Watership Down: The Graphic Novel adapted from Richard Adams' original work by James Sturm (text) and Joe Sutphin (art)

Published by Ten Speed Graphic on October 17, 2023

The novel Watership Down is a celebrated anthropomorphic adventure novel that was written by Richard Adams and first published in 1972. While the original book is classified as a children’s novel, it has long earned the praise of adult readers. This graphic adaptation captures the magic of the original work in a simplified form that makes the story accessible to children who haven’t mastered the ability to read. The story isn’t dumbed down so adults can enjoy it just as much as kids, either as a reminder of a book they read years ago or as a quick introduction to the original. A note of caution, however. Some parents might deem the art inappropriate for very young children as some of the scenes of rabbits biting and clawing each other are a bit bloody.

Weighing in at 385 pages, the graphic version adapts Adams’ novel without losing essential elements of the story. The primary characters are rabbits, although a bird and mouse play critical roles. Humans are largely represented through machinery or weapons.

Fiver is an ordinary rabbit, apart from his inconsistent ability to foretell the future. He has a vision of a disaster that will wipe out the warren if the rabbits do not flee. When the chief rabbit refuses to take Fiver’s warning seriously, Hazel leads a group of dissident male rabbits in an escape from the chief rabbit’s authority. Their best storyteller joins the group, telling stories of cunning rabbits that inspire the dissidents to be sneaky and cautious, even when the chief rabbit sends one of his rabbit goons to bring them back. The rabbits defy the goon and embark on a long journey.

The graphic novel makes judicious choices about aspects of the original text that deserve to be highlighted. For example, the graphic novel emphasizes the role that legends and storytelling play in helping a culture maintain an identity and preserve its values. The rabbits repeatedly turn to tales of courage and sacrifice in rabbit kingdoms of the past to guide their responses to current problems.

I see the story is an ode to freedom and a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism. In an early example of that theme, the dissident rabbits encounter a group of rabbits who offer safety in a large and comfortable warren, but those rabbits are willing to sacrifice some of their number in exchange for food and protection from predators that humans provide to them. Leaders who tell their followers that strong rulers will keep them safe by sacrificing the less worthy are common across the world. We’ve seen too many of them in the US.

Moving on, Hazel saves a mouse from a kestrel, an act of interspecies decency that will later be repaid. As the journey continues, Hazel helps a wounded bird who also repays his kindness. The rabbits learn that when they work together and accept the friendship of diverse members of the animal kingdom, they can overcome stronger foes. Even a cat can be chased away by rabbits working in concert.

The rabbit goon eventually reappears. He confirms the calamity that Fiver predicted. Humans, they discover, will callously kill rabbits, not just because rabbits ruin gardens but because rabbit warrens stand in the way of property development. The rabbits do not understand the strange ways of humans. That’s not surprising. Neither do humans.

Being male rabbits, the dissidents decide they need female rabbits to help them live their best lives, so they try to free captive does from a farm. I recall some feminist criticism of the novel as male-rabbit-centric because female rabbits don’t have much of a role except as breeders. I don’t recall females being mistreated (they certainly aren’t in the graphic novel) but I suppose readers who are sensitive to how female rabbits were portrayed in 1972 should be warned of those concerns. To me, this is a book that happens to be about male rabbits. I don’t think that demeans female rabbits.

The attempt to free the female rabbits requires a sacrifice, followed by a daring rescue. Other rabbits, hoping to recruit females, are taken prisoner by another group of rabbits who are governed by an authoritarian leader. More stories of daring and self-sacrifice ensue. The ending is touching.

Although I was in my twenties when I read Watership Down, I recall being very concerned about the fate of the rabbits. The graphic novel prompted those feelings to resurface. While the story might be less epic than The Odyssey, Adams told a compelling adventure story that touches upon adult themes in a classic tradition.

The art would be appealing even to kids who can’t yet read. Like real rabbits, some rabbits have a similar appearance, others are quite distinctive. Their facial expressions do not emulate humans, yet the artist made their emotions clear. The pastoral settings through which the rabbits roam — some pages are nothing but grassy fields beneath blue skies — convey a sense of tranquility that gives way to the violence of rabbits running from foxes or fighting each other. The purpose of a graphic version of a text novel is to create art that helps readers interpret the story. This one succeeds admirably.

