Tales from Watership Down

by Richard Adams
Avon Books, March 1998

[Challenge # 39: A book with a non-human (animal or fantastic creature) main character]

I don’t think any talking-animal story has ever come close to what Richard Adams accomplished with Watership Down, an epic tale of rabbits who flee their doomed warren. It had the perfect mix of myth, adventure, naturalism, and irony… irony in that world-changing or mysterious events in the rabbits’ world are actually mundane ones for human beings. An escaped dog decides the outcome of a war. A punt on a stream is alien technology, and a freight train a rampaging Godzilla. Adams’ rabbits handle these elements with a very British matter-of-factness, as if they were fighting in the trenches of Verdun.

But they are not without humor and charm, especially in their tales of El-Ahrairah, a rabbit trickster deity who supports his people with smarts and sass. This rabbit, or lapine as Adams puts it, mythology is a good part of why the book has become and remains a classic. Not only that, the world they inhabit is itself a mythology, a rural English countryside without motorways, radios, air traffic, or tourists, where cows are milked by hand and children never watch TV. Cars, trains, and electrical pylons make appearances, but that’s it. It’s a mythic twist within a twist.

I first read Watership Down at the age of 13 and enjoyed it immensely. It’s one of those books that are a perfect bridge for young teens into more adult reading. I even remember how I got it: from a bookstore in Philadelphia, on a day trip there with my widowed mother, who had pulled me out of school to enjoy the autumn weather. And like many other budding writers, I created my own language from the lapine glossary that Adams provided at the end of the book, a language that ranks as a conlang classic. (Adams utilized “soft sounds” like th, f, and hr and short verbs to create something that rabbits might speak, if they could.)

For the “talking animal” selection of this year’s Author Water Cooler challenge I chose Tales from Watership Down, billed as a sequel even though it’s more of a coda/appendix. Half was more rabbit mythology tales, and half short stories of what happened in the new Watership Down warren after the defeat of General Woundwart. I don’t think any of this could have been read on its own; one would have to have read and enjoyed the previous book. The stories are a lot like the multiple appendixes J. R. R. Tolkien provided after the “official” ending of Return of the King (“Well, I’m back,” he said.)  Material that enhances what you just read, but is not really necessary.

That said, I did enjoy my re-visit with Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, and their companions. The further history of the warren unfolded logically in a series of small events that added more to the world, teasing us almost of what might have been if the author decided to create a series. If there was a theme to it, it was the importance of even-handed, inclusive, yet decisive, leadership. Adams even managed to right some wrongs in the original story, in that the female rabbits received more of a voice, and he hints that the does are in fact responsible for cultural transmission in rabbit society. It’s an intriguing idea of a free-floating stream of ESP that acts as a collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense, for the rabbits. It nicely explains how distant warrens can have the same language and societies, though I am not sure the author intended it as such.

Thumbs-up for readers who have the original book.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

by N. K. Jemison
Current, Penguin Group, 2013

[Challenge # 14: A book about a person of color (PoC), any variety, written by an author of the same variety]

Up to now, I haven’t read much current fantasy, that is, books published after 2001. In recent years I read fantasy YA – which disappointed me more often than not – but stuck to new releases from my favorite go-to authors for adult fantasy reading. I was a little nervous when beginning N. K. Jemison’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms because I’d been out of touch with new writers in the field. I wasn’t sure what I would find.

But, wow! I did enjoy it a lot, enough for five stars. I can say without reserve that fantasy has come a long way since Dragonlance and The Wheel of Time, the series I most associate with the 1980s and 1990s with. The ones featuring florid, thorny typefaces for the book’s title and busy Darryl Sweet cover art of all the characters in one posed, dramatic moment. The kind sold in B. Daltons in malls across the heartland, when the genre began its homogenization in response to an increased readership with money to spend.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a parlor fantasy, by which I mean 90% of the action occurs in the same locale, with the same people. A young woman from a dark-skinned warrior tribe, Yeine, is chosen by her estranged grandfather to become one of the heirs to his vast, theocracy-governed kingdom, but she must best his two other heirs in magical combat. Arriving at the capital city and its tethered floating palace, Sky, she discovers the gods have installed in her the soul of a defeated goddess in a plot by them to become free. The gods are currently the slaves of the theocracy’s rulers and must do their bidding while locked in human form. The plot is part Beauty and the Beast, part coming of age, part mystery, and part Dying Earth in that its magic felt like advanced science. The tone is Vancian as well, very wry, but also humanistic – Cugel the Clever with an understanding of the moral consequences. There’s an echo of Frank Herbert’s Dune series in its examination of Godhood, and of Octavia Butler in its examination of the emotional bonds between the human and the alien. Yeine narrates, and thankfully avoids present tense. Her voice contributed a great deal to my enjoyment of a novel which is composed of more than a few disparate elements, and I wish every writer who has their heart set on using first person present would read it, just to see how much more powerful a more traditional POV is.

Though most of this world seems to exist in a pre-gunpowder age, the characters have a basic understanding of astrophysics and come across as quite modern. The minor characters could be harried bureaucrats in any local government or school system, and the fantastic gods-created floating palace often comes across as a luxury hotel in Dubai. On the other hand, not every hotel has gods in human form running around, playing tricks. Though there are four in the story, only two emerge as real characters, Sieh, who, though “adult,” embodies the essence of childhood, and Nahadoth the Nightlord, who has two different personalities, one for day and one for night, when not even his masters can fully control him.

It’s Yeine’s interactions with these two deities that carry the story forward. Her feelings about them are constantly changing, ranging from sympathy for their plight to anger at their machinations, and the author did an excellent job at portraying them as alien beings with components of humans, but who aren’t really human. I was more fond of Sieh than the Nightlord, who, in seeking his true identity, seduces Yeine several times, the last resulting in a titanic orgasm that leaves the bed broken and room trashed. The story veered close to being a bodice-ripper at that point; yet, it fit, and lent weight to what was otherwise happening in the plot. Though indulgent in that it happened three times, it didn’t detract significantly from the book.

Apart from these moments, the POV felt very cerebral, again like Vance’s fiction where a reader can enjoy the sounds of the words and the concepts, yet not quite taste the sweat or feel the heat. There was a lack of visceralness. But again, this fit the type of story it was.

The pace was brisk, with no wasted moments or words (well, except for those orgasm scenes) and the narrator’s personal mystery deepens as she begins to converse with an unseen entity who may or may not exist in her head, or may only be a narrative affectation to get her point across. I thought the latter, until the story’s twisty-turny, thunderous conclusion. All I can say is duuhhh for me.

At the end, I’d had a wrenching yet entertaining experience. Psychologically the story felt far longer and more epic than its word count had predicted, always my sign of an excellent writer. It might have been expanded more, but then, it wouldn’t have carried the punch it did.

I don’t think The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is for everyone. There’s a level of abstraction there that’s a 180 degree turn from more traditional, Tolkienesque fantasies. But for those who want to see what the genre is capable of, I recommend it.