Rabbits, the War and Watership Down

Darren Naish has an interesting article on the evolutionary position of rabbits on his blog.  In a comment on that article Steve Sailor offers the following background on the writing of Watership Down:

By the way, the book "Watership Down" is one of the great stories of the English at war. Author Richard Adams was a commando dropped on the far side of the Rhine in Operation Market Garden in September 1944 in Gen. Montgomery's audacious attempt to win the war by Christmas. Unfortunately, the Rhine bridge turned out to be "A Bridge Too Far" and Adams, like Hazel the leader of the rabbits, had to cross the Rhine and lead his men out of German-occupied territory. For a week, they lived the rabbit life, with a thousand enemies, and 25 years later Adams blended that adventure, his boyhood wanderings on Watership Down, and "The Private Live of the Rabbit" into one of the unique accomplishments in English literature.

Now this information may be generally available, but it was new to me.  It would have been nice to know it before I read the book.  I now feel that have to read it all again.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

I do not read much science fiction.  Many years ago I read Asimov's Foundation series when it was still just a trilogy, but I wasn't too impressed, probably because, back in those days science reality (the moon landings, Vikings and Voyagers) was more impressive. 

The Algebraist is similar in scale and subject matter to the Foundation books, but Banks is a much better writer than I remember Asimov to have been. He is  clever and witty and makes his strange worlds and even stranger life forms, seem quite believable.  I particularly liked the ancient, shambolic, laid-back Dwellers, beings who have lived in the atmospheres of gas giant planets for billions of years.  I found it gripping while I was reading it but, as with all science fiction, the moment I had finished it, the excitement evaporated like a dream after you wake up.

I could see The Algebraist being made into a film, but it would have to be practically all CGI.

Monkey by Wu Cheng-en

A classic tale from China translated by by Arthur Waley.  It is the story of a monkey king who creates mayhem in heaven and, as a result, is entombed under a mountain for 500 years.  Then he agrees to escort a Buddhist monk on a journey to India to fetch scriptures, they are joined by various helpers on the way and have lots of adventures.   I read this book to my daughter (who was then 11) and we both enjoyed it.

The final few chapters,  in which they return to China, have a different atmosphere from the earlier ones: they are overtly religious and less playful; maybe they were added to the original at a later date?

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I finished reading this to my 10-year old daughter a couple of weeks ago.  It is a wonderful read - much deeper and more detailed than the film.  The writing is beautiful and the characters  are convincing and varied.  Adams creates a believable rabbit culture with its own mythology, rather like Tolkien did but on a smaller scale.  I particularly like the way that most of the rabbits have great difficulty in understanding some things which humans find obvious, like the idea that a piece of wood can be used to float across a stream.

Next spring, one sunny morning, I am going to wake Zoe up early and together we will catch a train to Newbury. From there we will take the Basingstoke bus as far as Kingsclere, and then we will walk up onto Watership Down and there I will point out to her the places mentioned in the book.  We will walk on along the ridge to Ladle Hill and, if there is time,  cross the valley to Beacon Hill on the opposite side and then look down on Highclere Castle.

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The most complete collection of Borges' short stories available in English is this set of translations by Andrew Hurley published by Penguin in 1998.  It includes all the stories in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory,  but there about the same amount again of material that was new to me.  A lot of this 'new' material is set in the macho knife-fighting gaucho culture of Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th Century, wonderfully atmospheric, and quite violent at times.