Into the woods

SOMETIMES THINK," grumbled the British science fiction writer Michael Moorcock in a 1987 essay titled ''Epic Pooh," ''that as Britain declines...her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals....Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage."

Even had this passage not occurred in the middle of an attack on ''Watership Down"-the best-selling 1972 novel that is being reissued in paperback by Scribner next month-its target would have been clear. For ''Watership Down" concerns itself with mild-mannered chewers of cabbage (rabbits, to be precise) and its author, Richard Adams, at the time he wrote the book, was an English civil servant.

The broader assault of Moorcock's essay is on the body of fantasy fiction produced and consumed by (as he saw it) a ''disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle class"-the ''artificial romance" of J.R.R. Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings," the ''corrupted romanticism" of C.S. Lewis's ''Narnia" books. These are precisely the productions, of course, that continue to enthrall the American public. Peter Jackson's ''Lord of the Rings" trilogy bestrode Hollywood like a colossus for three years, and Andrew Adamson's upcoming ''The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is expected to succeed on a similar scale.

Has American culture begun to mimic the chronic nostalgia of a certain strain of post-imperial Englishness? Is the embrace of these fantasies part of, in Moorcock's words, a ''longing to possess, again, the infant's eye?" Or is there something in them that speaks to the moment more clearly than, say, ''Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous"? A closer look at ''Watership Down" reveals that its vegetarian heroes inhabit a rougher and bloodier reality than is generally remembered: a wartime reality. And it is the fact that he had been to war-rather than his class status or political tendencies-that places Adams in the company of Tolkien and Lewis.

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That Adams spent more than 20 years working for Britain's Ministry of Housing and Local Government before producing a worldwide smash about talking rabbits might seem strange, until one considers Rudyard Kipling's ''Jungle Books." Published in 1894-95, they are the story of the ''man-cub" Mowgli, a human foundling raised by the Seeonee wolf pack. They are also a hymn to administration: The jungle order as expressed in the poem ''The Law of the Jungle" is a sort of eroticized bureaucracy, furred and clawed, complete with hygiene programs (''Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip") and zoning requirements: ''The lair of the wolf is his refuge, but where he has digged it too plain/The council shall send him a message, and so he shall change it again."

About such matters Kipling was very serious indeed. As a young journalist in India he had acquired a great respect for the Indian Civil Service, in whose efforts he saw the low-level heroism that gave the British Empire its historic sanction. And from good government, or so the thinking went, flows good behavior. Kipling's friend Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, rewrote parts of ''The Jungle Book" as a symbolic framework for use in guiding junior Scouts, or Wolf Cubs. The head of the Scout ''pack," runs a passage in the current ''International Handbook for Cub Scout Leaders," is ''a large, grey lone wolf called Akela....All the wolves listen to him because they know that the leader of the pack represents the law and keeping the law is the only thing that keeps them together."

To imagine ''Watership Down" adapted to a similar purpose-a movement comprising warrens of children in standard-issue rabbit ears, perhaps, with an emphasis on horticulture and quiet living?-is to feel the world-historical contraction of English consciousness between Kipling's time and Adams's: the disappearance of the Empire. But the two writers share an interest in organization, and in authority. In fact, Adams wrote ''Watership Down," his first book, in the evenings after work, and the footprint of his day job on the story is a deep one. Ejected from their native Sandleford warren by the bladed bulldozers of sprawl, Hazel and his band of buck rabbits undergo what amounts to a series of experiments in local government, first at an eerie, unnamed warren where the rabbits submit to periodic culls in return for a regular food supply; then in the militarized, paranoid environment of General Woundwort's warren Efrafa; and finally at their own newly established colony at Watership Down.

Kaye Webb, Adams's editor at Puffin Books, once remarked that she enjoyed the conversation of the rabbits because they spoke to one another ''like civil servants"-which is to say in tones of muted bourgeois anxiety, with an emphasis on official matters: grazing rights, access to senior ministers, and so on. (''But, Hazel, you didn't really think the Chief Rabbit would act on your advice, did you? What were you expecting?") ''Give me a town clerk," Adams rhapsodized to a radio interviewer in 1985, his piping, almost archaic upper-middle-class English tones swelling like the chord of a church organ. ''Give me a borough surveyor and it's a world I know....It's a quiet, grey world but a very nice world of honest true men and decent fellows."

