Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere, Frith Help Us!

Watership Down
by Richard Adams
 p. 1972 

I didn’t start this blog intending for it to be a feminist literature blog; I truly had no intentions of discussing gender roles every single time I read a book and I don’t, on the whole, it just happens that I’ve read a lot of books written between the fifties and seventies lately, and by chance Watership Down is just the latest in a string of books where discussing gender roles cannot be ignored, especially since it figures directly into the plot here.

I had no idea what to expect plot-wise, as I'd never read Watership Down as a kid, though it would have been right up my alley, given my love of animal adventures (my first ever ‘book’, written by my first-grade self, was a story about ten animal friends; is now notoriously lost to the ages). Watership Down is not a kid-friendly adventure in the vein of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, though it would not be inappropriate for all kids, just those with more... delicate sensibilities. It is never graphic, but there are descriptions of rabbits being killed that could scare younger readers.

The plot is simple; Hazel, the protagonist, is a young, sturdy rabbit whose brother Fiver, the runt of the litter and a prophet of sorts, predicts a dire future for the warren in which they’ve lived their whole lives. Fiver is a peculiar creature among rabbits but Hazel trusts him and manages to convince a few other youngsters to follow them on their journey into the unknown. Since rabbits are prey to pretty much everything, they encounter many dangers on the way but eventually settle a new warren on Watership Down and are content to live out their days... until they discover they totally forgot to bring girls along.

The second half of the book is concerned primarily with finding some girls to populate their new digs and have their many rabbit babies. Call me crazy but I caught on to this oversight right away when they kept introducing more and more androgynously-named rabbits (like Hazel, Holly and Strawberry, to name a few) and none of them turned out to be female, but none of our heroes joined me in this revelation. This is explained by the excuse that rabbits do not have the capacity to think beyond the immediate danger (and this excuse is widely supported by their simplicity), but I still found it a little silly that none of them thought to convince a few girls to come along, especially since everyone that remained was brutally slaughtered and judging by the complacency of the does they eventually do bring home, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that it would have been easy to convince a few to join them.

There are a couple female rabbits of note later on but none of them ever come close to providing the same qualities that the male rabbits do. Their sole purpose in this novel and the only reason for including them is to procreate.  Apparently film and TV adaptations of Watership Down adjusted for political correctness and gender flipped a few rabbits, or made up a few, but as there were only a couple years in between these and the book’s publication, I have to wonder what the deal is. It makes me even sadder since Adams apparently wrote this story for his daughters, yet failed to include any girls. And it’s not even like all the rabbits are timid, dull creatures. Each of the male rabbits has their area of usefulness and moments of heroism, but the girls are left out. One of them even gets snatched by a fox and they shrug it off and say "what's one more or less doe?" In a story that highlights the importance of cultural evolution and innovation, why couldn't gender roles be challenged as well? I'm sure the girls would have fought just as bravely for the lives.

The women-exist-solely-as-breeders theme aside, there is still a lot to enjoy about Watership Down. Stylistically, I was reminded of The Hobbit in that we follow a group of unlikely heroes on an important journey. On the way they battle and overcome differences and tell stories. In the rabbits’ case, all of their stories center on a rabbit folk hero named El-ahrairah (“Prince with a Thousand Enemies”, as the footnotes translate), and his interactions with the woodland creatures as well as the rabbit (or “Lapine”) equivalents of God and Death, Frith (the sun) and the Black Rabbit of Inlé, respectively. Occasionally these stories would intersect with or inspire the events of the story, since El-ahrairah embodies the trickster spirit of rabbits and our heroes often had to think beyond their simple lives to survive. Mostly though, I found these deviations from the story tiresome and distracting.

My favorite character shifted as the story progressed and each rabbit had their moment to shine. Right off the bat I favored the protagonist Hazel, admiring him for his bravery and his faith in his brother which thrust him into a leadership position, but admonished him later for letting his ambitions lead him astray. Fiver, the prophetic brother, was a bit too spastic for me to enjoy at first, but he grew up a lot on the journey and had more moments of clarity than anyone; he never minded being universally despised either, he just did what he thought he had to to save his people. Holly, an early antagonist who almost prevents the group from leaving the warren, shows up later, one of only two survivors; shaken by traumatic events, he is humbled and helpful and helps the new group. Bluebell—the other survivor—holds a special place in my heart for being the eternal joker who gets his friends through hard times. Dandelion is the quickest runner and the ablest storyteller and Blackberry is the cleverest rabbit of them all, able to imagine his way out of every scrape using skills incomprehensible to his friends. Even the villain, General Woundwort, is a remarkably sympathetic antagonist, one you can’t help but admire a little for his stalwartness. The only rabbit I strongly adored consistently was Bigwig, the fighter, a constant source of strength and loyalty, who challenges Hazel when he needs challenging but nobly steps aside when he realizes he is not the true leader. Bigwig suffers perhaps more than any other rabbit but he remains Watership Down’s staunchest ally.

