Watership Down/The Plague Dogs
Author: Richard Adams Genre: Animal Fiction Years of Publication: 1972/1977 Pages: 476/390
Watership Down
Writing: 6/10 Plot: 7/10 Characters: 7/10 Creativity: 10/10
Overall: 7.5/10
The Plague Dogs
Writing: 7/10 Plot: 8/10 Characters: 9/10 Creativity: N/A*
Overall: 8.5/10
I have a lot of feelings…
Richard Adams is basically the J.R. Tolkien of the xenofiction world. He didn’t create the genre, but he brought it back and now almost everyone tries to emulate him. He’s a huge player in the animal fiction genre, a genre I absolutely love, so I have to talk about him. Watership Down’s legacy looms over the entire modern-day genre and The Plague Dogs is touted as one of Adams’ best works. I have complex feelings about them.
Watership Down
I have a history with this book. I read it for the first time ages ago via audiobook and I loved it. It was the first “grounded” xenofiction I read. It was more naturalistic unlike Warriors and Wolves of the Beyond (I will get to that one. Just you wait). I fell even deeper in love with it after watching the ‘78 animated movie, which I still love to this day despite my now sour feelings toward the book. The Netflix mini-series is also pretty good. I recommend the movie and the show. The book though… eh. I feel so bad because I know how influential and beloved this book is, but this second time around… I just don’t like it anymore.
The Plot: Hazel, a young buck rabbit, his brother Fiver, and their ragtag group of friends leave their birth warren after Fiver receives a vision of their home being destroyed by humans. They travel far and wide, encountering and conquering all sorts of dangers, to build a new warren on Watership Down, a real place. There, they battle with a rival warren ruled by the harsh General Woundwort as they try to settle. It’s a simple story and I left a lot out to avoid spoilers. I don’t have a lot of issues with the story itself. It’s simple, it builds tension, and it keeps your attention. Most of my issues come from the execution.
The Writing: Okay so… the prose is kind of dry. The story is written in third-person omniscient which, normally, I wouldn’t mind, but here I feel the prose is too disconnected from the characters. This is an issue with third-person narration in general. Since the narrator isn’t following anyone in particular, an individual character’s emotions are not explored properly or thoroughly, making them to feel blank and empty. I like Hazel as a character but his emotions were just blatantly told to us instead of shown. All the characters are like this really. They all feel a bit bland because the prose is too disconnected from them. Another thing I dislike is the long story sections. Way too many times, the plot just stops to give us a story about El-ahrairah, the rabbits’ god figure, and his many antics. This stuff is cool for worldbuilding, but it’s so intrusive. It just stops the plot dead and then goes on and on for pages about a story I don’t really care about. This dragged the story down and made the book hard for me to get through. It took me two months to read because I was so bored. The prose is too dry, too impersonal. The stories are too long and don’t mean much to me.
The Characters: Eh… they’re okay I guess. I don’t really have a lot to say about them. Hazel is the main lead. He’s Fiver’s brother and the leader of the small band of rabbits. He’s cautious but is willing to take risks if it benefits his group. He sees the value in his companions and constantly looks to them for advice and opinions. He keeps the group together during rough patches. He thinks outside the box. He’s a good leader. I like Hazel. Fiver is interesting as he’s the only real magical element in the story. He’s literally a seer! He gets visions of the future that help them throughout their journey. Besides him, everything else is pretty grounded in realism. Bigwig is the only other character out of the main group that the narration follows. He’s a large, buff, and gruff rabbit who is the brawn to Hazel’s and Fiver’s brain. He’s okay. He’s not really all that deep. None of the characters in the main group are for that matter. Blackberry is the smart one that comes up with out-of-the-norm ideas that help the group. Dandelion is the speedster storyteller. Pipkin is Hazel’s fiercely loyal buddy and best friend of Fiver. Kehaar is a chatty, black-headed gull that helps them deal with the Efrafa warren, ruled by General Woundwort. General Woundwort is the main antagonist of the story and he’s actually pretty threatening. He runs this rigid police-state warren where the rabbits are forced to live by strict rules and bow down to the abusive Owsla, the warren’s guards. Woundwort doesn’t allow anyone to enter or leave Efrafa because he believes it is safer to stay put, away from the eyes of predators, especially humans. He’s a real threat so seeing the Watership Down rabbits outsmart him is satisfying.
