… and I’m most likely to tell you that it is ‘Watership Down.’Richard Adam’s master work is certainly right up there on top of my list.
But it not the mere reading of the book that has pushed it so high up in my reckoning. There are so many other factors at play: my age, my level of expectation, even the place of reading and the weather.
(Photo CC Dean Ayres)
It’s a complicated thing.
I would probably have been aware of ‘Watership’ Down when it was published in 1974 even though I was only 11 – I was just that kind of child – but it was when I saw a copy on my science teacher’s desk circa 1976 that I became interested in reading it. My science teacher, Tom Rogers, didn’t strike me as the reading type but the book was beside his satchel for a period of weeks and I used to steal glances through it when he wasn’t looking. (I later came upon ‘The World According to Garp’ in the same way but it was a stand-in teacher who was reading that one).
Those rabbits put me off at first. I wanted mystery and murder and laughs and rabbits didn’t hold much promise of any of that. But the book was intriguing, there was crowded typeset and earnest reviews and the cover showing a rabbit head in profile was striking enough that I felt it would look good at my bedside.
So I saved up my money and at the start of my summer holidays I was able to buy it.
The opening lines had me worried. From memory, it was all about fields and flowers and sunsets - such that I began to wonder if I could get a refund for some comics instead. Before long, however, the story kicked in, the characters sprang to life and I became completely and utterly entranced.
I remember us making one of our family excursions to Glencar Lake. Dad fishing out in a boat, Mum making floppy ham sandwiches and me… me buried in my book, impervious to my surroundings.
Except that last bit is not true at all, I may have thought at the time that I was impervious to the breeze in the long grass and the threat of a shower rolling in across the lake, of the bee landing momentarily on the page or the long indifferently-weathered summer weeks stretching out ahead of me.
But I wasn’t. These things slipped in between the pages and the lines and the words and became as much a part of why I love this book as the words themselves.
And who can not love this book, to some extent at least? How can any of the myriad fans of Lord of the Rings not also see the same questing, adventure, mythology, crisis and heroics in this wonderful novel?
It is my belief that many people’s perceptions of this book are adversely coloured by the animated film which was adapted from it. If it were an outright ‘bad’ film, the damage would be limited but it is, in fact, an earnest but ultimately rather boring and ‘average’ sort of a film and that is infinitely worse for the book. People remember the ‘cartoon’ and can’t be bothered to try the book – having seen the film, I can’t blame them for that.
As an adult, I was afraid to return to Watership Down after my childhood reading, for fear that I would be disappointed, but I did brave it again about five years ago when I read it aloud to my then-seven-year-old. I surprised myself (and please don’t tell anyone this) by reading the last line, closing the book, bidding my son good night and then crying just a tiny bit.
I don’t think that piece of silliness was on account of the resolution of the book or the fate of any of the characters therein.
I think perhaps, for a moment, that bee landed on the back cover again and the lake breeze of my teens eased one final time through my hair.
