![\"\"](\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/rabbits.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI watched the first episode of Watership Down<\/em> last night on Netflix. It’s the best thing I’ve watched in a long time.<\/p>\n This is a new production of the Richard Adams novel by the BBC. There are four episodes.<\/p>\n Watership Down<\/em> was originally published in the United Kingdom in 1972. The American edition was published in 1974. I read the book soon after it was published in the U.S., and I have reread it at least twice since then. I know the story, but whether you know the story or not, this BBC production is thrilling — and terrifying.<\/p>\n I don’t think that Richard Adams really meant Watership Down<\/em> as an eco-parable. But it is that, though the story also is much more. The decimation of farmland to turn it into suburbs has been going on for a long time. I see Richard Adams as a kind of empath. I have to imagine that he loved the countryside and that, like Tolkien, it greatly disturbed him to see countryside lost. A writer’s imagination would then have a very natural way of lingering on what the loss of farmland would feel like to a rabbit<\/em>. He felt their needs, their vulnerability, their contentedness (when they had it), and most of all he felt their fear and their panic. This is not a story for young children.<\/p>\n According to the Wikipedia article<\/a>, Watership Down<\/em> was rejected by publishers seven times before it was accepted, with no advance, by a one-man London publishing house, Rex Collings. Collings died in 1996<\/a>. I hope he died rich.<\/p>\n Richard Adams died on Christmas Eve in 2016, at Oxford, at age 96.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I watched the first episode of Watership Down last night on Netflix. It’s the best thing I’ve watched in a long time. This is a new production of the Richard Adams novel by the BBC. There are four episodes. Watership Down was originally published in the United Kingdom in 1972. The American edition was published … Continue reading “Watership Down”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14864"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14868,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions\/14868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}