Watership Down is a masterpiece.

The above sentence should stand on its own. The book is not without its flaws, but only in minor and inconsequential ways (for example, some of the - very occasional - human speech grates a bit), and in any case a completely perfect item is often cold and impersonal. That criticism cannot be made here; indeed, Watership Down is one of the most affecting novels that you will ever read. You might have seen the 1978 film (which is pretty good, and skilfully reflects the book's atmosphere) or the 1999 TV series (which isn't, and doesn't), but the book stands tall above either.

It's also a very British book, both in its superbly accurate depiction of the southern English countryside and in the attitudes and speech patterns of its principal characters: perhaps this is part of its attraction to Anglophile audiences elsewhere in the world. Indeed, I wonder whether a reader's nationality might have some bearing on how the book is read - Australians, for example, will be unaccustomed to thinking of the rabbit as anything other than vermin, while some Americans might not be aware that the European rabbit is a different species to the cottontails of Bugs Bunny fame.

There's probably someone out there who's been living under a rock since 1972 and doesn't realise that Watership Down is about rabbits at all, so let's first fill them in: the novel is, in essence, an adventure story following the trials and tribulations of a group of - quite literally - young bucks who leave their home warren in Sandleford, near Newbury, after a premonition of doom from Fiver, an undersized outsider with the gift of second sight. Among the band we find most of the stock characters of this sort of fiction - the tough fighter Bigwig, Fiver's calmly authoritative brother Hazel (yes, he's a buck, despite the name), Blackberry the brainbox and so on and so forth - and they set off to find a safe place for a new home on - wait for it! - Watership Down, which as Adams points out in his introductory note to the book is, like the other locations mentioned, a real place.

The astute among you will have worked out by now that any new warren made up exclusively of bucks isn't going to last very long, and it is this that leads the rabbits to mount a hugely dangerous raid, with a rather unlikely ally, on the fascist warren of Efrafa, which is presided over by the huge and terrifying General Woundwort. They meet with both triumph and disaster, but treating those two impostors just the same is not something that comes easily to rabbits.

One of Adams' most laudable decisions, and what makes the book the glorious success that it is, was to eschew the "lickle fluffy bunny-bun" approach and make these rabbits as realistic as possible. There have to be a few concessions, of course, notably in the language - the rabbits speak English, with a few scattered Lapine words (one or two of which, such as "tharn", meaning paralysed by fear, have reached the borders of respectable English usage). And they have a rich mythology, brought to us in the form of stories told by Dandelion - which also serve to break up what is a very long book into manageable sections. But they run, mate, excrete and fight as real animals do. That realism also means that, despite what the 1999 TV series (and to a much lesser extent the 1978 film) would have you believe, the initial band of deserters from Sandleford is all-male. Why? Simple - because that's how real rabbits do it (or so RM Lockley, the source for Adams' rabbit lore, tells us). To complain that this depiction is sexist is akin to complaining that depicting an all-male Roman legion is sexist - it might be not how it should be, but it is how it is. In any case, the criticism is misplaced - try mentally removing Hyzenthlay from the novel and you'll see what I mean.

Following on from that, it should also be said that Watership Down is very violent. "Nature red in tooth and claw", indeed - when these animals fight, they don't make up after five minutes and go off down the pub (so to speak). Before we're through, rabbits (many of them "good guys", at that) have been shot, snared, maimed (often by other rabbits), gassed, killed by stoats and dogs (and, yes, other rabbits) and have died of disease. It's expertly handled, and as such can be very frightening, which is why it's not really a suitable story for young children. Perhaps that misconception came from the fact that (in the UK, though apparently not in the US) the 1978 film is rated U rather than PG, despite being almost equally bloody.

Actually, Watership Down is not really a children's book at all. Here in the UK, the book has been in print for 30 years in parallel adult (Penguin Books) and children's (Puffin, Penguin's juvenile imprint) editions, with the only change being the cover design. More recently, it has received the extremely unusual (and possibly unique) honour of being granted both Puffin Modern Classics and Penguin Modern Classics releases, the latter with a fascinating introduction from Nicholas Lezard, editor of the Literary Review, who convincingly argues the case against its dismissal as "kids' stuff", and for its inclusion as a "great work".

I said in the title that the book was "heartbreaking", and so it is, almost desperately so at times, though the frequent humorous asides, Dandelion's tales and beautiful descriptive passages means that it never tips over into mawkishness, something that rather too many writers seem to have trouble with. Adams' great triumph is that he draws the reader into the lapine world with such skill that we become as one with them, and the death or injury of a character we're rooting for hits one with the force of a hammer-blow. I defy anyone to read a line such as "my heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today" without a catch in their throat. I also defy anyone to read this novel just the once. Watership Down is, and will always remain, one of the tours de force of English anthropomorphic literature.

(With apologies to Dave Eggers for pinching his title!)

Recommended: Yes