Consideration of Works Past: The Year of the Angry Rabbit

I looked for this book forever.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

All of the past printings were way too expensive—in excess of a hundred dollars. I’m guessing for the longest time it was a collector’s item. Then, at some point, the cost of the book fell to a point where I merely screamed and I got a copy.

 

The Year of the Angry Rabbit was written by Russell Braddon in 1964. Braddon is Australian and this is a satirical novel so it comes as no surprise the armature around which the book is written is Australian politics. Braddon said he wrote it as a joke and it only took four weeks. It’s a pretty good joke both for and on the reader.

 

The premise is that a kingmaker constituent, Sir Alfred, responsible for the ascent of the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Kevin Fitzgerald brings Fitzgerald to task. Rabbits have been controlled by the introduction of myxomatosis. However, on Sir Alfred’s station, a resistant group of rabbits have taken over. Alfred demands Fitzgerald correct the situation. Fitzgerald tasks Professor Welch and his team to come up with an improved disease, “supermyx.” 

 

Welch does so with a bit of a caveat. The rabbits are immune to supermyx as well but it turns them into vicious rabid animals with an infective bite. Any animal the rabbits bite does of supermyx instantaneously—demonstrated on Sir Alfred early on.

 

This gives Fitzgerald an idea. After he nukes Sir Alfred’s station to make sure the supermyx rabbits don’t escape, he then commissions the military to secrete clandestine installations of supermyx bombs in every major city in the world with the control system in his study. Then, he blackmails the world into giving up nuclear arms and embracing peace. It doesn’t go all that smoothly. He has to wipe out a couple of countries that insist on continuing their war. But once that’s all over with, it’s smooth sailing. 

 

War is still economically necessary, however. So, Fitzgerald leases the outback in the middle of the country for scheduled wars promoted like the Olympics. Things go swimmingly. 

 

However, no good satire ends well. It turns out the rabbits have survived nuclear holocaust deep underground and have turned into dog-sized, intelligent, feral carnivores—all with a supermyx bite. They escape and start overrunning the country. Australia is abandoned and that would be all right except the keyboard used by Fitzgerald to trigger the supermyx bombs ends up in the path of the nightly running rabbits. Bombs go off all over the world and everybody dies.

 

It's a fun novel. It reminds me a lot of Paul Tabori’s The Green Rain in 1961. Both involve a technological event that changes the world and ends up ending humanity. There were other novels around the same time that felt similar: Brian Aldiss’ Earthworks (1965) and FROOMB! (1964) by John Lymington. They share a sense of inevitable doom mixed with an odd sense of humor. Tabori was Hungarian. Aldiss and Lymington were both English. Braddon was Australian. Maybe I was attracted to the unAmerican sensibility.

 

And I was attracted to this work and these other works. There’s a certain go-to-hell­ quality to them. A sense that they were saying I see what’s coming. Now you’ve got to see it, too.

 

I have read The Green Rain many times sense and it still holds up. FROOMB! has become a difficult read. I haven’t tried Earthworks again yet, though I will. 

 

I had high hopes for The Year of the Angry Rabbit. It didn’t exactly disappoint but it has aged and not in a good way. I think Braddon was initially going for the Leonard Wibberley tone such as in The Mouse That Roared. But the book got dark on him. Wibberley managed to keep that light tone throughout the book but it took effort and you can see different plot decisions he made that lightened the book at the cost of Mouse’s substance. Braddon didn’t do that and by the end, the “light” tone is forced. 

 

Tabori had the same problem in The Green Rain. When the book turned dark, he abandoned the light tone and switched to just saying what happened. There’s a short coda at the end of The Green Rain that really brings it home. I won’t mention it here in case you might read it.

 

Still, though it has not aged as well as I would have liked, it is still a fine book. It manages to go dark without going vicious—always a feat.