Tales from Watership Down

At last: twenty-four years after the publication of Watership Down - one of the century's best-loved works of imaginative literature - the superb storyteller Richard Adams reenters that unique and special world to tell us about the lives of the rabbits after their defeat of General Woundwort. Tales from Watership Down begins with some of the great folk stories well known to all rabbits. Then we listen in as Dandelion, the rabbits' master storyteller, relates the thrilling adventures experienced by El-ahrairah, the mythical rabbit hero, and his stalwart, Rabscuttle, during the long journey home after their terrible encounter with the Black Rabbit of Inle (as narrated in Watership Down). Finally, in the principal part of the book, we are told eight enchanting stories about the rabbits of the Down - Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and their companions - including the impact on the warren of the obsessive doe Flyairth, and the appointment of Hyzenthlay as a female Chief Rabbit and partner to Hazel. Sally Eckhoff To those with an aversion to fairy stories, fake mythological lingo, and anything that anthropomorphizes animals, here's a book to make you swallow your doubts. Tales from Watership Down is a marvel. It consists of 19 stories, ostensibly about rabbits but actually concerning aspects of life - some mystical, some practical - that are traditionally hard to pin down. Hard, that is, Adams seems to argue, unless you're as sensitive as only a rabbit can be. Adams is best known for two earlier books, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, and for the films made from them. (He is also the author of Traveler, a moving and perceptive biography of Robert E. Lee's legendary war horse.) None of these quite convey the striking and often scary atmosphere he brings to this new collection, a full 20 years after we last heard from him. Aside from the rabbits' vocabulary, which can be distracting, there's nothing prissy or inconsequential here. Adams clearly understands a great deal about rabbits, surely among God's poor because, as the old saw goes, He made so many of them. Rabbits are not only prey to what Adams calls "the thousand enemies," but to the cruel whims of the seasons. But few people can conjure up weather like Adams can, and hardly anybody has ever made an overgrown field in England sound so gorgeous and full of promise. Rabbits' lives don't really have a point to them, not in any way people understand. Adams concerns himself instead with aspects of destiny that have to do with mysticism and nature - stuff we think we understand but really don't. The pure, unfamiliar feelings evoked in "The Story of the Three Cows" and in the gory "The Hole in the Sky" - just two of the stories here - persist for quite a while after you've finished reading them. How often do you get to step inside a wounded rabbit's delirium, or taste "the blessing of the years," a small animal's dreams of youth? And a laugh-out-loud nonsense yarn by a rabbit named Speedwell, with its crocus boats and sky-blue horses, may be the best carrot of all. -- Salon Publisher's Weekly As readers of Watership Down (1974) will recall, Adams reached classic heights of inspired storytelling in that fable of the animal kingdom, performing a finely calibrated juggling act between the real and the imagined. These 19 interrelated tales continue the adventures of the rabbits met in the earlier book, after their defeat of General Woundwart and the Efrafans. The deeds of the hero El-ahrairah are celebrated in the seven stories of Part One (of three). El-ahrairah's stalwart companion Rabscuttle joins him for four tales in Part Two, while the remaining stories, which are devoted to Hazel and his rabbits, have the continuity of a novel. Mystical, occasionally allegorical, full of whimsy, rich in vivid descriptions of the rabbits' society and of the natural world, the tales are often suspenseful, frequently amusing and invariably clever. The rabbits exhibit a wide range of behavior, showing themselves to be manipulative, defiant, ignorant and self-satisfied, along with noble, lo