Watership Down - Richard Adams

Summary Scores:

Enjoyable to Read: B

Impact on the World: F

Increased My Understanding of the World/People: F

Made Me Think: D

I first heard about this book in The Devil's Casino, which is a book about Lehman Brothers. Some of the main characters owned a bar together and had a picture of Fiver on the wall. I had never heard of Watership Down, but I looked it up and realized it was regarded as a classic by some. There are plenty of so called classics I have never read or will read, so why this one? I guess it was a bit of a whim really. It was easy to gather that this was a story about a group of rabbits that leave their home in search of a new one and have many adventures along the way. How could a book starring rabbits be considered a classic unless it was simply great storytelling. And since I'm a lover of good stories, I decided to give it a shot.

The non-spoiler summary is that Hazel and Fiver are brothers. Hazel is a natural leader and Fiver has a sixth sense about looming danger. Fiver is frantic that all the rabbits need to leave, but only a handful join them. They don't really know where they are going and stumble into several adventures along the way. And even when they find their new home, the adventures continue. I thought Richard Adams did a great job of making them intelligent like humans, but not human. Of course, there are many ways to blend rabbits and humans into characters, but I thought this version was especially good. About the time you start to think of Hazel as a person, he does something very rabbit, and vise versa.

The characters are interesting, but at its core this is an adventure story. Richard Adams points out in the introduction that this is not an allegory, it is simply a story he made up for his kids on a long trip in the car. As someone who tries to make up stories for my kids, I have great admiration for this story. It has all the trappings of a good adventure tale. I enjoyed the rabbit legends almost as much as the actual story. There are several places throughout the book where the rabbits tell stories. Basically, these are the equivalent of Greek mythology to the ancient Greeks. The stories were brilliant and funny.

The scores at the beginning are designed to help me find books for my Cultured 100 list, and as such this book scored poorly on those metrics, but that does not make it a bad book. Quite the opposite. I thought this was an wonderful story and I will read it again to my kids someday when they are older; the way my Dad used to read stories to my sister, brother and me.