of me recall the author’s name. In fact, reading Duncton Wood was what sent me scurrying through the basement to find my old copy of WD.
Also in the same kind of vein, there’s a great kid’s book called “Poppy” by Avi. (I believe it’s the first book of a series, but it’s the only one I’ve read so far.)
nitpicking the nitpick, more than four would be “hrair”, or something like “thousand”. Fiver’s Lapine name is Hrairoo, which means “Little Thousand”. i remember that because i call my friend Hrairoo, for no particular reason. heehee…
Well, my screen name only indirectly comes from the book. I read Watership Down once, twenty years ago. Based on this thread I suppose I should re-read it, because like Weird_AL_Einstein I have no recollection of Silverweed or the “artistic” warren.
That said, the “artistic” warren reminds me of the comic book Tales of the Beanworld. The characters there were based on mythic tropes, where Mr. Spook = hero, Beanish = artist, etc.
In later issues Beanish began making sculptures (the “Look See Show”) of other beans and hoi-polloi, which all the other beans loved and recognized, but which Mr. Spook couldn’t see as anything other than the slats, hoops etc.
Jophiel you have some interesting points. I remembered that the mythology portrayed in the book were basically a type of entertaining fable. Does anyone else see a parallel to other faiths here? I definately do. El-ahrairah seems to have a lot in common with the mythical Aladin. Basically they were both tricksters who outsmarted those who were physically or strategically better off than they were. In a sense I believe the book equated El-ahrairah to Hazel but really a lot of what was attributed to Hazel’s cleverness was really Blackberry. The only difference is that Blackberry didn’t have the initiative to put those into action.
I also saw the display of art and poetry in the book as a taint upon rabbit kind. I thought the author was trying to portray that the rabbits are so close to humans that they are adapting their characteristics leaving behind other rabbit characteristics (like self preservation) in the dust. Part of the origin story of El-ahrairah contained the knowledge that others were out to kill the rabbits but whatever the god was called gave the rabbits an escape mechanism in their cunning and their speed. The rabbits from Cowslips warren took the human traits of art which replaced their self-preservation traits. I guess that is still basically what you said, Jophiel.
I wonder if Strawberry’s addition of the warren would have made art a bigger issue since Hazel’s warren basically added part of the other warrens they chose. They added some defense from Woundwart, the basic idea of a warren from their home warren, and the actual construction of their warren from Cowslip’s warren. I can’t imagine that they didn’t take away more that I just didn’t realize when it happened. Also, since Strawberry was from the “humanized” warren, how do you think this influenced the rest of the warren? We already know that he was basically an architect. Do you think that was his version of art that the rabbits adapted?
i remember that because i call my friend Hrairoo, for no particular reason. heehee…