The Philippine Online Chronicles

The best bargain I’ve ever made in terms of money given up for a good read was made in the Booksale branch in the basement of SM Megamall.

You know how (at least among people who like to spend many, many minutes perusing the stacks of cheap Booksale books) one can spend a long time looking through all those alien titles without finding anything worth picking up? It was one of those times, up until I came upon Richard Adams’ Watership Down – it was an ugly, battered book with entire chips of the front cover coming off. The pages themselves had gone beyond yellowing—they were turning a distinctly toxic shade of red at the edges. And it smelled funny. It was down to P25, the same price for a handful of chocnuts. It seemed even Booksale wanted to get rid of it. I bought it immediately.

Although the title may be unfamiliar, Watership Down has a very special place in my memory – that place reserved for movies that significantly traumatize you as a child, and the imagery of which remain as nightmares that sit in the back of your head even after you’ve forgotten what the movie was all about. Before I knew Watership Down as a book, I knew it as a movie that was shown on TV (when I retell this anecdote, I usually say it was on the Disney channel, although I don’t think there was even a Disney channel at the time).

The details are a bit patchy at best, but I remembered it involved rabbits – sweet-looking, fuzzy rabbits, and they waged war and killed one another. There was a fat king rabbit who violently dispatched those who tried to run away from his rabbit kingdom (their "warrens" as I would later read), and there was a skinny schizoid oracle rabbit who could see the Black Rabbit of Death (literally Death personified as a shadowy, red-eyed bunny that would escort the dead rabbits to their special rabbit afterlife).

At the time I saw it on TV, it must have occurred to me that this isn’t the sort of thing for children to watch. One scene involved one of the rabbits (a fat, adorable soldier rabbit named "Bigwig") getting caught in a wire trap. I didn’t even know such things existed at the time I saw this. Bigwig basically got caught in a wire noose that is pegged to the ground and it slowly strangled him while his brave rabbit comrades try to figure out how to help him. Bigwig, while making all sorts of choking noises, starts bleeding at the mouth. Cartoon blood, but not at all cartoony.

Another scene (and this one I enjoy telling people, especially younger children, just to hammer home the idea that "certain things you watch in childhood haunt you forever") was one of the schizoid oracle rabbit’s visions. It involved how humans kill rabbits. The people—farmers or hunters, either way dark, faceless figures with evil intentions—set fire to the mouths of the warren, trying to smoke the rabbits out (or maybe it was poison gas. I forget the details).

Those who managed to get out would be shot. Those who didn’t would die a slow death crammed in the warren. The image which never left me is a cross-section view of the underground tunnels, and all the rabbits who couldn’t get out stuffed tight, crowded together, unmoving, just blinking and breathing.

Upon Wikipedia-ing "Watership Down movie," I am brought to a page which tells me that what I saw as a child was a 1978 animated film which, for obvious reason, worried parents at the time it came out (the book I bought was published further back, in 1972). The poster of the movie reads "The world will be your enemy…and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you." The image features a silhouette of Bigwig caught in the wire trap.

The fact that I never completely got over the movie was the reason I was so happy to come upon the book. It’s not that I enjoy being disturbed, or mulling over what scared me when I was younger (--that is a lie, I do enjoy both to a certain extent). It was the idea that I, now older and with a stronger stomach for creepy things, could return to that haunting Lapine world which affected me so much, and finally put the entire story together.

Knowing the whole story – knowing why Bigwig was caught in a snare, or why all the warren rabbits had to die – in a way, makes the story less scary for me. It isn’t comforting, but it offers perspective. It’s the closest I’m going to get to approaching the younger me, who cringed and squirmed at the sight of all that animated death, and explaining what exactly I was seeing.

And it was actually a really nice story to read. Primarily it’s an adventure, starring a group of rabbits who escape a warren run by the rabbit equivalent of a psychotic warlord, and surviving the journey to where they could begin a new warren. Like the animated movie, it’s very dark in some places – rabbits do fight, and some die, and some are permanently disfigured after certain legs of the journey. But now, I knew what they were journeying towards – and I was rooting for them.

People who have analyzed the book have called it an allegory of freedom versus tyranny, or a critique of socialist societies. Some have said it’s a knock-off of the heroic narrative, even comparing it to the Odyssey or Aeneid. Except with rabbits. To me though, it became about immersing myself in the rabbit’s world, where they have their own Lord of the Rings-type vocabulary and mythology (remember the Black Rabbit of Death? It’s actually called the "Black Rabbit of Inlé," and is the bunny equivalent of the Grim Reaper. "Inlé" is also the rabbit word for "moon" or "darkness"), and social rankings and rabbit armies (and rabbit Gestapos). I never thought I’d care so much about my childhood nightmare bunnies.

I also found out, upon researching the book on the Internet, that "Watership Down" is actually the name of a place which exists in real life, north of Hampshire, England. It’s where the bunnies ended up founding their new warren. That was something I never really figured out before either - I thought the title was some kind of metaphor.

I’m not the only person who has found herself engrossed in the Lapine universe. At a certain point, Watership Down was so popular that it had television series, theatrical adaptation and video game. For now, I’ll settle with having read the book. It was a whole lot of catharsis for P25.