The Worldbuilding: This is what the book is known for. The rabbits of Watership Down have a rich culture, language, and religion. I’m actually not a huge fan of constructed languages as I feel a lot of authors don’t do it right (looking at you, Paolini). A big pitfall I see is replacing regular, simple words with constructed ones just to make the story feel more fantastical when in reality all it does is confuse and frustrate the reader. Like you don’t need to replace the word “tree” with some made-up bullshit. It's just annoying and comes off as very pretentious. But Lapine is not like this. Adams creates words to explain concepts. One of my favorites is “sil-flay” which means “to come above ground to graze.” “Hrair” means “too many” or “an uncomfortable amount.” Rabbits can’t count higher than four, so anything above that is “hrair.” “Elil” means “predators.” So on and so forth. The rabbits’ police force is called the Owsla. The lead rabbit is called Chief Rabbit. They worship a deity called Frith, which is basically the sun and the creator of the world. They have this really cool creation myth that goes as follows: Frith created the world and populated it with all manner of creatures. All creatures were plant-eaters until the rabbits grew too large and too many. El-ahrairah, the leader of all rabbits, disregarded Frith and as punishment, Frith made foxes, cats, owls, and dogs hunt and kill rabbits. However, Frith gave El-ahrairah and his people strong back legs for speed and jumping, long ears for hearing the smallest sounds, and cleverness for outsmarting their new predators. El-ahrairah is donned “the Prince of a Thousand Enemies” and in his many stories, he is shown to be clever, tricky, proud, and dedicated to his people. It’s iconic. Many people see Adams’ rabbit folklore as the standard for animal societies, and for good reason! It’s cool, fascinating, and very creative. I like it a lot. It’s the highlight of the book. I just wish the stories weren’t so damn long...
Recommendation: I like Watership Down, but it’s no longer a favorite of mine. It’s not a book I’ll read again. The prose is too dry and boring, I do not like the long, intrusive storytelling sequences, and the characters are not enticing enough for me to care. The worldbuilding is fantastic, but I don’t need to read the entire book to get that. Do I recommend it? Yeah. I do. Especially if you like animal fiction, you should read this as it is the granddaddy to all of it. 7/10. It’s good.
Or y’know… you can just watch the movie. The movie is 10/10. It removes all the fluff and is really well-made. Great film.
Now onto:
The Plague Dogs
I have no prior history with this story. When I first heard that The Plague Dogs was darker and more adult than Watership Down, I knew I had to read it. It took me a long time to finally get to it and uh… yeah it’s better than Watership, hands down. I like this one a lot, but I also have some issues.
The Plot: The story follows two dogs: Rowf, a huge black labrador, and Snitter, a small fox terrier. Both dogs were trapped in an animal experimentation laboratory where they were tortured for no good reason at all. Rowf was forced to swim in a large water tank where he almost drowns every time and Snitter had his brain experimented on, scrambling his thoughts and memories. One night, their handler carelessly leaves Rowf’s cage open and the two of them escape through a vent. They run out into the rural English countryside and begin to fend for themselves. Rowf ends up killing a sheep which grabs the attention of the sheep farmers, who begin to discuss and track down the dogs. They also grab the attention of a surly fox simply called the tod who wants in on the free meals. The tod helps the dogs, teaching them to not kill in the same place twice, to never kill near their hideout, and to never linger near their kill. As he and the dogs rough it out, the farmers are trying to figure out what’s going on while the scientists at the lab try to hide the fact that Rowf and Snitter are their dogs. The scientists do not want bad publicity, but the press sure does. A ripe, sly bastard called Digby Driver goes around and cooks up this crazy story about the escaped supposedly disease-ridden lab dogs which creates a hysteria in the small town. This is a really tight and dark story. A lot happens and none of it is cheery.
