the development of American fantasy, from Washington Irving to Ursula K. Le Guin.
Barron, Neil. Fantasy Literature: A Readers’s Guide. New York: Garland, 1990. Guide 9
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with extensively annotated bibliographies of key texts. Includes a chapter on modern
fantasy for young adults and sections on general reference works, history and criti-
cism, author studies, and other sources for further study.
Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. Large collection of plot synopses and critical judgments of 1,775 books
published between 1750 and 1960. A useful and near-comprehensive guide to the de-
velopment and key themes of modern fantastic fiction.
Bleiler, Richard, ed. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2
vols. 2d ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Extensive collection of critical
and biographical essays. The first volume deals with continental European and early
British writers, the second with American and modern British writers.
Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New ed. New York: St.
Martin’s Griffin, 1998. Although less comprehensive and less well organized than its
science-fiction companion, this remains one of the best general reference books on the
fantasy genre that excludes horror and occult fiction.
Dickerson, Matthew T., and David O’Hara. From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on
Myth and Fantasy. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2006. Discusses Homeric and Biblical myth, Arthurian legend, nineteenth century fairytales, and contemporary writers
including Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Pullman, and J. K. Rowling.
Gray, William. Fantasy, Myth, and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis,
Tolkien, MacDonald, and Hoffmann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Critical
interpretations of the novelists’ handling of reality, myth, and truth in their fantasy
literature.
Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. One of the best theoretical studies of the aesthetics of fantasy
and its significance in postmodern fiction.
Lobdell, Jared. The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. One of dozens of scholarly books about Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings series, this book looks also to Tolkien’s influences, and to his imitators.
Pringle, David, ed. The St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1996.
_______. The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers. Detroit, Mich.: St.
James Press, 1998. Matched pair of reference works on individual authors, with sup-
portive bibliographies of their relevant books and biographical notes. These volumes
cover more authors than Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction Writers and cover works un-touched by Clute and Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy.
Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.
Theoretical descriptions of fantasy literature, beginning with writings by Plato and Ar-
istotle, through essays by Sigmund Freud and later twentieth century writers.
10
RICHARD ADAMS
Born: Newbury, Berkshire, England; May 9, 1920
Also known as: Richard George Adams
Principal long fiction
Watership Down, 1972
Shardik, 1974
The Plague Dogs, 1977
The Girl in a Swing, 1980
Maia, 1984
Traveller, 1988
The Outlandish Knight, 2000
Daniel, 2006
Other literary forms
Richard Adams has written two collections of short fiction, one of which, Tales from Watership Down (1996), is in part a sequel to his most famous novel. His other works include several illustrated children’s books in verse; an illustrated series of nature guides; an account of a journey to Antarctica, Voyage Through the Antarctic (1982), cowritten with Ronald M. Lockley, the author of the factual work that became the basis for Watership Down; and an autobiography covering the first part of his life through his demobilization after World War II, The Day Gone By (1990).
Achievements
Called by English writer A. N. Wilson “the best adventure-story-writer alive,” Richard
Adams is most famous for taking the talking-animal story out of the genre of children’s literature and informing it with mature concerns and interests, as in his first great success, Watership Down, which won the Carnegie Award and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. He continued this transformation in The Plague Dogs and Traveller. Adams also made his mark in fantasy literature; his imaginary kingdom of Bekla is the backdrop for
Shardik and Maia, novels whose main concerns, slavery and warfare, definitely remove them from the realm of children’s literature. He also wrote a less successful full-length ghost story, The Girl in the Swing, and later two historical novels, The Outlandish Knight and Daniel, the latter of which returns to his concern with the subject of slavery.
Biography
The youngest of three children, Richard George Adams spent an idyllic childhood (“the
happiest [days] of my life”) growing up on the outskirts of Newbury, England. His father, a local doctor, transmitted his knowledge of and love for the flora and fauna of the region to 11
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his son, whose later devotion to animal welfare was additionally inspired by Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle books. Adams’s father also instilled in his son a lifelong interest in storytelling, which Adams later honed in bedtime tales told to roommates at prep school. Other important influences included the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910) by Walter de la Mare, and the silent Rin-Tin-Tin films. All would later echo in his fiction.
Although his time at prep school was often unpleasant, Adams thoroughly enjoyed his
public school experience at Bradfield. The school put on a yearly play in its open-air theater, often a classical Greek drama, and Adams called the theater the place where he was
“more consistently happy than anywhere else.” Bradfield also encouraged his love of literature, the Greek and Roman classics, and history, the subject in which Adams won a
scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1938. Adams was grateful to Oxford for its
acceptance of what he calls one’s “fantasy potential.”
