Richard Adams was born in Newbury, England in May of 1920. He was the youngest
of three children, a sister, Katherine, and a brother, John. (Richard had had
another brother but he died at the age of three from influenza.) Richard was his
father's favorite. George Adams (his dad), spent most of his time with young
Richard teaching him about all the nature in the area. Richard grew up a few
miles from the town of Newbury on a three acre piece of land with a house named
"Oakdene." Richard's father was a doctor at the local hospital in
Newbury and his mother, Lilian Rose Adams, was a nurse. Richard spent most of
his childhood at home and out wandering around Newbury, enjoying its beauty. At
about the age of 10, he was sent to the Horace Hill boarding school. After a few
years, he was sent to another prep school, Bradfield, and at the age of 18,
received a history scholarship to Oxford University. At the age of 21 he was
enlisted in the British Army. Adams has produced a variety of different
writings. Along with his numerous novels: Watership Down, Shardik, The Plague
Dogs, The Girl in a Swing, Maia, and Traveller, Adams has also written books of
short stories: The Iron Wolf and Other Stories, and The Unbroken Web. As well,
he has done picture books in verse: The Tyger Voyage, and The Ship's Cat, and
books on nature: Nature Through the Seasons, Nature Day and Night, and A Nature
Diary. Adams' first novel, Watership Down, is about a group of rabbits who leave
their home because of disaster, and go out in search of a new home. On the way,
they encounter two other groups of rabbits. One group lives life with a constant
knowledge that they are just food for the neighboring farmer, neglecting their
own culture. The other group lives so as to never be found by man and to protect
itself from predators. When, at last, a new home is found, the rabbits have to
undertake a journey in order to find some females so that their colony will grow
and prosper. Throughout the novel, Adams puts in various ideas and themes that
are meant to make the reader think twice about their relationships with nature
and themselves. This novel sets up the themes of freedom and survival, which are
also found in two of his other novels, and the theme of the stupidity and
cruelty of man to the earth and her creatures. The Plague Dogs, Adams' third
novel, is about two dogs who escape from an animal research station and try to
fend for themselves in the hills of England. Rowf, a large, black, strong
mongrel who has a mean temper and who has a deathly fear of water due to the
experiments performed on him. Snitter, a fox terrier who has fits and has the
power to see the future because of the brain surgery performed on him in the
research station. Together, they meet up with a tod (fox). The tod helps them
survive while reporters follow the dogs and spread dangerous rumors of the
plague, getting politics involved. The themes in this novel are similar to the
ones in Watership Down: survival, freedom, and human cruelty, but added to this
list is the theme of rights. In this case, the right of animals, but, in some of
his other works the theme extends to those people who are less fortunate and are
in awful situations. The Girl in a Swing, his fourth novel, talks about a young
man, Alan Desland, who has devoted his life to the business of fine ceramics and
who is completely swept off his feet by a young German woman, Käthe. They get
married, in Florida, after a very short courtship and return to England, where
Alan returns to his business and Käthe holds spellbound his friends, family,
and even him, with her beauty and charm. Inside Käthe, though, is a secret
which Alan finds out about too late. The main theme in this novel is completely
different from his other novels. Adams concentrates mostly on guilt - A guilt
that Käthe held inside her and eventually caused her destruction. He also
explains how guilt affects those around the guilty. Adams' fifth novel, Maia, is
a story about a young, beautiful girl who is thrown into slavery by her jealous
mother. She makes friends with an exotic girl, Occula, who is sent on a mission
from the gods to avenge her father's death by murdering the queen. Maia enters
slavery, becomes a heroine by saving the Beklan army, falls in love, finds her
long lost brother, and helps the rebels conquer Bekla, who then abolish slavery
and establish equality throughout the empire. The themes in this novel are like
those in Watership Down, and Plague Dogs. This novel, mostly because of its
length (900+ pages), has many more themes than the other two novels. The main
ones, though, are slavery and freedom, human dignity and rights, and survival
against all odds. Freedom FREEDOM - that consuming goal above doubt or
criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent
waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter
winters!...Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute,
harp, sackbut...and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will
do so upon the instant,...For we are free--free to suffer every anguish of
deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and
half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and
responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to
struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where
we longed to be... Freedom is one of the strongest themes in three of Adams'
