What Talking Animals Can Say

The other week, I reread Richard Adams' "Watership Down".

The other week, I reread Richard Adams' Watership Down. I'd read it as a kid and enjoyed the adventure-story of talking rabbits; I enjoyed it again now in different ways. And, it made me remember other talking animal stories.

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The books I read as a very young kid have faded into the mists of my distant childhood, but I do remember there were a whole lot of picture books about talking animals. Most of them barely even tried to make their animals realistic animals of their species.

There's one series I do remember well enough to talk about: the Berenstain Bears. The main characters are, in everything aside from their fur, a human family. They live in a house; they go to school; they see doctors; they eat all sorts of packaged food cooked on stoves and served on plates; they ride in cars and buses. They let their young readers read about cleaning house, going to summer camp, and such human activities, because they were basically humans. When the authors wrote a picture book about the natural world and different sorts of animals, they needed to introduce a character "Great Natural Bear" to show how real bears live, because none of the existing characters were any help in that!

Not only do these bears wear clothes; they’re watching TV.

Also in this vein is the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. After the first book, most of the animals don't take any traits from their species. Mice, rabbits, squirrels, and other creatures live together in Redwall Abbey without their species mattering at all. They look different, but they act the same. And, all of them act like people not mice or any other sort of animal. We occasionally meet an isolated heron or other unusual animal who acts unusually, but even that probably isn't because of their species, because we also occasionally meet isolated mice or squirrels who act strangely.

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On the other hand, Jacques does keep a distinction between good animals and evil "vermin", which's loosely founded on which sorts of animals English farmers see as "vermin." In other words, mice are generally friendly and good, and rats generally aren't, because - in this one real-world context - mice have a good reputation and rats a bad reputation. Jacques uses his characters' animal nature to characterize them even though they don't act like animals.

To pick on another rare talking animal book written for adults, George Orwell's Animal Farm does the same thing as Redwall. Aside from living on a farm, its animals don't act like animals. But, Orwell used broad "stereotypes" such as dogs being violent and horses being faithful to help with quick characterization. Boxer is faithful like a human, not a horse, but his horse nature helps us see him as faithful.

Talking animal books for adults are so rare that Orwell’s first edition was subtitled “A Fairy Story.”

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Watership Down goes far beyond this. It's an adventure story about talking rabbits set in the real world, around a particular real hill (named Watership Down) in England. The protagonist, Fiver, gets a vision of a coming disaster to his warren, and leaves along with a few interested rabbits. After several adventures during which Fiver's brother Hazel becomes the expedition's obvious leader, they dig a new warren; and - in search of finding other interested rabbits to join - quickly get into conflict with a neighboring totalitarian rabbit warren.

What makes this story rich - far richer than other talking-animal adventure stories like Redwall - is the culture Adams gives his rabbits. He gives hints to their language with terms a rabbit would find useful (such as "silfay," "to go aboveground in search of food"); a vision of the ideal rabbit as a shrewd trickster; and a rich oral tradition of stories about the sly folk-hero "El-ahrairah".

Adams gives us simultaneously an engrossing culture we can sympathize with, and a culture we can imagine rabbits having. They act like real rabbits. While writing the book, Adams consulted with a naturalist who'd studied rabbits in depth, and it shows. In their innate timidity, love for companionship, and many other qualities, his rabbits are realistic rabbits. This makes his worldbuilding more engrossing, and makes his characters more compelling.

The real Watership Down, in Hampshire, photographed in 1975 just after the book was published. Like the rabbits saw in the book, there’s hardly any trace of humans.

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Not matching up to Watership Down in this sense definitely doesn't make a story bad. But, I feel that books like Redwall squander the chance to be something more. If you're using talking animals, why not use the fact that they're animals directly in their characterization?

There are some reasons not to. C. S. Lewis, while talking about Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows (which I haven't yet read), explains the same reason Orwell must have been thinking of in Animal Farm:

Why should the characters be disguised as animals at all?... It is quite indispensable…

If you try to rewrite the book with all the characters humanized you are faced at the outset with a dilemma. Are they to be adults or children? You will find that they can be neither. They are like children in so far as they have no responsibilities, no struggle for existence, no domestic cares... But in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do what they please, they arrange their own lives.

To that extent the book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions--the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity--and conceals the contradiction by the further pretence that the characters are not human beings at all. The one absurdity helps to hide the other.

Lewis himself basks in this double "absurdity" in his Chronicles of Narnia. Reportedly, Tolkien once reduced Lewis to silence by bringing up the Dwarves' lavish breakfast near the end of The Horse and His Boy, and asking him where they'd gotten the food. (We might ask the same of Tumnus and the beavers in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, who serve similarly lavish spreads after Narnia has had a hundred years of winter!) But Lewis was happy to neglect such questions. And, he is right that it's easier to do so with talking animals than with humans.

Similarly, Animal Farm conceals the absurdity of quick ideological shifts behind the absurdity of farm animals raising a revolution. If the story was told about humans, we would question its plausibility, get bogged down in myriads of details, and lose sight of the central ideas Orwell was allegorizing. Again, "the one absurdity helps to hide the other."

Watership Down, on the other hand, wouldn't have this problem if you tried to retell it with humans. The rabbits would become, quite simply, a hunter-gatherer tribe trying to survive in a land of vicious predators and hostile... giants, I suppose, would be the closest equivalent to the humans in the original book. Where their food comes is obvious; we see them picking it. Their social structures are clear on the page. Their lives are very different from humans, but Richard Adams clearly tells us about them.

But you don't need to go into depth like that; many stories don't. Even Adams never describes how all animals apparently have a pidgin language when they hardly ever speak outside their respective species. Redwall tells us enough that we can assume how the Abbey gets its food from the forest, but that's still reading into the story. Narnia tells us even less, as does Wind in the Willows (at least, from Lewis's description.) Their stories are focused on character interplay and the overall atmosphere.

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This atmosphere is, absolutely, built with talking animals. When - in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe - we follow the four children through the Wardrobe to meet first a mythical Faun and then a talking Beaver, it feels different than if they'd met humans: more magical on the one hand, and more like a children's adventure on the other. "Their secret country was real," Lewis's narrator says later about Narnia, putting it in the category the talking animals intuitively make it feel in. In one of my own attempts at writing a novel, I was using them that same way, to play with themes about childishness and maturity.

Talking animals don't need to be used that way. Watership Down definitely isn't a children's book, and the rabbits there shouldn't make us think of children. Still, as Adams says in the introduction to the anniversary edition, it kept getting rejected because publishers assumed talking animals brought with them an atmosphere intended for children.

Still, they don't need to. Watership Down reminds me there're avenues that could be taken with talking animals that hardly any author has taken. I hope more will take them.