My only other complaint is that [spoiler alert! Highlight text to read] no rabbits actually die on the entire journey OR in the climatic end battle, with the exception of a few does (but who cares about them, AM I RIGHT?!) and a few of Woundwort’s men. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not gunning for their blood or advocating a rabbit snuff tale or anything, but I think it took a lot away from the impact of the journey that there were no losses. To stand up for what you believe in takes courage and can be rewarding but even kids should learn that taking a stand sometimes has consequences. At the end of the story, when everyone lived happily ever after, I didn’t really feel like as much was at stake as I would have if we’d seen a few of the characters lost along the way.

This book was definitely not what I was expecting, and I wonder how differently I would be looking at it if I had read it as a child. As it stands, I was a little disappointed I didn’t like it more as an adult. I was a little interested in checking out the film and TV versions... until I found out that BOTH versions carelessly omitted Bluebell, which I found to be a severe error in judgment on their parts. I will now be boycotting any version until they make one that includes my favorite trickster rabbit. TAKE NOTE HOLLYWOOD. (And while you’re at it, give a few of the good parts to the ladies, will ya?)

Casual Racism and Cattle Rustling in Northern Australia

The Irishman
by Elizabeth O'Conner
p. 1960

Despite being set in northern Australia, Elizabeth O’Conner’s The Irishman is an inherently Irish novel, as it is tragic and naturalistic and chiefly concerned with the sins of the father. For awhile near the beginning, I kept forgetting it wasn’t set in Ireland; what kept bringing me back to reality is the overwhelming presence of racist undertones in response to the assortment of aboriginal characters.

At its heart, The Irishman is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age story. Young Michael Doolan—twelve years old at novel’s start—is a shadow of his father, Paddy Doolan, the notorious, stoic and often drunk teamster in an early 20^th century remote Australian town. To Michael, Paddy can do no wrong and he stands tall in the boy’s eyes, in spite of his cowering mother and rebellious older brother Will, who hates his father’s uncivilized, selfish ways. Michael sees none of this though, enamored as he is with the hero his father represents. To the reader, the cracks are already beginning to show but to Michael, it understandably takes a bit more time and perspective, and it all starts when Paddy abandons his family about halfway through the book. Michael, determined to truly know his father, sets out to find him, but it takes him a long time and a lot of trouble to get there and when he finally does, he’s not the same boy that set out.

Michael is growing up in a rough, constantly changing world. He often straddles the line between the old ways of his father and the new method which his brother—exiled from his home until his father exiles himself—later adopts. The contrast between the old and the young is felt and there is no clear emphasis on which way is the best way, but it is clear that with the advent of the automobile and other technologies, the old ways, for better or worse, are dying. In both his chosen profession and his place in his boy’s heart, Paddy Doolan is slowly becoming obsolete. It is a tough theme to wrestle with and O’Conner handles it with grace and beauty. This would have been a novel worth reading again and exploring its complex themes... if not for the casual racism.

It starts somewhat innocuously. Will, having left home for a job wrangling cattle at a nearby station called Timbooran, finds himself in thrall with a black aboriginal servant girl who works for the station manager’s wife. The girl—for lack of a proper name, simply called Bo-Bo, a pile of gibberish she uttered when they found her as a baby—is educated and appears to be a favorite of the missus, and it is her unusual forwardness that both repulses and attracts Will to her. But he cannot start a proper relationship because people will talk so when he knocks the girl up then shuts her down refusing to acknowledge it, poor Bo-Bo throws herself off a cliff to her death. Will not only moves on, but his life gets infinitely better. I kept waiting for the novel to revisit the Bo-Bo story and Will’s own tale of growing up and accepting his sins but it never does and—unless you count getting his face punched in by Paddy, which anyone could see coming a mile away—Will never even receives his comeuppance.

