Watership Down offers a view into a subculture

 

One of many pieces of cover art for Watership Down. Image found at https://dameai.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/watership-down-d/.

Okay. Given the length of Watership Down, I’m going to be reading this book and posting about it for a while. With that in mind I feel like I need to say one thing about it sooner rather than later.

I think that Watership Down offers a glimpse into the furry community. That is, the way that Adams builds all of this mythology and culture for his rabbits (giving them their own language, a cultural hero in El-Ahrairah, and a creation story) and yet does as little as possible to anthropomorphize his characters in the usual ways (giving them clothes, having them stand on their hind legs, or making them use human tools and objects, etc.) offers some idea of how people who identify as furry think when in their “fur-sona.”

Maybe.

At the very least, looking at the book as a window onto a subculture makes it easier for me to comprehend. In a kind of backwards way it actually anthropomorphizes the animals for me, helping me to empathize with them not as fellow creatures but as fellow people; in other words, in the same way I’d empathize with characters in most other books.

That said, the section of the book I read for this entry sees the group (Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, and the rest) ford a river after Dandelion tells of El-Ahrairah, then come to a bean patch where they decide to rest and lick their wounds. They avoid an encounter with a dog along the way, but are beset by a crow that they’re luckily able to fend off.

So far, then, they’re just being rabbits.

Which is fascinating in and of itself, for sure. Even though reading about rabbits making their way to a new warren doesn’t sound all that interesting but Adams’ research into rabbits really shows through.

But even then I fear that reading about rabbits making their way to a new warren in a world in which other animals don’t seem to be intelligible to them will soon wear thin. After all, how can that sort of journey fill a 475 page book?

What do you think about stories that involve a lot of travelling? Should this travelling be described or just skipped over? Do you think travel as part of a work of fiction that’s about something bigger can contribute to the story, or will it only ever detract from it?