novels. In these novels, his characters are striving for freedom in some way,
and, though their struggles end in victory, they see others who have given up
their search for freedom, or were never allowed the opportunity to even begin
searching for freedom. In Adams' life, he was continually searching for freedom
from society and freedom from himself. Maia, (Maia) a girl aged only 14, was
sold by her mother, Morca, into slavery. Maia was told, when she was bought,
that she was going to the main province, Bekla, to model dresses for the
wealthy. After a few nights she knew this to be a lie, and was told that she was
to be sold to one of the wealthy citizens in Bekla for use as a bed-slave. Her
whole life's goal, after being bought by the leader of the spy ring in Bekla,
was to find a way to make herself free again. She watched girls in her same
situation buy their freedom, and she watched girls thrown out because they were
of no use any longer. She took an offer, with the promise of freedom, to risk
her life as a spy and learn inside information by using her master. At his death
(when he died, she became property that could be put up for auction), she was
given another opportunity to gain her freedom by leaving behind what she knew
her life to be and to go live with a man she did not know and report what she
found out about him and his people to the Beklan army. After many months (and
many deaths), she gained her "freedom" for a while and was considered
a heroine of the Beklan army. Her struggles were not over. It took her seven
more years to finally gain her complete freedom. A group of rabbits (Watership
Down) set out from their home, or warren, based on a vision that one of the
rabbits has. He told the others that their warren would be destroyed. If they do
not leave immediately, they never will. Nine male rabbits set off searching for
the ideal place to build a new warren. On their, way they encounter two
different groups of rabbits. Each group is in a different situation, but both
are far from being free. At the first warren they come across, they find a
rather small number of large healthy rabbits living in a huge warren. The
rabbits have food provided for them year-round by a farmer a walk-way away. On
the outside, these new rabbits appear cheerful and happy, but they have a deep
secret. They have adapted their lives and their culture to meet the needs of the
farmer close by. The farmer provides food, and kills the rabbit's enemies to
make the rabbits want to stay where they are. In turn, the rabbits have to
travel to the place where the farmers puts the food they eat. When they do go
eat, usually one or two of them gets caught in a snare. The rabbits get food and
protection from their natural enemies. In return, the rabbits sacrifice their
lives for the farmer. The second warren of rabbits that the travelers met were
slaves. They were not slaves to man as the previous warren had been, but they
were slaves to their fear of man. The rabbits had allowed one strong rabbit to
come and take over their warren. He created a dictatorship and set strict
standards of living on the rabbits to "protect" them from their foes.
The rabbits had no opportunity to eat when they wanted. Their eating was
regulated. They could never go outside the confines of the warren, for fear that
a predator might follow their trail back to the warren and harm the others. The
females were not allowed to mate with whom they chose; they were after all, a
prize for the strong military leaders who earned it. The rabbits tolerated all
of this and more because their leader had instilled in them a fear of humans--of
predators. In all reality, the rabbits were more afraid of him and his power
than they actually were of their predators. Rowf, and Snitter (The Plague Dogs)
were at the mercy of the doctors at the Animal Research (Scientific and
Experimental), also known as A.R.S.E. Rowf was taken from his mother as a puppy
and sold to the research station. Each day he was submerged into a tank of water
until he drowned, then was revived. All of this was done to see if he would
build up a kind of tolerance to the next drowning. Snitter, had belonged to a
caring master whom he thought he had killed when he had run out into a busy
intersection and his master tried to save him and got himself hit instead.
Snitter was then sold to the research station by his master's jealous sister and
underwent brain surgery which left him confused and allowed him to see events
before they happened. Even after the dogs escaped from the research center, they
were never really free. They were constantly at the whim of nature and her
wrath. Even though they had escaped the research station and were on their own,
Rowf and Snitter were still under the control of man. They depended on his
sheep, chicken, and garbage to eat, and mines and barns to take shelter under.
...[they were] two creatures victimized by society, unable to live by its own
rules but also unable to work out and live by their own outlaw code-... Adams
himself knew what it was like not to be free. His life at two boarding schools
over a period of eight years, because he was forced to believe ideas he did not
follow and to follow adults he did not believe, helped him to understand what it
must truly be like to live in a world where one is restricted at all times.