Adams’s Oxford years were interrupted, as were those of so many others, by World
War II. Adams chose to serve in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), which is mainly
concerned with transport and communication duties, but later he volunteered for the air-
borne arm of the RASC and served in the Middle East and in Singapore. On his return to
England, Adams was shocked to learn how many of his Oxford companions had died
during the war.
After demobilization, Adams soon met Elizabeth Acland, whom he would later marry
and with whom he would have two daughters. In 1948 he joined the British civil service,
but he never abandoned his love for storytelling. Watership Down began, like many other
“children’s” classics, as a story initially told by the author to his children (in this case to entertain them on a long car trip); two years after its publication, Adams was able to retire from the civil service and write full time at his various homes in the south of England.
Analysis
In each of his novels, Richard Adams adopts a different individual narrative voice:
easygoing and colloquial in Watership Down and
Maia, stately and epic in Shardik, ironic and densely allusive in The Plague Dogs, and the very different first-person voices in The Girl in a Swing and Traveller. On the surface, Adams’s natural gift as a storyteller is his strongest talent, but his novels deserve to be read more for his habitual concerns: a love for
“the surface of the earth,” as George Orwell called it, as manifested in the English countryside and the creatures who inhabit it; a hatred for the cruelties that human beings inflict on the other inhabitants of this world as well as on themselves; and an acute awareness of the transitory nature of existence and the evanescence of friendship and love.
Watership Down
Watership Down burst on the literary scene in 1972, as unlikely a success as J. R. R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1955) had been almost two decades earlier. Its plot and 12
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characters seemed those of a children’s book: A group of rabbits leave their threatened
burrow and make a dangerous journey to find a new home as well as enough new rabbits to
ensure its continuation. In its length and often violent action, however, it certainly went beyond the boundaries of a children’s work, and it succeeded with many adults. It even led to some shameless imitations, such as William Horwood’s mole epic, Duncton Wood
(1980), but none had the imagination and freshness of the original.
As Tolkien did with the Hobbits, Adams made his exotic characters familiar by giving
them an easily identifiable demotic speech. Hazel, Bigwig, and the others speak much as
did the originals on which they are modeled: Adams’s companions in the 205th Company
of the RASC during World War II. (Hazel, according to Adams, is his commanding offi-
cer, John Gifford, and Bigwig is Paddy Kavanagh, who was killed in battle.) The rabbits, like their soldier counterparts, are believable everyday heroes. Their persistence in the face of daunting odds, their relatively unflappable demeanor as they are introduced into new and dangerous surroundings, their ingenuity in overcoming their difficulties—all
recall the best qualities of those soldiers in the war.
The familiar speech is also reproduced in the novel’s narrative voice, which is often
that of a good oral storyteller; as Adams has noted, “A true folk-tale teller is usually rather colloquial.” This informality helps to disguise the classical underpinnings of the work, the main one of which is Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553). There are also echoes of Xenophon’s Kyrou anabasis (c. fourth century b.c.e.; Anabasis, 1623) and Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), with Hazel as a more trustworthy Odysseus and Bigwig a less bel-ligerent Achilles. These archetypal characters and plot devices are also supported by the scientific accuracy of the details of the rabbits’ lives, which Adams culled from The Private Life of the Rabbit by R. M. Lockley (1964). Familiar yet exotic characters, an epic story, and verisimilitude of milieu contribute to the lasting and deserved appeal of
Watership Down. ( Tales from Watership Down, in its latter half a sequel to the novel, also serves as an answer to those who accused the original of, among other charges, sexism.)
Shardik
Adams’s next novel, Shardik, disappointed many of his readers, for although on the surface, like Watership Down, a fantasy, it was far removed from the first novel in setting, characters, and plot. Adams constructs the mythical land of Bekla, whose precarious
peace is shattered by the emergence of a great bear, which is taken by many to be the avatar of the god Shardik. After a short rule by the bear’s chief follower, Kelderek, the bear escapes, and Kelderek must learn the real meaning of the irruption of Shardik into the lives of so many people. For much of the book, the characters are unlikable, the setting is foreign without being exotic, and the plot seems to be nothing but one violent incident after another. The narration is also different from that in Watership Down, much more stately and epic in tone, with self-consciously Homeric similes interrupting the narrative flow.
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In the end, however, Shardik is satisfying, once the reader grasps the greater themes of the novel. Shardik’s reign has allowed slavery to flourish once again in Bekla, and only by suffering and death can Shardik and Kelderek redeem themselves and society. Adams’s
own horror at slavery, both literary and real, echoes in the plot: The evil slaver Genshed is consciously modeled on Stowe’s great villain in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, and the mutilated beggar boys whom Adams had seen from a troop train in India are reproduced in some Beklan slaves. Adams’s own hatred of war causes the first half of the book to be almost antiepic in its drive: The religious war it depicts is nasty, brutish, and long.
