azel, Fiver, Bigwig and their fellow rabbits live in peace and prosperity in their warren somewhere in the hilly countryside. But Fiver, the smallest of his litter, sees visions of a terrible disaster awaiting their little community. He is not capable of understanding the nature of the disaster—the arrival of bulldozers, intent on flattening everything for a new housing tract—but he knows that everybody who stays is doomed. The Chief Rabbit is too fat and complacent to believe these wild stories, so Hazel and Fiver escape with the few fellow rabbits willing to believe in Fiver's prophecy.
Seeking a new warren, they brave dangers including predators, automobiles and running water. Along the way they comfort themselves with the myths and tales of El-ahrairah, the so-called "Prince with a Thousand Enemies," who they believe to be the progenitor of all rabbits; the legends trumpet his cunning and bravery and his cleverness at outwitting predators, all qualities that the fugitive rabbits will need if they're ever to survive the search for a new home.
Even so, the greatest dangers come from other rabbit communities. The band narrowly escape disaster when they almost join one warren whose oddly effete inhabitants live in what seems to be well-fed comfort. But even that threat pales before the one that still looms in their future: Efrafa, a warren that has become a repressive fascist dictatorship, ruled by the brutal and ruthless General Woundwort. When Bigwig enters Efrafa in a desperate plan to free females—does—to help populate the freshly established warren at Watership Down, Woundwort vows bloody revenge ... and Hazel's band find themselves forced to prepare for an all-out siege. ...
Heroes with long ears and little puffy tails
Watership Down was the first and best novel of Richard Adams, the British fantasist whose other books include Shardik and The Plague Dogs. They're all good reads, but none matches the sheer fun of his first book.
Perhaps the greatest surprise about Watership Down is that it's not Cute. The heroes and villains are all rabbits. They possess the appeal and many of the attributes of rabbits; they're anthropomorphised enough to render them capable of conversing with each other at length, in a manner sufficient to mark them as individuals ... but they're not the flopsy-mopsy bunnies they would have been if this were a mere children's tale. They're facing deadly serious issues of life and death here, and not all of them will survive.
Their adventures are so compelling and, by the end, so viscerally exciting, that it's easy to gloss over the fact that every community of rabbits our heroes encounter on their journey is a portrait of the various fates that can meet a society. The warren they left is so complacent it fails to react to warnings of imminent disaster. A warren they encounter on the way lives with the illusion of safety and prosperity, but only if they live in denial of the terrible price. The caged pet rabbits they find at a nearby farm have all their needs met, but live without freedom or self-determination. And Efrafa, of course, is the kingdom of the self-proclaimed General Woundwort, who is so obsessed with the enemies he sees on all sides that he curbs the freedom of his people and ignores the many signs that the system is breaking down all around him. Any reader who seeks political metaphors in that, especially today, will find plenty in the text. It's a tribute to the power of the actual narrative that these metaphors are almost invisible in the face of a rollicking good adventur
story.
General Woundwort himself is a fascinating and compelling villain: ruthless, battle-scarred, murderous, physically unstoppable in rabbit terms, obsessed with control, and anything but mad. In context, he's downright terrifying. When he leads his soldiers on a bloody mission of vengeance against Hazel's warren, there seems real doubt that any of our heroes will survive. When Bigwig, a sort of rabbit John Wayne, faces him down inside the embattled warren, giving Hazel time to pull off a brilliant gambit, the bloody showdown between hero and villain is, honestly, as viscerally exciting as adventure fiction gets.
