From The Literary Hub:
BACK IN 1974, THE NEW YORK TIMES‘ RICHARD GILMAN WASN’T OVERLY ENTHUSED BY RICHARD ADAMS’ BELOVED RABBIT ADVENTURE STORY
. . . .
“The impulse to make animals represent or incarnate human significances is of long standing in literature, going back at least as far as Aesop. For whatever reason, English literature has for scene time been especially lavish in the granting to animals of human properties: speech, humor, moral values, histories. One distinction of this kind of writing is that while it is mostly directed toward children, adults have enjoyed the best of it as much as children and sometimes more: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, surely, but also Kipling, A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, even Beatrix potter.
I doubt that Richard Adams’s Watership Down is really aimed at young children, despite his having said that it arose from impromptu stories he used to tell his small daughters. I can’t imagine many readers under 13 or 14, an age when the lines between juvenile and adult fiction begin to blur, having the patience and grasp of extended allegorical strategies to persevere to the end of a 426‐page epic about a community of rabbits. And while older teen‐agers may well enjoy it, I suspect that this tour de force, the Iliad and Odyssey of Oryctolagus cuniculus, is going to find its true audience mainly among the people who have made a cult of Tolkien, among ecology‐minded romantics and all those in need of a positive statement, not too subtle but not too blatant either, about the future of courage, native simplicity, the life‐force, and so on.
I don’t mean to be condescending. Watership Down is in some ways a delightful book, at times an affecting one. But faced with the extraordinary praise given the book in England, one has to draw back some distance. Lacking the high wit and imaginative force of Alice in Wonderland or the triumphant (if occasionally purple) lyricism of The Wind in the Willows, the book seems to me a good deal less than the ‘classic’—with the implication in the word of settled universal appeal—that British commentators have so reflexively proclaimed it.
. . . .
“As in all such fiction, the plausibility issues from the detail and consistency with which the animal life is rendered, and above all from the resemblances we can discern to aspects of our own lives. To this end Adams offers a remarkable wealth of information on rabbit existence and wisely concentrates on matters of sustenance, living arrangement, behavior toward other animals, and the like.
“But as anthropomorphic fantasy replaces observation (the book is in an actual area of Berkshire, England, and Adams is particularly fine on landscapes and flora, weathers and seasons) he sees fit to give rabbits a folklore and folk‐heroes, a mythology complete with creationmyth and, finally, a language … If I remember correctly, the great writers of animal fiction let their characters unselfconsciously speak the authors’ own languages, and this is proper because the imaginative act is complete once the literary decision has been made to allow animals to speak in words; to let them use their own worth, their own verbal language, is to tempt the pathetic fallacy beyond its acceptable limits. This may seem a small point, especially since the Lapine is a very minor element of the rhetoric, brit I think it symptomatic of what is wrong with Watership Down, or rather what keeps it from being wholly right.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
I fear this review must be a scan of the 1974 article, because as I was reading it I was put off by the many grammatical mistakes. However, the mistakes seem to be the sort a machine would make when optically scanning an article, so I give it the benefit of the doubt.
I raised rabbits in 4H, so I KNOW how stupid they can be, and fully support putting them in the stew.
Nevertheless, I still occasionally pull out the “Bunnies and Burrows” rules and reread them. It was fun trying to survive in a rabbit’s world.
Al who played a wide variety of RPGs back in the day
I caution the bunnies in the parking lot to beware the hrududus and suggest the flayrah is in someone else’s garden. So I guess that made up language made an impression, unlike this review.
+1 😀
Wow! I adored Watership Down, have re-read it many times, and am now reminded that it might be a good time to re-read it again. (I found the rabbit mythology to be particularly effective.) Different strokes for different folks!
I have a copy, have reread it several times over the years after seeing the animated movie on TV when I was um… in 4th grade.
I loves it.
I’ve never actually managed to read it all the way through, not being particularly keen on rabbits – although I love Tolkien. The Wind in the Willows is one of my all time favourite books but that may be for all kinds of extra reasons, not least a teacher in our small inner city school who read it to us, ‘doing’ the voices wonderfully. It still makes me laugh and cry. But the review seems overly clever and carping without illuminating the book at all. He makes the mistake of reviewing the book he wishes the author had written. Meh.
This fellow would have liked my friend’s mother; she was a farmwife, and when my friend sent her a copy of the book she wrote back a one-sentence review: “This book is about *rabbits*.”
Worse, it’s about rabbits who shelter an injured seagull in their burrows.
Right…
And yet, I know and liked Watership down enough to read and reread it (and, in my callow youth, to have the role playing game rules for doing adventures with rabbit characters like those in his book), while I have never looked for anything from this schmuck at the NYT.
I want reviews to tell me about the story; to the extent the review does that (damned little), it is bearable. I think it crosses the line when it becomes the opinionated bloviations of the reviewer’s preferences and how the author has strayed from those preferences. Two Brickbats pitched hard as I can for the reviewer.
I mean, his gripe about the rabbits having their own names for things, instead of using english terms like Peter Rabbit or Mister Toad might do, how is that different than slanging Tora Tora Tora for using Japanese instead of casting English-speakers for every role? He probably thought Aesop wrote in English too. @#$%^&!! NYT Reviewers, we hates them, we does.
Chop them up, put ‘m in a stew….
XD
Whenever somebody calls a particular book “beloved” you know you’re in for it.