There are many memorable characters in Watership Down, but perhaps the most memorable is General Woundwart. Learning what he is if you've never come across him before will probably lead you to echo the incredulity of those who first heard details of the soon-to-be-incredibly-successful book in which he appears. This is because General Woundwort is not of the genus Homo, but of the genus Oryctolagus. In other words, he's not a man, he's a rabbit. Which means, of course, that he appears in Watership Down. Which is, of course, a children's book. Well, no, actually it isn't, it's a children's classic, and you don't get to be one of them without appealing to adults as well. Adults will see that General Woundwort and his slave-warren Efrafra bear more than a passing resemblance to a military dictator (e.g. General Franco) and a slave-state (e.g. Sparta), and might even go so far as to start shifting uncomfortably in their armchairs and muttering "Allegory" to themselves under their breath.
In fact, I think you can clear General Woundwort and Efrafra of the slur because, rather like Br'er Rabbit's Tar Baby and the Briar Patch, the story and characters are set in such a convincingly detailed non-human world that they have to be positively wrenched from it to become anything so banal as a reflection on human beings and their behaviour. General Woundwort is a very cunning and ruthless and murderous military dictator. He's also a rabbit. There's no incongruity.
Which is a remarkable achievement that is matched in the rest of the book. Adam, in Christian mythology, was the father of the human race, which means that while there's no symbolism in Tolkien's surname, there certainly is in Adams'. Like Tolkien, Adams was the father of a genre: the genre of the anthropotheric, or therianthropic, story. That is, the genre of stories about animals who behave like human beings. In the strictest sense, the genre stretches back to Aesop and his fables through Enid Blyton and hundreds of years of Christian and pagan allegory. What Adams did that was new was introduce realism. His animals share the faculties of language, hindsight, and foresight with human beings, and almost nothing else. They keep all their instincts and all their wildness: they just talk to each other.
Other authors have followed Adams' lead and you can now read books about, among many other things, talking owls and badgers. I haven't read any of the later entries in the genre Adams founded, and I haven't wanted to, because if any of them come even close to matching the invention and realism of Watership Down I would be very surprised.
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Advantages: Involves the reader incredibly deeply in the fortunes of usually ignored or depised creatures Disadvantages: Some of the writing is a little old-fashioned
Advantages: Shows what life is like for real wild animals in the world around us. Disadvantages: Some parts seemed a bit too gory for my personal taste.
Advantages: Involves the reader incredibly deeply in the fortunes of usually ignored or depised creatures Disadvantages: Some of the writing is a little old-fashioned
Aug 14th, 2001
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