The only reason I could summon for this awkward and unpleasant side story is to draw a parallel between Will and Mr. Dalgliesh, the station manager Michael comes to work for who alters the course of Michael’s life. Dalgliesh, a stern, taciturn, humorless man, is at first a bad match for wild, charismatic Michael, who is constantly planning to escape this work detail. Dalgliesh gives Michael grunt work, is moody and laconic, and at one point retaliates against a cattle-stealing neighbor by murdering 200 of his cattle in what can only be considered the act of a sociopath, and yet his ‘darkest’ secret is the implicated affair with his aboriginal servant Paula. I spent far too long trying to find the part where Paula was revealed to be a sympathetic character and Michael learned to get over his racism. Sure, she harbored a crush on a married man, but the only sin anyone was concerned with was that Paula dared to be familiar with white people. From the moment she appears, O’Conner’s language makes it very clear that there is something sinister about Paula and Dalgliesh. We are never given an opportunity to view her situation in a sympathetic light... not until Paula is brutally murdered by a frustrated and off her rocker Mrs. Dalgliesh near the end. Michael hears of these events later and shrugs it off, thinking Paula probably didn’t deserve it but it’s no matter because the black characters are treated as disposable and their loss is never felt. Michael even goes back to work for Dalgliesh in the end, having seen that his way was 'best.'

All of this I might have overlooked, but then O’Conner had to throw in one last far-too-forward black servant who overstepped his boundaries. This one had the audacity to try to tell others how to do their job and for that he got his face punched in by a pissed off kid with missing daddy issues and no one felt bad for him at all. Look, I know this book was written in the fifties, so I ought not to be surprised, but the dogged racism really distracted me from the whole experience and pulled me out of the events. They weren’t even necessary to tell the story of boy and man and that rocky path called adolescence. It’s as if O’Conner just really had some racist things to say and invented a venue from which to spout them.

All of this criticism and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the white women (the only ones we’re supposed to like, apparently), are all timid, fearful messes accepting of verbally and physically abusive relationships. For a book written by a woman, it sure does a disservice to female writers, and yet it still won the Miles Franklin Award in 1960.

I suppose it’s fitting that I’m reading a novel with outdated, politically incorrect language and attitude, when the underlying theme is about accepting one’s obsoleteness in a changing world.

Another Fun Romp In Cold War Paranoia!

Year of Consent

by Kendell Foster Crossen

p. 1954

Don’t be confused by the cover, which features a massive machine literally enveloping a puny human in its sinister grip. Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 novel about a supercomputer that runs our lives isn’t so much a straight up science fiction novel as it is a dystopic future novel. There is no computer sucking our brains out through tubes—at least not literally. False advertising, people—this is your first cold hard lesson in media manipulation, and a rather appropriate one considering the themes the novel goes on to introduce.

As I’ve stated before, I like reading books like this for a variety of reasons—seeing how accurately (or not) past writers predicted the future, and seeing what ideas developed from the intense Cold War paranoia of the time are foremost on my list. There are a lot of reasons I find these short novels tedious as well; women rarely, if at all, represent positive and influential figures—a product of the conservative era in which they were written, undoubtedly. Also, they are not very well written most of the time, and Year of Consent is sadly not an exception to this rule, but I think it’s a very important book and worth bringing to the forefront for the historical context it provides.

Year of Consent is set in 1990—36 years on from the year it was written, but for us it’s 23 years in the past. It’s always amusing to see what past ‘science fiction’ writers predicted for the future and what they failed to comprehend. Crossen’s novel sees us with self-cooking ovens that supply the food from warehouses, but it failed to predict the rise of personal computers. As a contemporary science fiction author, it’s intimidating when I look at my own work and find my predictions for science and politics woefully inadequate. The truth is we will never really know what the future holds technologically-speaking, but ideas—more often than not—hold true. This isn’t because all these authors are prescient so much as it is because ideas, and societal norms, are cyclical and people, on the whole, are pretty predictable.

Crossen’s 1990 imagines a world of four social classes—the producers (pros), the consumers (cons), the non-producers (nulls), who as I understand it, are pretty much the artists and writers who produce whatever semblance of ‘culture’ exists, and a secret class of social engineers, the people who truly have all the answers. Our narrator, Jerry Leeds, is one of these social engineers, an ‘Expeditor’ working for the government sector of Security and Consent (SAC), whose job it is to essentially root out un-American citizens. Information on consumer activities is fed into a giant computer, unofficially nicknamed Herbie, and any dissenters are captured, labeled ‘sick’ and reprogrammed to ‘appropriate’ degrees, sometimes necessitating full frontal lobotomies. We meet Jerry on Depth Interview (DI) Day, the annual day when the cameras are turned, so to speak, on the social engineers and they are forced to wear devices that monitor their every move, right down to their heart rates. Jerry is nervous, but so is everyone, so great is their paranoia that ‘Herbie’ will find something amiss in their daily routine that would cause them to be considered ‘sick.’