Once the arc of the plot is evident, Shardik can be seen as an epic indictment of the horrors of epic war.
The Plague Dogs
The Plague Dogs is the most tendentious of Adams’s novels. The title characters are trying to escape from a laboratory in England’s Lake Country, where they have been subjected to cruel and unnecessary experiments. Although seemingly a return to the mode of
his greatest success, the grown-up animal novel, it is much more a satire, filled with savage indignation at the lengths to which humans will use and abuse other species, a satire that gains effect from Adams’s experience working in government bureaucracies. Like
Shardik, it is an investigation of cruelty, this time toward what the novel calls “animal slaves”: “It’s a bad world for the helpless,” as one of its characters says. Once again Adams adopts a new narrative voice, particularly in the sections concerning humans, this one arch and packed with literary allusions. The novel is not totally one-sided, the case being made near the end for useful animal medical experimentation. Yet again it is in his animal portrayals that Adams best succeeds, particularly those of the dog Snitter, whose nonsense
language, caused by a brain operation, echoes that of dramatist William Shakespeare’s
fools, and of the wild fox, whose feral otherness seems to be an answer to criticisms of Adams’s cozy rabbits.
The Girl in a Swing
Adams’s next two novels are major departures, explorations of the themes of sexuality
and love, subjects he touched on only tangentially in previous work. The Girl in a Swing is nominally a ghost story, but in reality it is more a depiction of the obsessive love that the hero, Alan Desland, feels for Käthe, a German girl whom he meets in Copenhagen and
swiftly marries, not knowing that she is trying to escape a ghost from her past. The work contains echoes of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), with Käthe as Cathy
Earnshaw, but Alan is no Heathcliff, and while Adams’s depictions of local scenery remain one of his strengths—much of the locale is again borrowed from Adams’s childhood—the
end of the novel is more deflationary than chilling. Adams has said that ghosts in English horror writer M. R. James’s short stories are knowingly artificial, but the one in The Girl in a Swing is unfortunately no less an umbra ex machina, a ghost from the machine.
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Maia
Maia returns to the fantasy world of Bekla, which Adams created in Shardik, to tell the story of the eponymous heroine, who undergoes a transformation from literal sex slave to country matron, all described at sometimes tedious length, in more than twelve hundred
pages. Adams’s narrative style here is more familiar than that in Shardik, his similes shorter, homelier, and less epic. However, the reproduction of the girl’s countrified speech becomes irritating, and anachronisms such as discussions of infection and primitive vac-cination are annoying. The plot is basic: Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy. The girl does not ev
en meet the boy until almost halfway through the novel, however, making
for difficult reading.
The underlying theme of Maia is much the same as that of Shardik, as the good side attempts to eradicate slavery in the Beklan empire, but this time the scenes of sadism that Adams describes become extremely uncomfortable. In Shardik such scenes had a moral point, but here their purpose seems cloudier: We know these characters are villains, so
several scenes explicitly depicting their villainy are uncalled for. On the positive side, Adams once again depicts actions that undercut fantasy epic conventions: Maia’s most heroic actions are undertaken to prevent, and not to further, violence and warfare. At the end, however, when Maia has become a contented country wife and mother, the reader wonders how this matron grew out of the girl who, some nine hundred pages earlier, had realized she possessed “an exceptional erotic attitude” and proceeded to use and enjoy it.
Traveller
Traveller is basically the story of the Civil War seen through the eyes and told by the voice of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s famous horse. In this novel, Adams plays to all his strengths, including a new narrative voice, this one a modification of Joel Chandler Harris’s in the Uncle Remus stories; a singular, believable animal persona through which the action is described; and a depiction of his favorite themes—hatred of war, admiration for those who must suffer through it, and sorrow over the ephemerality of comrades and friendship.
The bravery of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia is, as Adams elsewhere has noted, a reflection of Adams’s own pride in the gallantry of the British First Airborne Division in the battle of Arnhem. Lee is Adams’s quintessential hero because he treats both animals and people
with dignity and respect. Traveller, like satirist Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is aghast at humankind’s capacity for cruelty, but he is not keen enough (or anachronistic enough) to see the cruelty that slavery commits.
Traveller is, as another horse calls him, “thick”: At Gettysburg, he thinks Pickett’s charge succeeds, and at Appomattox, he thinks the Federals have surrendered to “Marse Robert.”
However, he gets the basic truth right: “Horses [are] for ever saying goodbye.” It was the lesson Adams learned when he returned to Oxford after the war to learn of his friends’ deaths, and it is the grave lesson that has informed his best fiction.
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