Rabbit Redux

By M.M.

WATERSHIPDOWN

by RICHARD ADAMS 429 pages.

Macmillan. $6.95.

Once upon a time there was talk of zorn in the old rabbit warren. A bunch of the young bucks got together and agreed (for Frith's sake!) that even if they became hlessil, they had to pull out--and right away too.

Zorn, in rabbit language, "denotes a catastrophe." Frith is the sun "personified as a god." Hlessil means migrant rabbits. And obviously Watership Down--the name of the upland where these hlessil finally make their new home--is also the code word for that territory known to Oxford dons and nannies: English-whimsy country.

To the long line of antic British bestiary writers--Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien--must now be added Richard Adams, Oxford graduate, British army veteran and recently resigned assistant secretary in the Department of the Environment. This talking-rabbits novel, his first, was rated flayrah ("unusually good food, e.g., lettuce") by the palates of English readers, who made it a bestseller and called it a classic-to-be. How will American readers like their existential Peter Rabbit? Probably less.

Adams makes his fable of survival a neat enough suspense story as his little band hippety-hops across the animal playing fields of England, bedeviled by crows, dogs, cats, automobiles and all the sundry elil (enemies) known to rabbits, not excluding other rabbits. The rabbit-you-love-to-hiss is a sort of lapine Erich von Stroheim named General Woundwort who runs a fascist-state warren. When the mateless hlessil bucks lure comely does from behind Woundwort's Iron Curtain, all bunny-hell breaks loose.

How much can one thrill to a showdown featuring black and white cotton tails? The answer depends partly on how much one can accept Adams' conceit that rabbits "are like human beings in many ways." Adams' rabbits, like people, are divided into leaders, prophets, poets and even comedians. ("Do you know what the first blade of grass said to the second blade of grass?" asks the hlessil Henny Youngman. "He said 'Look, there's a rabbit! We're in danger!' ") The most favored Adams rabbits seem to speak in U accents ("I say, what's happened?") and express a no-nonsense appetite for duty. The least favored Adams rabbits seem to incarnate the attitudes of the welfare state.

Class Snobbery. In a sentimental attempt at brotherhood-of-beasts, Adams goes so far as to have his hlessil form an alliance with a black-headed gull and a field mouse. Alas, in an unfortunate lapse into rabbit class snobbery, the mouse drops its aitches like a cockney while the gull speaks with a bad Russian accent ("Ya, ya . . .").

Back in 1944, missing both the art and the message in George Orwell's Animal Farm, Dial Press rejected the book, explaining to Orwell, "It's impossible to sell animal stories in the United States." In trying to sell Richard Adams' story as a straight adult novel with trendy environmental over tones, Macmillan (also publisher of Jonathan Livingston Seagull) may be making the same mistake in reverse. All the praises and prizes that Water ship Down has received have gone to it as the kind of nature-loving and highly literate juvenile that British children can read much younger than their American counterparts. Says Adams: "I should be very sorry if people tried to read deeper meanings into Water ship Down" He was deeply distressed recently when an enterprising American journalist with a tape recorder spent two hours trying to convince him that the book is really a political parable.

As for mystical profundities, there are references to a death symbol known as the Black Rabbit and stories-within-the-story concerning a rabbit folk hero called El-ahrairah. There is a brief glossary of rabbit terms. The quotations at the head of each chapter derive from Aeschylus, Xenophon, Pilgrim's Progress, Morte d' Arthur. But otherwise Watership Down offers little to build a literary cult upon. On the American-whimsy exchange, one Tolkien hobbit should still be worth a dozen talking rabbits. qedM.M.

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