RECOMMENDED

The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on October 10, 2023

I don’t read much fantasy, particularly the kind that involves swords and wizards, dragons, and epic battles. I make an exception for Tom Holt’s interpretation of fantasy. He seems to recognize that most stories in the genre are a bit silly. He exploits the silliness to wring humor from the genre’s tired ideas.

Dawson, Ahriman, & Dawson is a firm of commercial and industrial sorcerers, thaumaturgical and metaphysical engineers, and scholarly magicians. Their clients are primarily nations, planets, and huge businesses. Ahriman possesses fearsome power. He doesn’t usually work but he shows up at the office now and then to demand that the firm generate more money so he can cart it away. He doesn’t need the money but he likes to abuse his partners.

One of the partners, Edward Sunshine, probably doesn’t need to work since he can fill his palms with diamonds from his bottomless purse whenever the mood strikes. A woman who received a delivery intended for Alpha Centauri (the delivery notice says “left with neighbor”) brings it to Sunshine because a friend told her that “weird shit is what you do.” After determining that the object in the package is sentient and malevolent, Sunshine turns to Harmondsworth to help him deal with it. Harmondsworth usually lives in a drawer in Sunshine’s desk but sometimes moves his residence to a tea kettle.

Tom Dawson handles executive recruitment for the firm’s clients. He’s been hired by the planet Snoobis Prime to find a replacement for their god, who died. The not-quite-gods he’s interviewed clearly don’t have what it takes. He considers recommending Santa Claus, who has free time 364 days a year. Santa already has magic and it would only take worshippers to turn him into a god. The position interests Santa, assuming the health plan is adequate.

Brian Teasdale, the youngest partner, takes on the case of a wedding photographer who is troubled by the image of a woman who appears in every picture she takes. The partners eventually realize that the woman in the pictures has been trapped in an asteroid for four thousand years, where her ex-husband imprisoned her after a nasty divorce. Out of spite, she has taken control of the asteroid and has set it on a collision course with Earth. She expects the collision to free her from the asteroid as it destroys the planet that her husband received in the divorce settlement.

A few more characters round out the firm. Tom’s evil twin brother Jerry lives in a steel box in the basement, from which he is allowed to emerge to vote in partnership meetings. Tony Bateman is a shapeshifter. He might be a tree or he might be a toilet in the ladies’ room. Gina, who was once Queen of the Night, works as a sort of office assistant. The characters are considerably more fun than the typical swordsmen and sorcerers of fantasy who take themselves much too seriously.

The loose plot follows characters as they labor to save the Earth from the approaching asteroid, except for those who are interested only in saving themselves. Characters also engage in office politics as they try to undermine each other in their respective struggles to control the firm, or the Earth, or the universe.

Tom Holt excels at dry wit mixed with occasional moments of slapstick. Humor permeates the novel. Teasdale gets his morning coffee from a little caterer in Plato’s ideal reality, making it the best possible coffee. One of the firm’s clients is Consolidated Landrape. A mother creates a planet for her liberal young daughter to save and tells her, “now you really are the centre of the universe. What more could someone your age possibly ask for?” The plot is goofy but coherent, the characters are endearingly grumpy, and the laughs are plentiful. I would say this is Tom Holt at his best, but Tom Holt is always at his best.

RECOMMENDED

Touched by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 10, 2023

Walter Mosley has a laminated spot on my list of three favorite crime writers. When he strays from crime fiction, I’m less enthused about his novels. Touched is a horror novel. It’s based on a puzzling concept and isn’t nearly as compelling as his Easy Rawlins novels, but Mosley has mastered the art of holding a reader’s interest.

Martin Just is arrested for exposing himself, naked and erect, to a distant nine-year-old girl while he is standing on the second-floor deck of his home. His wife believes he was sleepwalking. Martin knows he was awake but isn’t sure how he came to be on the porch — or, for that matter, back on Earth.

Martin believes he is one of 107 people who were taken from Earth, trained for a millennium, and returned to change the Earth in 107 different ways. A pile of glowing blue rocks told him that mankind will reach a state of interstellar domination that will result in oblivion, ending all existence — not just on insignificant Earth, but throughout the entire universe. Martin woke up with that knowledge and with an erection. That’s a lot for Martin to process.

