Watership Down - Richard Adams
*** This post contains spoilers. ***
Fiver could sense danger. Something terrible was going to happen to the warren - he felt sure of it. So did his brother Hazel, for Fiver's sixth sense was never wrong. They had to leave the warren. And so a small band of rabbits began a long and perilous journey.
I vaguely recall starting this book ages ago when I was a kid, but I didn't get very far. First chapter, maybe. Since then, I'd heard nothing but how this book is so not a kids' book, and so many rabbits die in it, and so on and so forth. Figured I should read it myself. It's actually a really good book. Much better than I was expecting. It took a bit before I really got into it, but once I did, I was in. Richard Adams managed to create some really strong characters that really make you care about what happens to them. Which is particularly cool because every single one of them is not only a rabbit, but they basically actually act like rabbits, too. By the end, of course, they've kind of developed a certain amount of higher reasoning, and they do things that real rabbits probably wouldn't. But as a base, even with those things, they are rabbits, behaving the way real rabbits do. And that alone makes this a pretty cool book. Like I said, I was very impressed with this book.
As for whether or not it's a kids' book, well, any book that opens with a passage from Agamemnon is suspect, if you ask me. Then there's the violence. There were actually many fewer rabbit deaths than I had been led to believe (To hear people talk, rabbits just drop like flies in the book.), and not one of them is one that we actually know and love. The band Hazel and Fiver set out with in the beginning never loses a member, and in fact ultimately gains several. There definitely are some deaths, but none in the Band of Bunnies. The violence, though, is kind of interesting, because if you think about these characters as the rabbits that they are, the violence is everyday stuff that we wouldn't necessarily even be all that bothered by (depending on your level of sensitivity, and feelings about hunting and whatnot) - people hunting, other animals hunting, and rabbit-on-rabbit fighting. On the other hand, because these rabbits are characters in this story, when they fight, it does basically have the effect of people tearing each other apart, and I think that does make it less than entirely suitable for kids.
More than that, though, the writing style is not the writing style of a children's author. Kids' books tend to be written in a certain way, without too much subtlety - even the really good ones. If you can't predict all the twists, you usually still have a fairly good idea how things are going to go, and reading as an adult, at least, you don't usually get too tense about the outcome of a particular situation. The writing in this book is way more sophisticated than that. When something starts - the mission to get does from Efrafa, for example - Adams does a really good job of not telegraphing at all how it's going to turn out. Personally, I was reasonably confident that the mission would be a success, in that they would get some does. But I had no idea what it might cost them, and was especially worried for Bigwig, and was intensely relieved when he came out OK.
A couple of other things I wanted to mention are the skill with which Adams describes the world from the rabbits' perspective, while still making it clear to humans what he's referring to. For example:
And then - then an enormous thing - I can't give you any idea of it - as big as a thousand hrududil [their word for cars/tractors/etc.] - bigger - came rushing out of the night. It was full of fire and smoke and light and it roared and beat on the metal lines until the ground shook beneath it. It drove in between us and the Efrafans like a thousand thunderstorms with lightning.
The rabbits have never seen a train, of course, so they can't call it that, but we know that's what it was. He does this all the way through. Pretty cool.
I also loved this: Adams throws in various words in Lapine, rather than English, which, initially, I wasn't too sure about, but it grew on me. Particularly as a good example of how to do what Anthony Burgess tried to do in Clockwork Orange without making the book incomprehensible. There are enough of these words to remind us that these characters are different from us, but not so many that you lose track of what the hell anyone's talking about. A couple that were used frequently were silflay, meaning eat or feed or something like that, and hraka, meaning poop. So when Bigwig tells Woundwort to "Silflay hraka," not only do we know exactly what he's saying, I laughed my ass off, because Richard Adams totally found a way to get away with having a character tell another to eat shit in a kids' book. And I find that hilarious.
The upshot of all this is that I really don't think this is a kids' book. I think it's much better than that. And the only reason I can think for it to be classified as a kids' book is that Richard Adams couldn't get this book published except by presenting it as a kids' book. Because, seriously, what publisher in their right mind would publish a book about bunnies for adults? It's too bad, though, because I suspect a lot of kids don't really get into it when they're kids, and a lot of adults probably skip it because it's kids' book. And they're missing out on a very engaging, well-written book, which is really too bad.
Next up: The Italian, by Ann Radcliffe