Jerry’s DI day routine gives us a brief overview of the world, which essentially boils down to only two major powers—the democratic Americans and the Communist Russians, with other lesser republics in between. While Crossen doesn’t hesitate to vilify Communism, he also doesn’t glorify the democracy he finds himself living in. In fact, one is almost drawn as critically as the other. Jerry identifies with a third group—the ragtag underdog known as the United Nations (Uns), a group existing primarily in Australia, the only refuge for the only sanity left in the world, apparently (In what is probably Crossen’s most glaring inaccurate view of the future, he has envisioned an Australia where everything ISN’T trying to kill you!).  On DI Day, Jerry receives orders from his totally indoctrinated boss, Roger Dillon, to capture a fugitive 'Uns' leader known as ‘Paul Revere.’ It is not a very subtle book, so you don’t even have to read past that sentence to know that Jerry has been tasked with capturing himself.

And so the adventure is set as Jerry must somehow evade his own oppressive, nosy government to protect his identity. I won’t go into the details but he is successful, though his simple-minded girlfriend Nancy finds herself lobotomized before the week is up, for merely wishing to herself that a Communist dissenter escape custody. Later on, poor Nancy a forgotten casualty, Jerry hooks up with a more spirited woman, Meg, who initially gave me some hope that she might represent her sex a little better. For a minute there, it seemed like she might break with the traditions of woman’s passive role in fiction and reveal herself to be a fellow undercover Uns, or at least an active convert who aids Jerry... but then I remembered this was 1954. I’m sure Crossen felt portraying Nancy and Meg as sympathetic victims seemed fair at the time, but in 2013 (and even in 1990), it’s a little disappointing to see women dragged around like props. It is my hope to find a science fiction novel written by a man before 1970 in which women were not merely passive participators, but I don’t suppose this was a popular viewpoint then. Hell, it’s not even acceptedthroughout science fiction today.

The social engineers don’t just capture the ‘sick’ dissenters. The SAC is also responsible for designing the culture that Herbie considers most acceptable, based on collected data. Herbie decides what the most acceptable foods are to eat, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, and this all adds up to the quintessential American. Nobody is forbidden to go outside the norm, per se, but it is strongly discouraged, as it will all go into your profile and determine whether you qualify for a lobotomy. As a result, we end up with a culture of zombies and people afraid to be different for fear of getting noticed and labeled. Opinions may vary, but I don’t think this reflects the U.S. of today, because the 70s did a decent job of popularizing the minority opinion so that rejecting the norm is almost as popular as accepting it today, but in the fear-steeped 1950s United States where information was limited and Communism was a very palpable threat, I can see how this opinion would be one that would get into the hearts of readers.

I did find a prescient quality to the DI Day cameras and Herbie, the computer that devours all the minutiae and knows everything about you. It’s rare today when someone can exist without at least some kind of online presence. What Crossen failed to predict, though, was that while the U.S. of his making was under mandatory close surveillance of our thoughts and actions, the real population of today willingly offered up this information ourselves. For either outcome—real or fictional—however, we are the only ones to blame for allowing things to be what they’ve become. In Year of Consent, Jerry and Meg have an opportunity to escape and start a new life in Australia, but Jerry chooses to stay, knowing that his work is not done. The SAC is hellbent on introducing their latest social manipulation into mainstream—creating an unconscious correlation between their two greatest enemies through CommUNism, a word which inextricably causes people to associate the U.N. dissenters with the Communist threat. If it is allowed to come to fruition, Jerry’s sacrifices might be all for naught. It is kind of striking to realize that this ploy of the SAC’s—this stupid, baseless plan borne of ignorance and fear—is not very different from the fear mongering of networks like Fox news over the past decade. Media manipulation, it seems, is nothing new, and this is precisely why novels like this—in many ways outdated—are still relevant today.

When it’s all said and done, the greatest attack on bureaucracy is to be as individualistic as possible, social norms be damned. Jerry Leeds is at the heart of a movement encouraging people to reject what society tells you is ‘normal’ and be whomever you so desire. It’s a sentiment that serves to be both anti-Communist and anti-whatever-the-extreme-reaction-to-anti-Communism-turns-out-to-be. An important lesson in not letting your fear dictate your thoughts and actions, because extreme reactions in either direction are equally destructive. In other words, THIS IS HOW WE LET THE TERRORISTS COMMUNISTS WIN, people!