Here indeed, is the moderate, complacent voice of Moorcock's hated Middle England, the ''great army"-as Adams once approvingly described it in an interview-"of ordinary educated middle-class opinion which finds nothing to support it in the trendy media." For the last century, the newspaper of this great conservative army has been London's flushed, trumpeting, and permanently aggrieved Daily Mail. It is surely more than coincidence that the most successful post-"Watership Down" talking-animal project was William Horwood's ''Duncton Chronicles": a six-volume cycle, published from 1980-93, about a community of English moles written by a former Daily Mail features editor.

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But writing off ''Watership Down" as a manifesto of middle-class conservatism misses the point; the book's unique effect resides not solely in the comforting, cabbage-muffled discourse of the well-behaved rabbits, but in the irruption-into their quiet, grey world-of violence and domination.

For this was the other sphere of Adams's experience: Prior to his career in government, he'd had an action-packed war, serving in the Middle East and then participating, as an officer in the 1st Airborne Division, in Operation Market Garden, the calamitous and bloody Allied attempt to clear the main bridges in German-occupied Holland. The Second World War shaped him as irresistibly as the first had shaped those other primary English fantasists, Tolkien and Lewis: ''I must confess," wrote Adams, ''that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath."

Active duty is no guarantee against whimsy-A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, was a signals officer at the Battle of the Somme-but the marks of Adams's war on ''Watership Down" are plain. The lines of power in the book are drawn with brutal clarity, from the Owslafa-the Gestapo-like enforcers of General Woundwort's warren-to the more improvised and benign, but no less efficient, command structure used by Hazel and his band of runaway bucks. And the novel's violence, ever-threatening, occurs with a terrible, scuffling abruptness, leaving half-severed ears, torn haunches, nostrils filled with blood. The frozen state of ''tharn"-defined in the book's ''Lapine Glossary" as ''stupefied, distraught, hypnotized with fear"-is a facet of rabbit-hood, certainly, but its human version is shell shock: locked terror, the draining away of courage.

As the heroic rabbit Bigwig lies strangling in the wire trap outside the unnamed warren, for example, the confusion of his friends has a nightmare quality, a sort of thickening, decelerated vagueness, horribly at odds with the physical urgency of the moment: ''His eyes opened unseeing and the whites showed bloodshot as the brown irises rolled one way and the other. After a moment his voice came thick and low, bubbling out of the bloody spume in his mouth....Hazel, left alone, tried to understand what was needed." In this aspect, Martin Rosen's 1978 animated version of ''Watership Down"-made before adults and children were sundered into separate demographics-was exquisitely, viscerally faithful; anyone who has attempted to watch it with a child can testify to the drawn-out agony of ''the shining wire."

All the great fantasies have this ingredient of extremity; without it they are indeed, as Moorcock says, a ''lullaby." As Peter fights the Wolf in Lewis's ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," its ''bare teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair." Lewis wrote in his memoir ''Surprised by Joy" of having seen, in the trenches of Arras, ''the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass." The ghost armies and Dead Marshes of ''The Lord of the Rings" are only the most emblematic of Tolkien's returns to the wilderness of the Somme; reviewing the book in 1955, Lewis wrote that ''it is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front...the background of something like despair and the merry foreground."

Who can ignore the merry foreground, the delirium of distraction, that currently prevails in American life-in a country at war, under threat of terror, with an impending energy crisis and a scandalous political culture? One senses that unknown dangers are preparing to assert themselves, and the closer they get, the dreamier everyday life begins to feel. This sensation is the hallmark of the English fantasists: Evil encroaches on the Shire, hallucinated blood spreads across a field at the Sandleford warren. The consolations of fantasy exist only in relation to its special terrors, and if we choose to seek these consolations and terrors in the archetypal darkness of the movie theater, or in the ancient privacy of a book, might we not be closer there to the truth than in the land of make-believe that awaits us outside on the street, or when we put the book down?

James Parker is a writer living in Brookline.