Adams began to relate his ideas to his knowledge of animals and nature. He found
that animals are not as free as people sometimes believe them to be. Their lives
have been restricted due to the growth of human civilization, and the
advancement of human technology. Some animals have even grown to depend on
people as their only source of food and protection. Many live in fear of humans,
which, as many humans already know first-hand, allows the fear to control their
lives because they become slave-like to their fear. Survival Overall, Adam's
work is a glorious paean to man's (or rabbit's) resilience, to the instinct for
survival against all odds. Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, and Maia all offer
the strong theme of survival to accompany the theme of freedom. In all of these
novels, the main characters are fleeing some situation to find their freedom. In
doing so, they all enter new and unfamiliar surroundings that are filled with
danger, yet, their uncontrollable desire for freedom allows them to continue to
struggle against all odds. Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in
many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster
and to let the stream of life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss.
They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as
callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed
imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature,
intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass. As the rabbits left
their warren in search of a new one, they had to overcome many obstacles that
were new to them. Their surroundings was one obstacle. They left a home that was
next to a field, and close to some woods that had a creek running through it. On
their journey, they encountered heather, ground of chalk, man-made forests, a
road, and a common of rocks. All of these surroundings were new and unfamiliar,
but they pressed on to find their new home; they continued, most times very
hungry, against all odds. Although humans know for a fact that animals have a
strong instinct for survival, they tend to neglect the fact that they, also have
such instincts. Maia shows that humans do in fact have such instincts and use
them more than they realize. Although Maia was sold into slavery, an institution
that she so desperately hated, she had to make the most of it. If she hadn't she
would have surely been killed. Rowf and Snitter, throughout their journey,
searching either for a master, or trying to succeed in becoming wild animals,
struggled every day to stay alive. They had two fundamental problems to deal
with. One, all the humans in the area wanted them dead and were searching for
them, and two, finding food was a very difficult task because they had
absolutely no experience at doing so. They knew of nothing to live for, yet,
their keen instincts encouraged them to go on and they ended up beating man, and
nature, by surviving. Adams enjoys using this theme for both man and animal
because he likes to show his readers that they are in fact animals themselves.
What humans sometimes punish animals for is simply the fact that they are just
following their instincts. Adams shows that, in separate situations, humans too
use those very same instincts, which make them like the animals. Adams also
shows that his themes of freedom and survival complement each other. Without
freedom, no one is truly surviving. The characters in Watership Down, The Plague
Dogs, and Maia all undertake a search for freedom, and survival. Along their
quest, they are tested by nature (and sometimes man) to see how strongly they
really want to be free. (Those that do not, end up dying, either physically or
by giving up hope and returning to their previous situations in a worse
condition than when they left.) Those that succeed end up free, although along
the way they may have nearly died, but they were striving for their freedom and
a better way of life, struggling to survive. Adams, during WWII saw many people
he knew die. They died at the hands of the enemy, but some died because of
faulty planning and muffled leadership. Adams describes a certain plan,
Operation "Market Garden," in which thousands of his comrades died,
and thousands more were taken prisoner due to the poor planning of upper ranking
generals. Adams was, of course, one of those who came through the Operation
unharmed. Looking back, though, after the Operation and after he returned home,
he had to keep on struggling to survive among all the grief that consumed him at
the time. He said that he had never felt any lower at any other time in his life
than when he returned home from the service. He was able to write his novels
with knowledge of what it was like to have to struggle to free one's self from
whatever is holding him back, and keeping him from surviving in an environment
suitable and acceptable to him. Threat of Man/Human Cruelty Love the animals.
