Baddies in books: General Woundwort, the rabbit who ran his warren like a Stasi commander

In our series on fictional villains, Xan Brooks argues that the baddie of Richard Adams’ Watership Down is made all the more scary by his moral complexity

From Sauron to Humbert Humbert: more Baddies in books

My favourite literary villain could have leapt fully formed from the pages of world history, or court transcripts from the Hague. He’s your classic geopolitical monster: the rebel fighter turned military general turned totalitarian despot. He possesses the brutishness of Stalin, the cunning of Napoleon and the guerrilla swagger of a Gaddafi or Saddam. He’s knocking on now; he turned three last birthday. He’s burly and he’s hulking; he comes right up to your shins.

General Woundwort is a “singular rabbit”, almost as big as a hare, who rears up late to dominate the third act of Richard Adams’s Watership Down. He is the leader of Efrafa, an oppressed, overcrowded warren which he runs along the lines of a Stasi state, crushing political dissent in the name of security. Watership Down, of course, comes billed as a children’s book and it was one which thrilled me so much at the age of 10 that I immediately turned back to the start to read the whole thing again. When I revisited the novel a few years ago, I did so more in the spirit of nostalgia than anything else. And yet in the intervening decades Watership Down had deepened and darkened on the page.

In his 1973 film The Holy Mountain, director Alejandro Jodorowsky chose to re-cast the conquistador campaign with lizards and toads. In Watership Down, Adams manages a similar allegory of 20th-century turmoil, re-enacted with bunnies on the bridleways of Hampshire. The rabbits in his tapestry are variously resourceful, cowardly, kindly and cruel. And naturally these rabbits aren’t rabbits; these rabbits are us.

Watership Down (for those who haven’t read it – or witnessed the harrowing 1978 film version) is a quest narrative about a group of migrants, forced out across open land after their burrow is bulldozed. Along the way they brave harsh weather, roaming foxes and a nightmarish settlement where the inhabitants are being fattened up for the farmer’s pot. But all of these perils are dwarfed by the encounter with Efrafa, which might be 1960s east Berlin or 1990s Baghdad. Must we still persist with the conceit that Woundwort is a rabbit, by the way? I’m picturing him with epaulets on his shoulders and his boots buffed to a shine.

A lesser writer, I think, would have been content to leave Woundwort as a simple thug; the crude monster to be foiled and brought down. Yet crucially Adams elects to humanise him (or possibly rabbitise him). He gives the general an interior voice and a hard-knocks back-story (murdered mother; impoverished youth). At the same time he reveals the rabbit to be a product of circumstance, shaped by his environment. Woundwort, we come to realise, has beaten the odds and brought peace to the land. He is courageous and shrewd, a natural born leader. But he is also a victim of his own success. He can’t adapt; he can’t relax. So he reshapes Efrafa as a permanent wartime economy. He sees enemies and rivals in every corner of the burrow.

Looking back, I suspect that Watership Down was the first book to introduce me to the notion of moral relativism; that the villain’s villainy is defined only by its relation to the characters we are invited to like and to support. History, after all, is written by the winners - whether it is the history of the eastern bloc or a tale of scurrying rabbits in the fields west of Basingstoke. The good ones triumph and the bad eggs are defeated and the story ends happily until a fresh crisis breaks.

There is no doubt about it: Woundwort’s system is outmoded and the world is moving on. He has been corrupted by power and is fighting on too many fronts. He is a brake on progress; he has to die. And all of this is probably at it should be. But tweak the story by a few degrees and it is possible to imagine an alternative version, in which the monster is the star and the villain is the hero. Even Woundwort’s enemies regard their tormentor with a grudging admiration (“the brute’s got courage, I’ll give him that”). They know that for all his menace and malice, there is something magnificent about him.

Animals in the wild tend to lead brief, violent lives. Tin-pot dictators rarely enjoy happy endings. In the book’s final pages, his army destroyed, Woundwort proceeds to square up against a rampaging dog – an animal he can never hope to defeat, although he hopes it all the same. “Dogs aren’t dangerous!” he roars at his followers. “Come back and fight!” The most he can hope for is that his body will never be found, that his myth will grow in his absence and that he will live on as a story; a beast to spook both children and adults alike. “Such was Woundwort’s monument,” Adams concludes. “And perhaps it would not have displeased him.”

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