Title Tailchaser's Song Series --- Author Tad Williams Cover Art Braldt Bralds Publisher Daw Books - 1985 First Printing Daw Books - 1985 Category Epic Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Tailchaser, Pouncequick, Roofshadow, Hushpad Main Elements Anthropomorphic cats

Meet Fritti Tailchaser, a ginger tom cat of rare courage and curiosity, a born survivor in a world of heroes and villains, of powerful feline gods and wiskery legends about those strange, furless, erect creatures called M'an. Join Tailchaser on his magical quest to rescue his catfriend Hushpad - a quest that will take him all the way to cat hell and beyond...

I grew up on Watership Down, watched throughout my childhood and still enjoy watching it now. I've read the book twice. Thus was I eager to try out Tailchaser's Song, which seemed to have a similar vibe only with cats instead of rabbits.

In fact, the vibe was very much the same, at times it almost felt like I was reading Watership Down, just the tone of the language, the way the cat spoke to each other, told each other stories, the travelling from one place to another. And then the discovering of Firsthome (the cat capital) and being disappointed and sort of turned off by it (reminded me of Cowslip's warren). Then the underground world of cat hell (which felt at first a lot like Effrafa...but worse, much worse). In fact while it was so very similar up to that point there is one big difference, and that is here, one deals not just with other cats, but also with gods and the warped creatures that the gods are able to create. Huge monster black cats with blood red claws, blind furless cats, and a massive pile of dying and dead creatures, that moves and heaves, upon which the evil cat god in all his bloated glory rests as if on a throne. It was like as if Lovecraft had decided to take over the design of Effrafa...

I felt that cat hell world was too dark, too gross and disturbing, I felt it went a little too far in trying to make a point about how evil this cat god had become over the millenia. So I'll definitely say I like Watership Down best.

On the other hand, cats almost always get a bad rap. Take Garfield, he's fat and selfish. Take Bucky, he's cruel and obnoxious. Tom always loses to Jerry. Sylvester always loses to Tweety. They are the enemy in any dog/mouse/bird story. In fact cats do make good villains, but that's only if you've never owned a cat. My cats have all be sweet snuggly guys that at least on the surface don't appear to be plotting to take over the world. So I really enjoyed reading a book where the cats were the good guys (and the bad guys too but that's ok).

I read a review somewhere that complained that Williams didn't understand cats at all, but I disagreed. Sure, cats tend not to live in big groups like dogs, but look at the houses of people who are cat hoarders, for the most part the cats will get along with each other (as in Firsthome) even if they don't work together like a pack of dogs would. In fact if you've ever owned two cats at the same time, they become very attached to each other, sleeping together, and even mourning the passing of their companion. Also the person felt that a feral cat wouldn't look down on a neutered housecat...but who knows what cats think, maybe they do? And maybe it works both ways, the fat housecat looks down on the poor unlucky feral having to hunt his own food. To each their own. The other complaint the person had is that cats don't vocalize to communicate, but that just showed that that person couldn't be bothered to read the whole two pages (gasp the effort!) of the author's notes at the end. As Williams explains, the language is mostly posture and gesture but conveniently translated into English for the benefit of the reader. Imagine how awkward it would have be to have to read "Ear flick, tail switch, glance to the right" and figure out that this is Fritty explaining that he's hungry. It's like all those movies where the German Nazi's all talk amongst themselves in accented English, sure nowadays movies tend to go with spoken German and English subtitles, but you sort of understood why it was done that way, so that the audience could actually understand what was going on. It's why Star Trek solve the problem with universal translators. We want to read a story, not struggle to learn a foreign language. Finally, I always viewed the Effrafan society as an allegory on Fascism, which is about as unrealistic bunny behaviour as one can get, so if the cats acted a little odd in Tailchaser, I didn't hold it against them.

Final conclusion - I really did enjoy it. However it was bit too much a copy of Watership Down for comfort and it went a bit too far into the realm of horror for comfort, though apparently a lot of people loved reading it in Grade 6...I guess if I can be 5 and watch Bigwig and General Woundwort graphically rip each other apart, reading about a giant cat god snacking on live cats maybe isn't all that much worse.