Watership Down offers little to build a literary cult upon. On the American-whimsy exchange, one Tolkien hobbit should still be worth a dozen talking rabbits.

This bunny-rabbit novel not only steers mostly clear of the usual sticky, anthropomorphic pitfalls of your common garden-variety of bunny rabbit story: it is also quite marvelous for a while, and after it stops being marvelous, it settles down to be pretty good- a book you can live with from start to finish.

It simply isn't possible. At this date, you cannot write a story about rabbits, 413 pages long, and hold a reader riveted. But Richard Adams has done exactly that in Watership Down (Rex Collings, £3.50). This is a great book, establishing a more than plausible and totally fascinating psychology and physiology for its rabbits, together with their own mythology and language. It sounds formidable, perhaps; yet what one's aware of, reading, is a story of the most exciting kind, remaining taut over all those pages. It's set in a precise part of Berkshire (map provided) – the hejira of a group of rabbits who accept a clairvoyant companion’s prophecy that their warren will be destroyed; their establishment of a new home and their search for mates – this leading to war with a warren ruled by the protectively totalitarian General Woundwort. A whole world is created, perfectly real in itself, yet constituting a deep incidental comment on human affairs.