Cover of Watership Down
Like many readers, I imagine, I keep a mental list of novels which I think have particularly striking or moving endings. Three good examples are Jane Eyre, L’Etranger and The Lord of the Rings. One of the best is Watership Down, the rabbit Aeniad written by Richard George Adams and published in 1972.
Here are the last two pages, telling the end of the novel’s Aeneas or Moses figure. The language is traditional and God speaks in the clipped, reserved tones of an Army officer (‘owsla’ means ‘regiment’): nonetheless moving for all that as the realisation of what is happening detonates through the formal dialogue.
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