Word: snitter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like his enormously successful Watership Down and Shardik, Richard Adams' third novel relies heavily on animal magnetism. This time out, two plucky dogs named Rowf and Snitter escape from an experimental station in the English Lake District, where they have been treated bestially by doctors. Freedom means surviving in the inhospitable countryside and dodging much of the British population, which incorrectly believes the animals have been inoculated with plague. On their journey the beleaguered canines are aided by a roguish fox. It is hard to say anything critical about such a heartwarming story...
...artful cataloguer of flora and fauna, at worst a windy sentimentalist. Memorable passages occur only when his imagination roosts among furry creatures or in the mid-regions of myth. Give him anything more difficult to chew on than a bone, and things fall apart. The story of Rowf and Snitter is glutted with just such indigestibles...
Hard as he is on unpleasant people, Adams lays a heavier hand on things and ideas he does not like. The center that Rowf and Snitter escape from is called Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental (A.R.S.E.). Its acronym hits the level on which every endeavor that does not involve padding about on four feet is treated. The behavior of politicians, scientists and journalists invariably rouses Adams into the kind of jocular sneering that is more fun to write than to read...
True, Adams overwrites almost every scene, but he manages to turn that fault into a virtue. Length can lull disbelief and make the unlikely seem familiar. Snitter, for instance, has been the victim of mind-control experiments and consequently hallucinates a fair amount of gibberish: "There's a mouse - a mouse that sings - I'm bitten to the brains and it never stops raining - not in this eye any way." The effect of a terrier doing his impression of the fool in King Lear is at first disconcerting. It grows less so with each appearance, and those...
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