In tandem, Hazel and Pipkin lead a raid on a nearby farm, learning only then of their fellow rabbits' escape from Efrafa (seemingly a police state), having fought for their lives.Īgainst these ongoing struggles, Adams provides humour and the magic of storytelling within the story. A group of emissaries must venture to the nearby warren, Efrafa, known to house many does – and over which the tyrannical figure of the antagonist, General Woundwort, looms. Fiver's vision is of safety at Watership Down, but the rabbits' first arrival there brings only the realisation that a warren without does cannot survive. In the way of all pilgrimage, their journey (reflected in quotations from Bunyan and in a physical map in the back of the book) presents dangers and hurdles on its way. While the shape of each character is filled out as the journey advances, the presence in the party of Silver and Bigwig, physically the strongest of the group, and formerly of the Owsla, military element of the warren, consolidates a sense of the battle to come. The mix plays a huge part in the book's charm. Complementing Hazel's loyalty and wish to see the best in others, Bigwig brings physical strength and courage, and we find ingenuity in Blackberry. Fiver is accompanied by his brother, Hazel, who is himself elevated to a new and unanticipated position as leader. There is a fragility as well as strength about the little group that sets forth. Thus begins the journey at the novel's heart. Fiver's warning is ignored by the chief rabbit, forcing a small brave group – of those convinced that the warren's days are numbered – to leave, in search of a new home. The words on a new noticeboard fill the sensitive seer rabbit, Fiver, with a sense of 'some terrible thing – coming closer and closer', threatening their beloved Sandleford: 'the field's full of blood'. Adams has sometimes been said to have 'anthropomorphised' the rabbits but it always seemed to me that their charm was rather that we become them. So immersed are we in their vantage point that the appearance in the closing chapters of a human in the shape of Lucy, the farm girl at Nuthanger, comes as something of a reversal. From the beginning, the fact of seeing of the world and the initial surroundings of Sandleford Warren through the eyes of the rabbits is something which, as readers, we don't question. 'The primroses were over:' the seasonal melancholy of the first line runs as a thread through the text, its sad beauty drawing us in.

For me it continues to hold the lure and the comfort of a pilgrimage to be made and remade.

A present from a much loved uncle, the story of the quest for survival by a brave, easy to love band of rabbits, seemed to combine the intimacy of a myth with the scale of a battle. Watership Down, Richard Adams' first novel, made its way into my life in the Christmas of 1974 and has drawn me back to its yellowing pages ever since.

Watership down by richard adams