There is some clear commentary here. Adams goes hard on pointless animal experiments that were rampant in the 70s. I’m an animal welfare person, and I don’t like animal experimentation either, but it does have a purpose. If a few rats have to die so we can get a cure for a disease that kills thousands of people a year, that’s fine. That’s a worthy cause. But if scientists are killing/torturing animals to test stupid shit like make-up, then yeah. I have an issue with that and so does Adams. The scientists in the animal lab are just torturing animals for the stupidest reasons. Like they break birds’ wings to see if it affects their flight patterns. They lock a poor monkey away in an isolation tube to see if the animal suffers from isolation. It’s needlessly cruel and it reflects the type of experiments that were done during the 70s. It’s luckily not as bad anymore, but it’s still relevant commentary. I appreciate it.
Adams also commentates on how the media will take a mundane thing and twist it into a wild story that is blown way out of proportion. This is very relevant! Digby is such a fucking asshole. He goes around and twists people’s words to spin this elaborate bullshit yarn just to sell papers. This reminded me of those “violent video games lead to real-world violence” type bullshit that you see on boomer news channels whenever a mass shooting happens. Man. I sure do “love” the United States. Feel so safe here :D The dogs do not have the plague and violent video games don’t lead to mass killings.
I like that The Plague Dogs has something to say. Adams had said that Watership Down doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a story about rabbits. Of course, with Death of the Author and all that, people are going to read whatever they want into the story. I personally don’t see any allegories or whatever in Watership, but Plague Dogs is so damn blatant that you have to have a -3 reading comprehension score to not see it.
The Writing: Let’s start with the negative. I still find the prose to be a bit dry at points, but not as impersonal as Watership. Adams digs deep into the characters here, which I really like. However, there are still long scenes that just repeat stuff we already know. We keep going back to the scientists as they discuss yet again how they’re not going to claim the dogs, how they’re going to stay quiet, and whatever. I don’t care about the scientists. After about two scenes of them, I got it. Too many scenes. Too boring. I didn’t need to know the whole backstory of Geoffrey Westcott, a one-off character who isn’t that interesting. He’s important to the plot, but not for any reason you can think of (I’m not going to spoil it. It’s quite shocking what happens to him). Just like with Watership, I found myself growing bored multiple times throughout the story. However, the dogs and what they were going through kept me going.
The positive. I love the dialogue. Adams phonetically writes out the Geordie dialect, a rural dialect in Northern England, which was hard to read and understand at first (especially with the tod), but after a while, I got used to it and it really added to the realness of the book. The dogs are in a strange place, surrounded by strangers so having people and animals speak with this thick accent really sold that idea of isolation in a foreign land. Both Rowf and Snitter have unique voices. Rowf is gruff, angry, and cynical while Snitter is wispy, poetic, and optimistic. They contrast and complement each other. Speaking of:
The Characters: The dogs and the tod are the best parts of the story. These dogs go through hell. Poor Snitter was a house pet whose owner was tragically hit by a car while trying to save Snitter’s life. Snitter was sold off to the animal lab where they scrambled his brain, mixing up the objective and subjective parts of his mind. Because of this, he speaks in riddles and floats between the past and present. He gets weird dreams and visions and talks about how he walks in a fog. I love how Snitter is written. He’s a tragic character. He believes that he is a bringer of death to all who are kind to him. He blames himself for the death of his master. Despite this, he keeps a positive outlook on things. He is intelligent and helps Rowf navigate the outside world since Rowf has never been outside of a cage. Rowf was born in a lab, surrounded by scientists who only treated him like a tool. He never had a loving master like Snitter. He views humans as monsters who exist to torture animals. Despite his hatred for humanity, he views himself as a bad dog because he knows that it is in his nature to serve and please man. If Man is telling him to drown in the tank, then he has to. If he doesn’t, he’s a bad dog. Rowf is very cynical and angry. He’s quick to lash out and resort to violence because that is all he’s ever known. Snitter keeps him grounded and reassures him that they will survive and find a master who will treat them right. Rowf helps Snitter remain in the present and protects him. Their friendship feels so real and close. They obviously care for one another even when they don’t truly understand the other’s point of view on life. Love these two. You can write a whole essay examining them. They’re so well done.
