a new book

 A while back I saw news of a new, hardback-version graphic novelization of "Watership Down." I looked it up and automatically pre-ordered it from Bookshop.

It came today.

 It's a gorgeous book - hardbound, and it feels to me like the big library books I used to check out as a kid, it has that kind of binding (it's a sewn binding, it's well worth the $30-something price). The illustrations are beautiful - they're not cartoony but stylized enough to work in a graphic novel. 

I've skimmed a few pages. I joked on Bluesky that "1. I'm so excited 2. I'm going to cry so hard" because of course Watership Down is not a lighthearted book, it touches on themes of fascism/authoritarian societies, and characters not fitting in, and the struggle to survive, and yes,, even death. 

I remember reading the book as a kid - maybe at about 10 or so? It was a couple years later I saw the animated version of it which was somehow harder and more brutal - I don't know if younger kids are more  resilient, or at least kids like me from basically happy and untroubled backgrounds, who haven't yet been banged up by life, we can weather that stuff better. Or if I skipped over the scary parts, I sometimes did that.

One thing I DO remember from the book was Kehaar, the gull, and he is in this one too. He's a memorable character to me because when I was a kid, my parents kind of looked over (though I don't remember them ever outright saying "no" to a book, though movies were more carefully chosen, of course) the media my brother and I consumed and I don't remember books with swearing in them. And Kehaar swears.

Well, kind of. He's a gull and he speaks a sort of pidgin or argot with the rabbits (I seem to remember in the book it was explained as that there was a common, simplified language many creatures could speak, along with their own species' language). But he's sort of analogous to a sailor, right? So he has rude language.

One of his memorable phrases: "I 'urt you like Damn!" when he was angry with someone. As I said, we didn't read books with swearing in them and we especially weren't allowed to swear ourselves, and I remember the tiny illicit pleasure of whispering to myself "I 'urt you like damn!" when I was angry with someone. Oh, I never WOULD have, but.....being able to say it made it a little better.

But I also remember Watership Down being kind of a shock (perhaps it was to all kids like me - I liked "animal stories," had read Winnie-the-Pooh when I was younger, and then Wind in the Willows, and a raft of horse-dog-or-cat books (and yeah, in retrospect - having read Where the Red Fern Grows probably should have prepared me) but.....Watership Down, while not exactly traumatizing, it was kind of jarring. It was the first of those types of talking-animal books to really explicitly include both Mortal Peril and death in it, and also the authoritarian warren (Efrafra) was scary to contemplate.

My favorite character was Fiver, the slightly-weird "seer" rabbit - a runt, Hazel's younger brother, who had visions he didn't always understand. 

The NPR review of the book notes that the new graphic novel tends to emphasize the hope rather than the peril - which is probably something people need. (But there are still deaths, and I am sure I will cry again at the end, if it's the same as the end of the original novel) 

Actually, in a odd way, as I think of it now: another book of my childhood, "The Rats of NIMH" isn't entirely different- it's about a society of small animals trying to survive in the world (in this case: the rats helping Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse, to have safety from the farmer's plow until her ill son recovers from an infection) but also one where there's peril and death (if I remember correctly: the farmer gasses the rat's burrow at the end, and several of the rats elect to stay behind for verisimilitude, so the others - and Mrs. Frisby and her children- can safely escape.

(Actually, now, I wonder: were books in the 1970s for kids a little....darker.....than in some other decades? I remember occasionally crying over novels. I mean, yes, I was a sensitive child, but still....seeing brave characters that were smart and saved another character choosing to sacrifice themselves so others could live, that's a pretty heavy thing to think about when you're eight.)

Like I said, my parents never really censored what I read - though I do remember my dad seeing me reading The Hobbit and asking me if I found it scary (I didn't; I found it exciting. Well, at eight I did. Some years later - I was in my 30s or thereabouts - I re-read and yea, the  parts where Bilbo was trapped underground, running from the orcs and from Gollum, that was scary. Again, I suspect that as a kid I had had a safe life - I had never run from anything, never really faced any danger, never even been in a cave - and now, as an adult, I can imagine the darkness and the weight of those tons of rock over you, and knowing that your adversaries know the space better than you do, are more used to pursuit in the dark, and you have no way to defend yourself- that's scary. And I wonder if yes, adult experiences do make you a bit more easily able to imagine the scary or bad parts of things instead of the merely exciting ones).