God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble
it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against
God's intent. ...Adams' book is the implication that some of man's victims are
clever enough to keep us from getting away with it, and that we might even learn
from them something about escaping the beastliness ourselves. He shut his eyes
then, and scrabbled head-downward at the turf, for he did not want to see the
pack close in, did not want to see the tod leaping, snapping and biting,
outnumbered thirty to one, the blood spurting, the tearing, thrashing and
worrying, the huntsman whipping his way into the turmoil and the tod's body
snatched, lifted high and knife-hacked for brush and mask before being tossed
back-oh, so merrily-among the baying foxhounds. The strongest theme in The
Plague Dogs, and Watership Down is the roles that humans play in the lives of
the animals. Cruelty, and fear of humans are just two of the main issues that
Adams tries to invoke in his books. In Watership Down, the rabbits live in
constant fear of humans, the strongest of their thousand predators. The small
group of rabbits are threatened out of their home by humans wanting to build
houses in the same place as the warren. The rabbits dodge gun shots, roads,
train tracks, and other man-made evils. Adams clearly is showing that humans are
evil and dangerous in the eyes of animals. Humans are creatures to be feared and
loathed. They are very self-centered, and only think of themselves. In as much
as Mr. Adams has a message for his readers, I'd say it is to make them more
sensitive to the complex balance of nature, more aware of the needs and ways of
other species (and the effect of human actions on them), more mindful that we
are creatures too, and must live in harmony with the others who share our
world... Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hooves, And their white scuts
flash at their vanishing heels, And swallows abandon the hamlet-roofs. The
mole's tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark's eggs scattered,
their owners fled; And the hedgehog's household the sapper unseals... Humans, in
Watership Down, are depicted as enemies. In The Plague Dogs, they are
destroyers. At the Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental) Station,
animals are treated like paper. Once they are used, they are thrown away. Adams
clearly despises animal testing. He depicts all of the scientists at the station
to be cold, ruthless, and incapable of feeling any type of emotion. He wants to
persuade his readers to hate animal testing too. He gives many examples of what
goes on in the Station, what types of experiments are performed, and the
attitudes of the scientists performing the experiments. ...was looking over the
interim reports on the smoking beagles...Of course it was open to people to give
up smoking, but this would plainly be an intolerable demand to make, as long as
experiments on living and sentient animals held out a chance for something
better...The dogs, trussed and masked, were ingeniously compelled to inhale the
smoke from up to thirty cigarettes a day...after about three years they were to
be killed for dissection and examination. ..."Well, I mean, how long do we
go on using the same guinea pigs?" "Use them up, of course,"
answered Dr. Boycott rather shortly. "They cost money, you know. Apart from
that, it's only humane. The Littlewood Committee report had an entire chapter on
wastage. We don't use two animals where one will do." "Well, this lot
have all had tar doses on both ears now, and the ears removed in just about
every case-every case where there's a cancerous growth, that's to say."
"Well, you can go on and use their limbs for the same thing, you
know." ..."Do we ever use anaesthetics [sic]?" "Good God,
no, said Dr. Boycott. "D'you know what they cost?"... Adams' life has
been filled with nature. His childhood was spent living in nature and listening
to his father teach him about nature. He respected nature as a child and he
respects nature now. His job, before he started writing, was that of an
air-pollution expert with the British Department of the Environment. So, Adams
actually decided to devote his life to the preservation and the continuing study
of nature. It is no wonder that Adams would write books that try to make people
realize how precious and fragile the balance of nature truly is, and how humans
are throwing that balance off. Dignity/Rights Dignity (the proper rights and
self-respect one has) and rights play a large role in Maia, and a smaller role
in The Plague Dogs. Maia deals mostly with the issue of slavery. Slavery does
not only destroy one's freedom, but it also takes away the dignity that a person
might have. By being under someone else's control, a person may lose all the
self-worth that they may have felt. Maia was reduced to providing sexual
pleasures for her fat, lazy master. She had to do whatever he wanted, whenever
he wanted, and as often as he wanted. When one is a slave, their own interests
have no worth to their owner; they are simply there to be used, for whatever
purposes. In a specific situation in the book, Adams describes a girl,
Milvushina, who was a wealthy baron's daughter in the province of Chalcon.
Maia's owner, Sencho, (called 'Piggy' by his slaves) who was the head of the
Secret Intelligence of the Beklan Empire, sent orders to have Milvushina's
family killed, or at least everyone killed but her. Piggy took Milvushina into
his household as a slave. He made her do the same types of things as Maia,
except he would tease and torment her while she was doing them. This situation
is a very direct, example of Adams' use of dignity and human rights as a theme.
This example shows how one girl, a girl with noble blood, can be reduced at one
blow to a sex-slave by someone's personal greed. By the same token, The Plague
Dogs also talks about dignity and rights, not of humans, but of animals. Once
again, Adams uses the Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental) Station as
his villain. The Station, quite simply, does not allow animals to live normal
lives, therefore stripping them of all of the rights ever given to them--more
specifically, the ones that allow them to survive by their own means. Animals
are used as pawns for humans at the Station. They have numbers for names. They
are seen only as things to be used at the whim of humans rather than as the
unique creatures God created them to be. The shed comprised, in all, forty pens,
arranged in two double rows. Most of these contained dogs, though one or two
were empty. With the majority of the pens, all four sides consisted of stout
wire netting, so that for the occupants of these there were three party walls
and three canine neighbors, except where an adjacent cage was empty. Adams dealt
with dignity first hand. His father, George, was, at first, a doctor for the
local hospital in Newbury, then he set up his own practice, but still helped at
the hospital. George was a generous doctor, allowing patients to pay smaller
sums because they could not afford the entire fee. He was a doctor, so he was
paid well, but, because of his kindness, the family was not as wealthy as they
could have been. George also enjoyed a drink now and then. While Richard was
growing up, so was his father's taste for liquor. George also had to deal with
three children. He had to deal with Katherine, who was in college, John, who was
in prep school, and Richard, who just growing up. By the time Richard had
reached prep school age his father's drinking had gotten worse. Not until
Richard's fifth year at school had his father's drinking actually affected his
profession as a doctor. George was forced into early retirement because he had
lost many patients and could not continue making a fool of himself. While
Richard was at Oxford, George suffered a heart-attack, which made him curb his
drinking, but it was already too late. They had to sell Oakdene, and they moved
into the gardener's cottage. George had to sit by and watch many of the old
trees get cut down by the new owners. All of this was a shock to George's
dignity and, after retirement, he simply let it eat him alive. Richard, who was
very close to his dad, watched all this and it pulled at his heart-strings.