Evil People Doing Things Evilly

Neverwhere

by Neil Gaiman
p. 1996
  

Existing beneath the surface of London streets is a rail system that connects all parts of the city. According to Neil Gaiman’s fantasy romp, Neverwhere, also existing beneath the city streets is an entire culture of people who have fallen through the cracks of society, people who possess magical abilities unheard of above ground. Neverwhere is the story of one young man’s journey as he becomes part of this figurative and literal ‘London Underground.’

Richard is an average guy (which, of course, is the best kind of guy for these kinds of stories); he has an average job with promotion prospects, a serious girlfriend with marriage prospects, a decent apartment and his health. He is all set up for a normal and innocuous (if a bit dull) life, until he helps an injured girl he meets on the street. In an act of mercy, Richard rescues Door, a girl on the run from a pair of nasty characters who chased her to ‘London Above’ after murdering her entire family for their unique abilities in—what else—opening doors most cannot.

As a direct result of his brief interaction with Door, Richard’s life is slowly stripped away as he is first ignored then entirely forgotten by his peers, essentially becoming invisible to the world. Left with no other choice, Richard takes to the London Underground to find Door and her bevy of curious comrades and restore the life that was stolen from him. Instead he finds himself pulled along on a dangerous journey to discover the truth about Door’s family’s demise—and a plot that would forever change life Underground.

Though I own the movie adaptations of two of his other novels, Neverwhere is my first foray into the works of Neil Gaiman and I have to say, I like his ideas here. He has a fantastic imagination and it manifests itself in a lot of creative ways, such as the Floating Market—a gypsylike bazaar that changes locations and can only be reached by word of mouth, the mysterious warring class system that exists in London Underground, and of course, the various machinations of Door’s protector, family friend, and requisite scene-stealer, the marquis de Carabas, a harlequin-esque rogue to whom there is more than what appears. Gaiman’s best idea, though, is his ability to draw parallels between the various characters that populate the Underground and the very real homeless and disenfranchised. The fact that an entire world exists that no one can see unless they are looking for it, where people are lost and forgotten and overlooked, where you too could find yourself if you fell far enough... it’s all strikingly real when you think of how easy it is for the world to turn a blind eye on its societal problems. Gaiman just took this parallel many steps further and turned this land of lost souls into a world unto itself, one with a purpose and a style all its own.

I enjoyed Gaiman’s imagination when it came to setting and theme, but I found myself unable to fully immerse myself in the atmosphere of Neverwhere, littered as it was with clichés. Richard and Door and even the roguish marquis are charming heroes, but there’s nothing new about them. Richard is your standard everyman, whisked away unwittingly on an adventure. No one expects much of him and he is entirely unremarkable and yet, when faced with a challenge that hundreds have failed he inexplicably passes with flying colors, no explanation given. Door is sweet and innocent, a speaker for and lover of helpless rats, but she’s got spirit and moxie and it all just makes me want to gag. She never fully takes credit for destroying Richard’s life and no one ever calls her on it. The marquis is clever and keeps the reader on their toes. He was definitely my favorite character but even he failed to completely win me over with his charm, maybe because I’ve seen it all before.

By far the worst offenders are the villains, though. The treacherous duo that doggedly chase our heroes all throughout the book are the demonic Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar whose villainous villainy is shoved down your throat until you choke on it (Croup would probably like that though). I found myself rolling my eyes every time Croup was likened to nails on a chalkboard, every time Vandemar devoured a small creature, and especially every nauseating time they were respectively referred to as a fox and a wolf, two creatures which we all know are notoriously evil in reputation. I feel like the exaggeration was meant to convey to the reader exactly what bad news these two were, but it was just so over the top, I found myself not the least bit creeped out by them. In fact, in most encounters, they aren’t even allowed to engage the heroes physically, making them the most ineffective creepers in fantasy. Then there’s the lead villain, the head honcho, a literal fallen angel who speaks in wispy platitudes and is generally aloof to the fact that he is a raging douchenozzle with a God complex. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

I think Gaiman was onto something comparing his ‘London Underground’ to London’s disenfranchised. I very much liked the idea that there is a society of people the world has forgotten who have found their own power and their own place. Gaiman doesn't just leave the door (no pun intended) open for a sequel, it's wide and gaping with a heavenly chorus of angels beckoning you through it without subtlety, and perhaps he’ll get around to it one day. If that happens, I for one hope Gaiman focuses more on drawing out that parallel and less on over the top characters having predictable adventures.