'Watership Down': A novel about leadership, with long ears

Richard Adams' classic allegory follows a group of rabbits seeking a better society.

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The first time I read Richard Adams’ “Watership Down” was so long ago that I retained only the vaguest impressions of the book: It had rabbits, a lot, and I liked it, a lot. Maybe it was time for a re-read, I kept thinking every time I spotted our copy on a bookshelf. Finally, it occurred to me that 2023, the Year of the Rabbit, was drawing to a close. As good an excuse as any.

The reward of reading “Watership Down” comes immediately. Adams has a fabulous way with words; take this evocative description in the book’s opening paragraph:

The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog’s mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow.

Or take this introduction to the rabbits a few paragraphs later:

The first rabbit stopped in a sunny patch and scratched his ear with rapid movements of his hind leg. Although he was a yearling and still below full weight, he had not the harassed look of most “outskirters” — that is, the rank and file of ordinary rabbits in their first year who, lacking either aristocratic parentage or unusual size and strength, get sat on by their elders and live as best as they can — often in the open — on the edge of their warren.

In the span of a page, Adams plunges us into a meticulously detailed place and society. This, we understand immediately, is not going to be a cute tale about bunnies making googly eyes at one another amid the flowers. By the end of the first chapter, we see catastrophe about to descend on this world; by the end of the second, we know that its leadership is in no way prepared for such a turn of events. Our first rabbit is persuaded by his prescient brother to leave before everything goes to hell, and they lead a small band toward the new home the brother has seen in a vision.

Naturally, they encounter all sorts of adventures along the way. There’s the warren that welcomes them, but where they soon sniff out a possibly sinister mystery. There’s the warren that is outright sinister in its militarism and rigid social hierarchy. In between their actual escapades, the rabbits share stories about the legendary escapades of Eh-ahrairah, a folk hero who reminded me of the Coyote trickster figure in many Indigenous tales.

It’s fascinating to me that Adams’ book was originally published in 1972 as children’s fiction. Adams himself was quoted as saying that “Watership Down” was “just about rabbits,” just a written-down and expanded version of a story he originally told his young daughters to pass the time on long car trips. But its characters’ struggles toward a better, safer and stabler society resonate with my adult perspective in a way they never could have during my childhood.