At least some of the 107 have made it their mission to wipe out humanity. Martin takes a different approach. Martin is the Cure. Or the Antibody. Sometimes he’s called the Antibody Cure. Martin wants to save the universe by fixing humanity rather than destroying it. This perspective puts him in conflict with the destroyers.

Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe Martin is delusional. But Martin believes that his newfound beliefs are true. The reader will agree with that conclusion before the novel reaches its midway point because the story is better if Martin is really waging a war against those of the 107 who want to end human life. Still, Martin’s explanation of his return to Earth and his newly split personality (he’s sharing his mind with a more toxic version of himself he calls Temple) never rises much above incoherent babble. In fact, the notion of choosing and training 107 humans to save the universe by fighting each other makes very little sense. At the very least, it needed further development.

Martin is Black. Before the battle with the destroyers begins, Martin needs to deal with the police, who decide to punish him for exposing himself on his deck. They place Martin in a cell with a large and brutal white supremacist who decides to strangle him. When Martin wakes up, he discovers that he is charged with murdering his cellmate. Fortunately, there were no witnesses and he likely acted in self-defense, so a judge releases him on bail. Mosley’s confidence in the judicial system is surprising, given that Mosley is far from naïve.

As Martin tries to explain all this to his wife, he realizes that he has physically changed. He feels younger. He’s stronger and more vigorous. Thanks to Temple, he’s become a sexual dynamo. That change pleases his wife (Martin feels a bit jealous that she loves shagging Temple) but she also seems to be changed by his touch. His wife takes steps to change his two children, making them soldiers in his war. This leads to a minor side story about his wife’s former (and possibly not so former) lover, but like most of the novel, that story is essentially thrown away before it develops into a significant subplot.

Mayhem ensues as Martin and his small army of reformed criminals (plus his family) battle a reincarnated killer, a demon dog, and a powerful member of the 107. That battle is essentially the heart of the novel, but it’s over too quickly to amount to much, given Temple’s ability as a warrior.

With no disrespect intended — again, I love Walter Mosley — the story seems a bit silly. Why did Mosley write it? I suppose Touched is a contemplation of death. Mosley’s point seems to be that death never defeats life. Everyone dies but in a universe that has existed for billions of years and will continue for billions more, the death of an individual life on a single planet isn’t all that significant. Death is “merely a prop for life, a yardstick that measured our advance.” It might be comforting to hold onto that thought until death prevents us from thinking. In any event, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the tiny specks we are in the vastness of space and time. A secondary lesson (and one familiar to fans of Mosley's work as a crime novelist) is that bullies can be defeated by showing them how “small and insignificant” they are.

Touched isn’t as substantial as Mosley’s crime fiction but it might appeal to horror fans who are satisfied with a bare-bones story. I recommend it to that limited audience with the caveat that readers looking for Mosley at his best are likely to be disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Ecco on October 3, 2023

Every other Jonathan Lethem book I’ve read, I enjoyed. This one didn’t speak to me. The story, to the extent that one exists, is told in a series of vignettes that explore an significant number of mostly male characters of varying ages and races and their relationships in Brooklyn between the 1930s and the upcoming end of the Trump administration.

The first sentence of chapter 2 is “This is a story about what nobody knows.” Count me among those who don’t know. Lethem later confesses that he’s probably losing the reader. Count me among the lost. Confessing that you're turning off readers is a very postmodernist thing to do, but it makes the book unappealing for anyone but diehard students of postmodernism.

I don’t fault Lethem for lack of ambition. I imagine he was trying to create a micro-history of Brooklyn with an emphasis on its unsavory flavors, a chronicle of changes that replaced impoverished criminals with wealthy ones. I fault the meandering execution, the episodic storytelling that never quite coheres, the failure to encourage readers to invest in the characters. To me, the novel felt like scenes cut from a movie. I would rather have seen the movie.

