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Watership Down Part II: On Watership Down
Part I discussion here - feel free to join into older discussions or comment on other people's comments! Also, don't miss the Watership Down location post linking to pictures of the places in the book.
Okay, so there's a lot going on here! I think this part is less strongly cohesive than the other parts, which are each themed around some big event. This one is mostly just "settling in." Which is not to say it's boring in the slightest. It's just a lot of different stuff happening. I had forgotten that some of this (like Hazel being shot) happened this close to the beginning!
And there's a whole lot going on in this! We meet Kehaar and the hutch rabbits; Holly turns back up (along with Bluebell); the rabbits dig their new warren; Hazel gets shot and is presumed dead for a while.
It's really interesting to see the various factors of personality and hierarchy in the warren jostle against each other as their status quo continues to change with the addition of new rabbits. I feel like the characters are all more comfortable with each other now and their personalities are emerging more clearly. They tease each other more, and there are lots of great little character bits.
"Shut up," Bigwig said, before anyone had asked a question.
"I know you must all have been disappointed not to get rid of me at Nuthanger Farm the other day," [Hazel said]. "So I've decided to go a bit further next time."
Also, I just generally love Kehaar and it's great to get to the parts of the book that have him! I remember reading this as a kid and having absolutely no idea what kind of bird he is (I think I had pictured him as some kind of shorebird, perhaps a tern) even though it CLEARLY says he's a seagull about a dozen times. Here, have a Kehaar visual reference. The cultural/lifestyle differences between the rabbits and the other wild creatures - as per the behavior of their individual species - are so interesting! I also really enjoyed the entire hutch-rabbit escape sequence and their flight up the ditch; it's very vivid and exciting. And the construction of the new warren was also really interesting to me, including Holly's surprise at the Honeycomb. Strawberry's pleasure at being able to constructively contribute to the new warren is so touching.
This section involves the rabbits dealing more closely with humans than they have before. Humans are always a presence in their lives, but were more of a distant factor in their lives, a kind of force of nature like the weather, whereas in this section we start to have some up-close contact and see more of their interactions with human things, like encountering the hutch rabbits and farm cats.
There are also some really chilling parts in this sections, like the harrowing description of the warren being destroyed, and the account of Efrafra. Actually, this makes me think about how much of these books are about storytelling, with a lot of key plot information being conveyed in the form of stories-within-a-story, underlining how important storytelling is to the rabbits in a plot-relevant way.
And we end on a bit of a cliffhanger, as everyone sets out for Efrafra!
Questions:
1. What's your favorite scene in this section, if you have one?
2. What do you think of the book using phonetic accents for the other woodland creatures? Does it work, or do you think there's a better way to represent that the animals are barely mutually intelligible with each other? (Personally I like it and feel that it gets the point across that they have to work to understand each other. Also, Kehaar's dialogue never stops being fun.)
3. Any favorite new characters from this section?
4. Or favorite character bits that you particularly noticed?
As in the previous post, spoilers for future installments are fine in comments. You can set them off or obscure them using sites like rot13 if you want to, but you don't have to.
Okay, so there's a lot going on here! I think this part is less strongly cohesive than the other parts, which are each themed around some big event. This one is mostly just "settling in." Which is not to say it's boring in the slightest. It's just a lot of different stuff happening. I had forgotten that some of this (like Hazel being shot) happened this close to the beginning!
And there's a whole lot going on in this! We meet Kehaar and the hutch rabbits; Holly turns back up (along with Bluebell); the rabbits dig their new warren; Hazel gets shot and is presumed dead for a while.
It's really interesting to see the various factors of personality and hierarchy in the warren jostle against each other as their status quo continues to change with the addition of new rabbits. I feel like the characters are all more comfortable with each other now and their personalities are emerging more clearly. They tease each other more, and there are lots of great little character bits.
"Shut up," Bigwig said, before anyone had asked a question.
"I know you must all have been disappointed not to get rid of me at Nuthanger Farm the other day," [Hazel said]. "So I've decided to go a bit further next time."
Also, I just generally love Kehaar and it's great to get to the parts of the book that have him! I remember reading this as a kid and having absolutely no idea what kind of bird he is (I think I had pictured him as some kind of shorebird, perhaps a tern) even though it CLEARLY says he's a seagull about a dozen times. Here, have a Kehaar visual reference. The cultural/lifestyle differences between the rabbits and the other wild creatures - as per the behavior of their individual species - are so interesting! I also really enjoyed the entire hutch-rabbit escape sequence and their flight up the ditch; it's very vivid and exciting. And the construction of the new warren was also really interesting to me, including Holly's surprise at the Honeycomb. Strawberry's pleasure at being able to constructively contribute to the new warren is so touching.
