Watership Down

Of all the many, many books that were important to me as a child, and that have remained closely with me over the years--Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, The Phantom Tollbooth, Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone, The Hobbit--I'm not sure any occupies as high a place as Richard Adams's Watership Down. I read it in third grade, and had a nosebleed all over my father's copy. I read it again in fourth grade, and a couple more times in middle school and high school. Adams's great achievement--presenting characters who are believably complicated, interesting, and human-like, while at the same time never letting us forget that they're rabbits--is one that remains impressive even on adult reacquaintance with the book. If anything, it's a more astonishing novel, because the anthropomorphizing that is so much a part of childhood is farther away, our tolerance significantly lessened, yet Adams holds our interest, and convinces us, nonetheless.

At heart, it's a book about different ways of organizing a society, and as the rabbits encounter a number of warrens, each built around a different idea of what constitutes security, the book takes on a moral force akin to that found in The Once and Future King. Lest that make the novel sound crudely allegorical, I should say that it's nothing of the sort: the rabbits are rabbits, their society is their society, not ours, and while we can draw lessons from what they experience, within the novel it never feels as if they're experiencing it for our sake.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this post: if you're a Chicagoan and you love Watership Down, or loved it as a kid, you should go see the Lifeline Theatre's production of it that runs through this weekend. Rocketlass and I went Saturday, our confidence in Lifeline just barely balancing the inevitable doubts: How on earth can you put on aplay about bunnies without everyone on stage looking ridiculous? How, with the scrim of the mind's eye removed, would they be able to convince us that these actors, obviously people, were actually rabbits?

Well, they did it. The actors don't dress like rabbits, but they move with a deliberate, practiced strangeness that is taken from, and calls to mind, the twitchy fearfulness of rabbits. And within minutes of the curtain rising, rocketlass and I--and, it seems, the entire audience--bought it. By the time the first act drew to a close, coming out of the story was a lot like emerging from a dream.

The adaptation isn't perfect, if only because a long novel has been squeezed into a play of ordinary length. Each of the groups of other rabbits that the bunch meets is dealt with more glancingly in the play than in the novel, which causes the casual brutality of the first warren and the uncanny horrors of a later one to be muted. The complicated relationships among Fiver, Bigwig, and Hazel are sketched rather than fully enacted, and while the play tries admirably, it can't ever quite convey as well as Adams the way that being thrust into leadership works on Hazel. Adams manages to perpetually locate him in the moment of decision, with no sense of authorial or readerly knowledge of what's to come, lets us see Hazel forced to learn, adapt, and be decisive, and the admiration those qualities elicit in his companions; the play does a good job of addressing the topic, but again, time constraints limit it.

Yet even having acknowledged those limitations, I'm amazed. For two and a half hours, I felt like we were watching, and caring about, rabbits, in the same way that Adams makes you feel like you're reading about rabbits. Their vulnerability makes you ache: they're forever in danger; like Cain, the whole world sets its hand against them. Watching, you feel what it is to be prey. It's an amazing achievement, and it brings to mind the terror of powerlessness that Philip Larkin captures in his poem about a disease that was deliberately introduced to control rabbit populations, "Myxomatosis":

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

But unlike Larkin, Adams and the Lifeline crew, bring the rabbits out of it. Their enemies will never be fully vanquished, of course, but the rabbits are at least vouchsafed a bit of hard-earned peace. If you're a Watership Down fan, go see this play. If you've not read Watership Down, seek it out--then give a copy to your kids, your nieces and nephews.

The Tortoise and the Curate

I will admit that I came to Verlyn Klinkenborg's new book, Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile, hoping it really would be what the flap copy suggested, a story told from the point of view of a tortoise. I was hoping for something akin to the trick Richard Adams manages in Watership Down, where he mixes anthropomorphism and convincing animal behaviors to tell about characters which, though complex and captivating, never seem like anything other than rabbits.

It turns out that's not what Klinkenborg is up to. Instead, he's written a gently chiding appreciation—and inversion—of eighteenth-century naturalist's Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789). White was a careful observer of nature, recording climatic details, movements of animals, results of the harvest, and everything he saw on his rambles through the countryside near his house. Given to White by an aunt, Timothy was a tortoise who lived in his garden for years, turning up now and again in the journal.

Now Timothy gets center stage, and it turns out that he's as much of a naturalist as White, but without the handicap of being human. White, though an undoubted lover of nature, was a curate of the Church of England, and he suffered from the beliefs of the era, which, before Darwinism encouraged a view of humanity at the top of nature, separated humans from the natural world entirely. Timothy knows better, knows the limits of what White preaches on Sundays:

Is death so fearsome that it must be undone? Is this life so poor a thing? Is not eternity somewhat too long?
Theirs is a niggardly faith, withal. Parishioners believe only as much as will save the humans among them. Never mind the rest of creation. Unwilling to distinguish the dead from the living. But eager to set apart the rest of creation.

He rises to the pulpit. God's family, he says, is numberless. "comprehending the whole race of mankind." And only the race of mankind. Thereby cutting off most of creation.

But numberless is not the race of mankind. Numberless is the race of beetles. Numberless are "the most insignificant insects and reptiles." Flying ants that swarm by millions in this garden. Armies of aphids falling in showers over the village. Palmer-worms hanging by threads from the oaks. Shoals of shell-snails. the earthworms. Mighty, Mr. Gilbert White avers, in their effect on the economy of nature. Yet excluded from the family of god.

Timothy watches, as White watches, only Timothy sees more, keeping track of the humans and their thoughts and activities as he keeps track of nature. Clearly, Klinkenborg is not trying to make Timothy seem like a turtle in essence; rather, he's using the idea of a tortoise to slow down and refocus his own thoughts about nature, pushing himself and the reader out of their ordinary understandings of the human and the animal. It doesn't always work, but at its best—as when Timothy watches White age and poignantly realizes that the events of nature will continue in Selbourne, unrecorded, once White is gone—it marries natural history, environmental philosophy, and the story of the odd semi-friendship that develops between man and tortoise. It was good for Saturday reading in my front room while watching the finches and sparrows and juncos crowd the feeder.

But what is the heron's vocation? To what occupation is the viper called? Or summer's myriad of frogs? What trade was the otter following when he strayed down the rivulet?
Only a single vocation in all the rest of this earthly parish, all the rest of creation. Vocation of place.

There are certainly worse vocations, for any animal, including a human.