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. Lethem’s attempts to create a level of intimacy with the reader that he fails to achieve. I generally enjoy Lethem's prose, as I did in this novel, but sharp sentences just aren't enough. Some street scenes are vivid; some characters have the feel of authenticity. But — perhaps because I’m getting old — I lost track the characters and then lost track of my attempts to keep track of them. Finally, I lost interest.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Lazy City by Rachel Connolly

First published in the UK in 2023; published by W.W. Norton & Company/ ‎ Liveright on October 3, 2023

Lazy City is a snapshot of a young woman’s life in modern Belfast. Since it isn’t much more than that and since her life is largely wasted, I have mixed feelings about the novel.

Erin was dating Mikey before she moved away to attend a university. She always felt a distance from other people but felt less distance from her college roommate Kate. She had difficulty processing Kate’s death. After a few weeks, she walked away from her academic life and returned to Belfast. Erin stayed briefly with her violent and unforgiving mother before it became clear that she was not welcome. This is the backstory of a novel that opens with Erin working as Anne Marie’s live-in nanny and cleaner.

Erin is a lonely party girl. She knows her housing situation is temporary and that she’ll need to find a new place to live (and thus a new job) if Anne Marie reconciles with the husband from whom she separated. Erin avoids thinking about her future by getting drunk most nights, sometimes adding coke or ketamine to the party after the bars close. She hangs out with her friend Declan, a gay bartender/artist whose physician father is from Sri Lanka, but otherwise tries to avoid people who know her.

Erin doesn’t know if she wants to reconnect with Mikey although she knows she will. She gets along with Mikey’s brother, who might be the novel’s nicest character (apart from Declan), but he has serious drug and alcohol problems. While she’s pondering what to do about Mikey, she meets a somewhat older American who is teaching English literature at Queens. She has mixed feelings about her drunken decision to sleep with him. She is soon sleeping with Mikey or the American a couple of nights each week.

Both Mikey and the American might have other relationships they are concealing from Erin. Why this should bother Erin baffles me since she isn’t telling either of her sex partners about her other sex partner, but Erin nevertheless feels victimized. Still, she manages to address her concerns with both men without hysteria or other pointless drama, which is to her credit.

Erin is bright and straightforward, not given to pretension. The American uses words like technocapitalism that he can only vaguely define. Erin wonders whether he is posing. She suspects that people like to blame capitalism for problems because it’s easier to repair economic systems than to repair people. She’s glad that the American doesn’t try to talk about the Troubles because he would probably say something that is culturally insensitive, or maybe she would, although she understands the people who survived the Troubles never talk about it.

Erin doesn’t feel she can tell anyone about the pain she associates with Kate’s loss. She isn’t particularly religious but she visits empty churches, lights a candle, and shares her life with Kate’s spirit.

Erin’s internal monologs, including her conversations with Kate, are sometimes insightful. She isn’t sure why she has sex with the American or Mikey. She chalks Mikey up to being a habit. She keeps sleeping with the American because “the loneliness in him means something to the loneliness in me.” Or maybe it’s the “sense that his vulnerability makes mine less obvious? That I have the upper hand?” Only later does it occur to her that he might be asking himself why he wants to have sex with her.

Rachel Connolly creates a sense of intimacy with her unadorned, conversational writing style. She portrays Erin as a likable but troubled woman, the kind of person for whom it is easy to be both sympathetic and impatient. Erin wants to be true to herself, but she seems to think that her true self should be drunk and high most nights. She needs to get her life together. That’s presumably the novel’s point. By the last chapter, as she makes New Year’s resolutions, it’s clear that she understands what she needs to do. It’s less clear that she has the will to do it.

Novels like this one, depicting a few months that aren’t going well in the life of a young woman, seem to attract publishers. I assume they attract readers or publishers wouldn’t buy them. I often feel a bit disappointed when I read them, perhaps because my impatience with the troubled young woman overcomes my sympathy. Erin’s epiphany — that her return to Belfast was an act of running away but also an act of running toward something — is a bit obvious, particularly after Erin spells it out for the reader. So is the last sentence, as Erin leaves a church and starts walking forward, presumably charting the path that will be the rest of her life. (I hope that’s not a spoiler, but I’m not sure how it is possible to spoil a story that has no real ending.)

The novel doesn't amount to much, although the writing is sufficiently sharp that I am hesitant to condemn the story as shallow. I recommend it as a decent slice of life story about yet another troubled young woman, but I can’t recommend it as anything more than that.

RECOMMENDED