Life
In revisiting Richard Adams’s classic novel, Melanie Cheng recalls not only her first encounter with a beloved story, but the thrill for every reader of discovering their own. By Melanie Cheng.
Finding inspiration in Watership Down
“If there’s going to be a story, don’t you think I’ve got as good a right as anyone to choose it?”
These are the words of Bigwig, an anthropomorphic rabbit from Watership Down, the 1972 children’s adventure novel by Richard Adams. Bigwig, based on an officer Adams served with during World War II, is the biggest and toughest member of the rabbit clan. He is also a little naive. Who, after all, has the luxury of choosing their story? Perhaps the only time we can truly make such a claim is when we are the consumers of literature – patrons perusing the shelves of a bookshop – and what a supreme and perfect joy it is.
There were not many children’s bookshops, let alone ones selling English language books, in Hong Kong, where I grew up. I remember one. Richard Adams himself said, “When you’re little, you don’t distinguish between fiction and reality. It’s all reality”, and so it is with my childhood memories of this bookshop. Small and delightfully cramped, with floor-to-ceiling timber shelves, there was something fantastical about it – a feeling that was only enhanced by its location within a very shiny and modern shopping mall.
It was in this bookshop that I first encountered Watership Down. The watercolour rabbits on the cover didn’t hold any special appeal for me. I was not an animal person. I didn’t own any pets. In Hong Kong, it was rare to come across wild animals other than rats the size of small cats on outings to Kowloon. But the book passed the first page test – a tool I still use to decide if a novel will be a good fit for me. I’d made my choice. As the minibus hurtled home, I buried my nose in the freshly inked pages, inhaled. At the time, I believed this to be a unique (and possibly pathological) pleasure, but I’ve since discovered many people love the smell of books – so much so that ebook readers can buy new-book-smell aerosols to fill that void in their reading experience.
Legend has it that Watership Down was a series of stories Adams made up to entertain his daughters during long car drives. It was purportedly at his girls’ behest that he eventually wrote the stories down, but the resulting manuscript was not received with relish by British publishers. For anyone who has read the book or seen the movie, the reasons are obvious. The rabbits in Adams’ stories are not cute. They are fearful, deceitful and occasionally even vicious. They fight, bite, urinate, defecate and have sex. In an interview with The Guardian a decade ago, Adams, then aged 94, said: “I do not believe in talking down to children. Readers like to be upset, excited and bowled over.”
In 1972, Watership Down occupied a space somewhere between children’s fiction and adult fiction, before YA as a genre had truly taken off – perfect for a bookish pre-teen like me. I became one of an entire generation of readers to learn about death from Watership Down and sex from Judy Blume novels. Indeed, a quick Google search reveals plenty of adoring middle-aged fans, including the journalist Ron Hart, who, in the wake of Adams’ passing, described how he’d had an image of the Black Rabbit of Inlé (a grim reaper figure from the novel) tattooed upon his chest, directly above his heart, after the death of his own father.
I don’t know if a novel can change a life – it’s an outrageously bold claim. But I do think a book, especially one read in the naivety and receptiveness of youth, can feature prominently in the story of one’s life. Watership Down is such a book for me. A few years after that trip to the fantastical bookshop, I attended my first memorial service. It was my earliest encounter with death – that of a favourite music teacher from school who’d been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer during pregnancy with her second child. As it happened, the first piece of sheet music this beloved teacher had given me to play on the piano was “Bright Eyes”, the song written by Mike Batt and performed by Art Garfunkel for the 1978 animated movie of Watership Down. To this day, I can’t hear the music without seeing her beatific face. Never mind that Richard Adams “pathologically despised” the song.
A couple of decades later, I gave birth to my own child, a daughter who arrived in the Chinese year of the rabbit and who, from a very early age, showed a great predilection for bunnies. When Melbourne was locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic and our family was craving the comfort and distraction of a furry animal, our choice of pet was a no-brainer. Later still, when I started writing The Burrow – inspired by this very animal – it was a similarly easy decision to include Watership Down in the book.
It was with some trepidation, however, that I revisited my favourite childhood novel. What if I hated it? What if I found the writing trite, laborious, clichéd? I’d made the mistake of trying to recapture a moment of childhood happiness before – it hadn’t ended well. But I needn’t have worried. A book with so many fans and such longevity is not usually one with bad prose. I would be lying, though, if I said the experience wasn’t tainted with a little disappointment. In fact, my feeling on reading the book was the same as the one I later attributed to Pauline, the grandmother character in The Burrow: I expected the violence, I expected more.
As for whether I would thrust Adams’ classic upon my children, my response would be an emphatic “never!” I’ve lived with adolescents long enough to know that any objet d’art recommended by a parent is automatically contaminated. Besides, I couldn’t bear to have a childhood classic desecrated by the kind of casual take-down only a teenager with an immature frontal lobe can deliver. But it is mostly because I wouldn’t want to deprive a young reader of the freedom and privilege to choose their story. Nobody, not even a parent, should interfere with that near-sacred experience of standing in a bookshop before a wall of stories and feeling awed and overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite possibilities – a feeling not unlike youth itself. A little part of me also likes to think I’d make Bigwig proud.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "Origin story".
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