Word: watership
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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...
...TWENTY-FIVE years, Richard Adams was a bureaucrat in Great Britain's Ministry for Housing and Local Government, mediating between federal housing policy and local sensibilities. This strong dose of reality perhaps explains the difference between England's two most famous modern fantasies-Watership Down and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkein, a professor of English, invented a whole mythological world for his fairy-tale creatures to inhabit; they in turn, are more concerned with forces of good and evil than with practical necessities like food, clothing, and shieter. Adams's rabbits, on the other hand...
Being a novelist, according to Adams, means writing stories in which "the reader should want to turn the page." When you ask him about sociological parables or allegories in Watership Down, he replies. "The book has no ulterior motive. It's simply a cliffhanger about rabbits." He admits, however, that the book was inspired by the English countryside, which he loves, in his own curious way. He denies having been influenced by the ecology movement of the past decade: I've known and loved this countryside since about 1925. And I look back to more pleasant days when there wasn...
...same sort of vigorous but slightly-off-target counterattack is Adams's reaction to charges of sexism in Watership Down. He doesn't explain the lack of strong female characters by arguing that female rabbits are subservient in nature. Instead he says, "That's just the way the story broke." He goes...
RICHARD ADAMS IS currently at work on his third novel, between interviews and book-signings. He calls it "an anthropomorphic fantasy like Watership Down; it's about two dogs who escape from an experimental station-sort of an animals' Catch-22, really-a black comedy with elements of the absurd, in which the heroes and the victims are animals." He says that for some years he has been upset and disgusted by the enormous number of experiments carried out on animals, many of which seem quite unnecessary to him. "If you experiment to cure a specific disease, say work with...