Writing about dignity allowed him to show people how important it really is, and
what can happen when that dignity is stripped from someone. Guilt The Girl in a
Swing is a study of guilt made manifest-of the far-reaching effects of the past,
clattering in upon a fragile porcelain world. The Girl in a Swing, has many
other sub-themes, but none of them represents the work as accurately as does
guilt. Guilt is the only true theme of the novel. Guilt leads to the fall of the
two main characters, and it also brings them together. Käthe, a beautiful young
German girl, and Alan Desland, a young man whose very life is the business of
fine porcelain, meet while Alan is visiting friends in Copenhagen. He falls
madly in love with her, and she with him. After a few weeks, in which Alan
learns nothing of Käthe's past, except that she does not like the church for
some reason or another, they jet off to Florida and get married. On their
return, Käthe fits in beautifully into Alan's life. Alan finds, though, that he
starts seeing and hearing things. He hears the sounds of waves and a girl
crying. He sees a young girl walking and crying. All the while, Käthe is
becoming more and more nervous and frightened. At the end, Käthe is killed by a
young girl at the beach. The young girl was Käthe's daughter. Somehow, Käthe
had killed her, and the ghosts would not leave her be. She was killed by her
regarding the past, and by her fear of telling anyone of her deed. She let it
consume her, and Alan, for Käthe was Alan's reason for living, although they
had only been married for a short period of time. When Käthe died, a part of
Alan also died. Everyone experiences guilt at some time in their lives. Adams
too must have had some reason for writing a novel about guilt. His autobiography
states normal things to be guilty about: not being there for his dad, not living
his life to the fullest, etc, but, for the most part, up to WWII he had not
experienced any large guilt factor in his life. After WWII, nothing is known
since Adams likes to keep his family life private. Nature/Scenery Nature and
scenery are a minor theme, but they are worth mentioning because they helped to
create Watership Down, and Maia. Without the scenery, and Adams' in-depth
knowledge of nature, the atmosphere would not have been so successfully set, and
the stories would have come across to the readers as being all wrong. In
Watership Down, the scenery helps to make the rabbits more dignified by showing
perspectives. If the novel had been written from a human perspective, everything
would have been read at a "taller level" and the reader would never
have been able to discern nuances or the feelings that the rabbits displayed.
Adams had to write at a level more suitable for rabbits, not humans. In Maia,
Adams weaves an imaginary world. By describing all the details, as seen by a
young girl, the images become clear in one's mind. The reader can see what Maia
likes and what she's afraid of. He can see how splendid or grand the baron's
hallway is, and how dumpy the motel looks. In a world unknown to anyone, the
scenery and nature are just as important as the characters are. Adams' themes of
Freedom, Survival, Threat of Man and Human Cruelty, Dignity and Rights, and
Guilt all have some connection to his life. They all also pertain to all
people's lives. Adams was writing novels based not only on his own experiences
of his life, but he was writing to try to get a particular point across to the
general public. He was trying to create awareness. If the readers of his novels
found his straightforward messages and took them to heart, he did create
awareness.

Bibliography
Adams, Richard. Watership Down. New York: Avon Books, 1975. Adams, Richard.
The Plague Dogs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,1978. Adams, Richard. The Girl
in a Swing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1980. Adams, Richard. Maia. ?
Adams, Richard. The Day Gone By: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1991. "Adams, Richard." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 5,
pp. 6-10. "Adams, Richard." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 6,
pp. 4-8. "Adams, Richard." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 18,
pp. 1-3.