This section involves the rabbits dealing more closely with humans than they have before. Humans are always a presence in their lives, but were more of a distant factor in their lives, a kind of force of nature like the weather, whereas in this section we start to have some up-close contact and see more of their interactions with human things, like encountering the hutch rabbits and farm cats.
There are also some really chilling parts in this sections, like the harrowing description of the warren being destroyed, and the account of Efrafra. Actually, this makes me think about how much of these books are about storytelling, with a lot of key plot information being conveyed in the form of stories-within-a-story, underlining how important storytelling is to the rabbits in a plot-relevant way.
And we end on a bit of a cliffhanger, as everyone sets out for Efrafra!
Questions:
1. What's your favorite scene in this section, if you have one?
2. What do you think of the book using phonetic accents for the other woodland creatures? Does it work, or do you think there's a better way to represent that the animals are barely mutually intelligible with each other? (Personally I like it and feel that it gets the point across that they have to work to understand each other. Also, Kehaar's dialogue never stops being fun.)
3. Any favorite new characters from this section?
4. Or favorite character bits that you particularly noticed?
As in the previous post, spoilers for future installments are fine in comments. You can set them off or obscure them using sites like rot13 if you want to, but you don't have to.
no subject
Hazel getting shot: what I love about this entire episode is that Adams shows Hazel as flawed here - his going back to the farm is a wrong decision mostly based on ego and a bit of hubris, not wanting to be outdone by Holly & Co. coming back from Efrafra with does.
Yes!! I really loved that too. Hazel isn't perfect, and the best part is that his ego-induced near-disaster doesn't come out of nowhere; it's mentioned early on that he's unusually confident and self-assured for a young outskirter, which are the same traits that enabled him to lead a group out into the wilderness and stand up against Bigwig's attempts to take charge. But now we get the flip side of that, when he's overly confident in a situation where he shouldn't be. And as you say, he does learn from it! It makes him feel like a believable character rather than a paragon.
Hazel and Fiver's fraternal relationship was the first one we readers got introduced to, and the fallout from the farm trip is basically the last time the book showcases it, due to all the other things happening in the rest of the novel. Fiver in general disappears into the background after this, I think.
Oh, that's really interesting; I hadn't noticed that, but you're right. Fiver still has a few things to do yet (his vision that gives Hazel the idea for how to save the warren later) but his relationship with Hazel started out very central and I don't think we really see it again after this, at least in a close one-on-one kind of way. The ensemble becomes more central from here, I think, especially Bigwig's various relationships.
I also hadn't noticed that about the traumatized-soldier resemblance, but you're right! It's especially interesting because I do think, considering it, that the vibe is more WWI than WWII, even though the latter would have been Adams' own experience.
no subject
Whenever English books use phonetic spelling or dialect, a translator worth their salt has to decide how important this is to plot and characterisation, and try to come up with some equivalent. For example, something like Shaw's Pygmalion (and afterwards "My Fair Lady") would make no sense if Eliza and her father don't speak distinctly different from Higgins & Co., and in a way that codes them as lower in the class hierarchy. So what both the original translator, Siegfried Trebitsch, and subsequent translators did was to let them speak in Berlin street dialect. Otoh, the original translators of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" ignored the problem altogether; Huck speaks the same kind of German Tom does. To pick a more modern example, with the Harry Potter novels, I've read them in English and only once glanced in a German translation, and it seems the translators try to come up with equivalents to the puns in the names etc., but ignore whenever JKR has someone speak phonetically, like, say, Fleur.
ETA: also: re: Hazel, that was one of the many reasons why I was mad about the most recent film/tv version. Book!Hazel is good but also not perfect; we see both his strengths and in the case with the farm his capacity for error. The recent tv series not only changed his motivations (now it's romantic love for Clover!) but felt it had to beef him up by involving him in the action parts of the finale (now Hazel, who after being shot has a lame left, for God's sake, takes part in the get-the-dog-expedition). And they ruin Bigwig's biggest scene by letting Hazel advise him to say that in advance. It's just textbook wrong, and you can tell whoever was responsbile for the scripts never understood what made Hazel a great character in the book to begin with.