A summer visit with an old friend

Ah, summertime, when the evening skies remain light, and evening reading is a pleasure. Every few summers I return to an old favorite, which I first read when I was about fourteen. Watership Down by Richard Adams is almost forty years old, but it remains, for me, the best summertime novel ever written.

It is the tremendously exciting tale of a band of adventurers who leave their home when they become convinced that it is not safe. They embark upon an odyssey filled with dangers both familiar and strange. They succeed in outwitting all their enemies before finding their peaceful home at last.

During their quest we become familiar with the personalities of the individual members of the band - the visionary, the doughty friend, the swift storyteller, the clever one. We learn of their culture, their language, their lore, the things that are important to them. They are not quite like us; they live closer to death by violence than we do, and both accept this and challenge it constantly.

They are rabbits. This, I know, is a problem for some people, who just cannot get around the fact that they're reading a 400-page book about talking, storytelling rabbits.

I have heard some people try to justify this book by calling it an allegory for human society or the quest for freedom, or something; I don't know. I don’t really buy it. Watership Down is just a marvelous story. I believe that if you give it a chance, you will find yourself reading long after the summer skies have finally darkened, because you will need to know what happens next to those rabbits.