Adams, Richard (Vol. 4) | Adams, Richard 1920–
Adams, Richard 1920–
Adams, an Englishman, is the author of the successful novel Watership Down. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)
Watership Down is a very grand book, but a simple outline of what happens in it makes it sound strictly for kids and/or idiotic. (Why is it, by the way, that idiot entertainment is thought okay for children?)…
There are a lot of things that make this book work, including the traditional and here expertly employed device of cliff-hanging chapter endings. But mainly it is Richard Adams's wonderfully rich imagination, together with an extraordinary and totally disarming respect for his material. Tone is all-important in a tale like this, and Adams's is straight, confidently controlled, never maudlin, never cute. Occasionally the author steps aside to tell us something about rabbits (he seems to know everything), but for all the necessary anthropomorphism, including just enough of a...
[The entire page is 3700 words long]
Navigate