Now the tod. Ooo I love the tod. The tod is a foil to the dogs. When the dogs realize that they won’t find a master immediately, they resort to their base instincts. Or at least they try to. The tod is a true wild animal who helps them survive the countryside and avoid the farmer’s guns. The tod is all about the present. He doesn’t fear death like Rowf and Snitter. He doesn’t worry about the future. He’s only worried about the here and now. To him, death is just the end. You live and then “the Dark gets yeh.” The tod doesn’t even have a name. “Tod” is an old word for a male fox. He doesn’t even understand the concept of names. He’s a real wild beast who runs on instinct. He speaks in a very thick Geordie dialect which makes him a bit hard to understand. Rowf finds his accent obnoxious and struggles to understand him, but Snitter, due to his wispy mind, can understand him just fine. In fact, Snitter likes him and sees him as a valuable asset while Rowf finds him sly and untrustworthy. The tod is good foil to the dogs and they play off each other really well.
The Worldbuilding*: You might’ve noticed that I put an asterisk by the “creativity” slot. That’s because… it’s kind of hard to rate the creativity of a really grounded xenofiction like this. The creativity section rates how unique the concept and setting are and while the concept is creative, it’s not like… all that unique because there are so many dog xenofiction books out there (too many. Where are the cats?) so I didn’t bother giving it a rating. The setting is just England. England is a real place, last time I checked. There is some worldbuilding with the “god-dog” story that Rowf tells (which I’m not going to recite here), but it’s just one story that sets up why Rowf thinks the way he does. So yeah… no rating.
Recommendation: I really liked The Plague Dogs. It’s way better than Watership and I definitely recommend it. It’s not really a story I’ll read again due to the long sections of boredom I felt whenever the dogs were not on page, but I’m glad I read it. It’s a good story, albeit very dower. Honestly, if you never read a xenofiction before, read this one. It’s a good ambassador for the genre. If you have, still read this one. It’s good. 7.8/10
Or y’know… you can just watch the movie. The movie is 10/10. It removes all the fluff and is really well-made. Great film.
It took me a while to write this as I had to sit and ruminate on these books. At first, I had really negative feelings towards them because they were just too long and boring at sections. I really hate when the plot stops dead to give us fluff that we don’t need. Both stories do this and because of that, it took me months to get through them, slowing down my reading schedule to a crawl. But after sitting on them, I do like these tales. I love animal fiction and these books shaped the genre to what it is today. The Plague Dogs has such great shining moments and while I won’t sing the praises of Watership Down anymore, it’s still a fine tale with phenomenal worldbuilding. I’m glad I read them.
I want to highlight Cardinal West’s fantastic video, Confronting Death: A Critical Examination of Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. Firstly, this guy is a great creator and I adore his content. Subscribe to him. Secondly, this video led me to finally read and watch The Plague Dogs. I’m not lying when I say that The Plague Dogs movie is one of my favorites now. It’s such a good film. The old-school cell animation is gorgeous and the ending is superior to the book’s. Cardinal West does this deep deconstruction of both books and how they tackle death and it’s well done. Show this guy some love. He did such a great job on this. Do be warned that he spoils both books so either watch the movies or read the books before watching. Seriously the movies are great.
