Duncton Wood

As a massive, life-long fan of Watership Down, I probably should've read this sooner. Without doing down Horwood's originality, it's another story in which the British countryside becomes the setting for a sweeping epic, in which unassuming little animals have a complex social hierarchy, factions, customs, folklore, spirituality, and propensity for brutal violence.

I wish I liked the result more, though. For me, it doesn't reconcile its mythic ambitions with its cast of humble animals as successfully as Watership Down. While that book is my paragon of talking-animal texts, prophecies and deus ex machina and all, I wasn't a big fan of Duncton Wood's use of those devices. Characters wander into each other's lives led by vibes and mystical coincidences, without much connective tissue otherwise. The text tells us that their loves and loyalties are deep and profound, but these are preordained rather than earned through the interactions we see. The result does have an otherworldly appeal, but I'd have liked some more grounded motivations and relationships for the moles. This fatalism sucks the urgency and agency out of an already slow-paced story.

Duncton Wood sometimes gets mistaken for a children's book, and it's very much not. The characters are moles and that's where the cuteness ends. The moles are animalistic enough to be preoccupied with mating and producing litters, but anthropomorphic enough that this incurs a pretty strong degree of sexual violence, incest and infanticide. It's an adult fantasy book that just happens to star talking moles, and is more A Song of Ice and Fire than The Lord of the Rings, to which it's commonly compared. The writing can also be dense and abstract, and there's a lot of evocative but long-winded talk about landscapes, tunnels and weather. By halfway through I found myself skipping over paragraphs of these beautiful, bloated descriptions, which I never like to do.

Overall, it's not a perfect book, outstaying its welcome by a couple of hundred pages, but it's a vivid and memorable entry in the small niche of talking-animal xenofiction for adults. I gather that the later books are less rapey, but even longer and more religious, so I'm not sure I'll continue.