Watership Down You Know for Kids
Watership Down and the Power of Not-Quite-Appropriate Children's Books
Tina Kügler
In April, the BBC and Netflix announced an ambitious 4-role animated dramatization of Richard Adams' childhood classic, Watership Down, to exist released in 2017. By the looks of the thoughtfully called cast and much-touted production budget, it seems likely that this new Watership Down may overtake the particular, trippy charms of Martin Rosen's 1978 film in the hearts and minds of a new generation. With any luck, it will steer viewers back to the novel, which has violence and haunting oddness in spades.
Watership Down, which I would feel comfortable describing every bit one of the finest and most interesting books of the twentyth century, is nigh accessible to older children and adults, despite having originated from gentle tales Adams told to his children on long car rides. This disparity between material and tone made literary agents and publishers uneasy when the manuscript kickoff crossed their desk: Rabbits, Adams says in his introduction to newer editions of the volume, were considered a topic too "babyish" to appeal to an older audition, while the writing was too complex and literary for the sorts of younger children for whom rabbits would be a logical selling point.
Adams' intentions aside, information technology is certain that many, many children too young for Watership Downward found their style to it, via either well-meaning relatives who scooped a bucolic-looking copy from a bookstore without investigating further, or from children'southward libraries, where information technology often occupies a position of honor. I certainly did: The horror of the Sandleford warren's demise (rabbits gassed to decease in their stopped-up holes, violent each other to shreds while scrabbling for air) gave me a mild claustrophobia that makes the ordinary drudgery of deplaning an unpleasant experience to this day. Many not bad books embraced by a younger audience generation after generation contain passages darker than parents would adopt: the leper tossing his rotted finger casually into the fire in Henri Charrière's Papillon; the sisters starved to death in their own rooms in Mervyn Peake's glorious Gormenghast. My ain parents' resolve to leave their bookshelves completely open for our edification was shaken by the questions I asked after reading The Colour Royal at 11. Watership Downward is no exception. The characters are drawn from life, in particular from the officers and resistance fighters Adams had known during the Second World State of war, and their preoccupations are adult ones: tyranny and rebellion, survival and reproduction.
Our world is confusing to children, and then they are richly prepared to fumble their way through imaginary ones. A new language, be it Adams' Lapine or High Elvish or Klingon, is no more baffling than the whys and hows of adult interaction. When Tolkien explains that one can study hobbits for a hundred years and withal exist surprised by them in a pinch, he'southward talking nearly humans. As the parent of an autistic child, I take come to run into the subtle cues most of us retrieve of as instinctual—the physical shifting and wrist-glancing that signify a readiness to end a chat, inquiring politely after what an acquaintance did over the weekend despite being utterly indifferent to the answer—as the learned dialect they are. Adams explains, for example, that rabbits live in a hierarchical lodge where leaders only welcome suggestions if they are couched in such a way that it seems the leader has come upwards with it himself. That'due south a lesson some of us take decades to learn.
Aslope the mysteries of adult behavior in Watership Down is the elemental mythology that children also absorb early in life. Joan Bridgman has argued for the importance of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a M Faces as a backdrop to Adams' writing. (It is not for nada that El-ahrairah, the foundational hero of his rabbits' folk tales, is the Prince With a One thousand Enemies). The trickster is everywhere in the stories that the rabbits tell each other, and it's the failure of the rabbits of Cowslip'south warren to appreciate the traditional sociology of Blackberry'south tales that showtime starts to warn our heroes that these rabbits are not quite right: too soft, too plump, too helpless. When it is revealed that said rabbits live in full knowledge that they are being deliberately fed and periodically snared by a nearby farmer, and simply choose never to speak of it, Hazel recognizes at in one case that Cowslip's rabbits are aback to think of the tales of cunning and bravery that keep our heroes going.
I've always institute it amusing that Adams apologizes on behalf of his characters for the blunt indifference of his male rabbits to the inner lives of the female ones, inserting an aside to that consequence following Hazel'southward "Are they whatever good?" query every bit to the fertility of the liberated does. Romance is non the goal of rabbits! The goal is to build a stable convenance population so that the warren can survive. The producers of the 2017 remake have wisely promised to beef up the female roles (you can't rent Olivia Colman and expect her to exist satisfied with "We've e'er lived in the box and the girl brings united states of america cabbage"), just the novel is, at its core, a Fellowship of the Ring–like quest by a ring of brothers. This is the sort of thing I must admit I noticed not at all as a child, which speaks to the willingness to run into themselves in boy heroes that girls have traditionally had to muster in their literature.
Despite Adams' repeated vow that his novel was never meant to be read allegorically, I don't buy it, and never take. The encroachment of mechanism and man into the pastoral is at the eye of Watership Down equally information technology is in The Lord of the Rings; so too the allure of safety over freedom when offered at the point of a gun, or a snare. Information technology may be that the central preoccupations of 20thursday-century literature (and British literature, in particular) transcend apologue—that what Adams calls "simply the story of rabbits fabricated up and told in the machine" tracks with the themes that matter to people, peculiarly people who drive in that car past field and farmland for years, gradually noticing a factory or a tire store where once none existed. For children who read Watership Down, the "dark Satanic Mills" of William Blake encroach eternally on pleasant pastures green, peopled with rabbits idly chewing clover in the sun.
Nightlight is Slate's pop-up blog about children's books, running for the month of August. Read about information technology here.
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2016/08/watership-down-and-the-power-of-not-quite-appropriate-children-s-books.html
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