It's only taken me around three decades to get round to reading this coruscating polemic by Richard "Watership Down" Adams, but it matched for quality of writing and sheer rage his underestimated "fluffy bunnies plus militarism, war crimes and abuse of power epic.
The eponymous dogs are escapees from a Lake District research facility - fleeing, one from repeated immersion in a "drowning tank", the other driven mad by brain surgery, into a harsh autumnal wilderness, trying to be wild and finding it no kinder an existence that domestic life, and hunted by men bent on their destruction.
The urgency required in their annihilation is provoked by the loathsome Digby Driver, a 1970s tabloid journalist of the scummy ilk still familiar today, but interesting as a character in the same way as Smeagol or Severus Snape, who makes the connection between the escaping dogs and bio weapons research conducted at the same facility to turn two sheep killers into carriers of lethal contagions. Mismanagement of media, official inertia and the knee jerks of publicity-aware politicians escalate a minor problem normally solved by one farmer, an early start and a loaded shotgun into a nationwide outcry and a regional panic.
In the midst of this human activity, our dogs try and fail to make a life for themselves. Aided sometimes by a self-interested fox who deploys their abilities to their mutual advantage, at other times our dogs know that they need a human master to survive, but that to approach men means a resumption of their tortures, or worse. As their condition slips to desperate, one of the dogs, blaming himself for the death of his kindly master, loses his grip on reality due to the mutilation of his brain.
This is described in Adams' mercurial prose, which switches from venom-fanged invective, to deliberately patronising Edwardian travelogue pap to prose verse. After the dogs kill their first sheep, he delivers a paragraph of prose verse rhyme with a rhythm familiar to contemporary rap connoisseurs, a triumphal screed which would not sound out of place in the microphones of a Tupac Shakur or a Wu Tang Clan. All Hail MC Richard, straight outta Oxford!
All these styles fuel Adams' incendiary condemnations of politicians, journalists, vivisectionists and mankind in general as abusers of those over who we hold dominion. But do not make the mistake of assuming you know the whole of Adams' mind on these matters - he baits the hooks of his rage with fat worms of indignation, only for the barbs of our own hypocrisy to gouge the throat as the denouement approaches. The ending of the book is unexpected and maybe bizarre, and Adams uses absurdity as a device which may not perhaps be appropriate to the rest of the book. But this moving, at time horrific, tale is fast-paced, thought-provoking and will make the reader angry on occasion, as the author intended. As a story of innate dignity of the helpless in the face of appalling cruelty and life becoming a landslide, as Richey said, this is a classic.
