A copy of Shardik has sat on my bookshelf for over fifteen years. I bought it as a teenager, fresh off the heels of reading the incomparable Watership Down and further intrigued by the character’s name check in the third Dar Tower book, The Waste Lands. I know I started it shortly after I bought it, but for whatever reason I put it down after fifty r so pages and didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago. I can understand why, as it is a long book written in a rich, almost antiquated style, and the plot simmers for quite awhile before flaming up into action. I’d read more challenging books by then, though, so perhaps it caught me when I was craving a breezier read. In any case, it sat unread on my shelf all this time, following me between houses and cities, always earning a place among my other books.
But now I’ve read it, and I can safely say I was missing out. Shardik is a fantastic book, densely woven with complex characters and a world envisioned in such detail that it almost seems real. it is the worldbuilding that aligns it with Watership Down, that and the fundamental optimism of its author, which survives the horrors enacted in both books only to emerge unscathed at the end of each. Otherwise, they are very different novels—so much so that I can’t help but admire the bravery (or thickheadedness) of Adams following up a highly successful children’s book about rabbits with a dense religious parable about the evils of slavery and the unfathomable nature of the divine.
The hero, a simple hunter named Kelderek, is greyer than his leporine counterparts in Watership. He starts out with a simple nobility that reminds me of Fiver, but Adams allows for his corruption when given the sacred role of envoy to Shardik, the bear god long worshipped on his home island of Ortelga but unseen for generations, until the chance arrival of an enormous bear driven ashore by a forest fire. Shardik has a rich cast, but Kelderek is its core, and Adams makes the bold choice of making him compromised by his decisions, breaking him down in the third act in a saintly scouring that allows him to reemerge, literally and figuratively cleansed.
Adams’ writing remains superb, deftly outlining the geography, history, and politics of the Bekla and the surrounding regions. His prose is strong, though in this book he has a tendency to use extended similes, in which a scenario is depicted in great detail—sometimes for whole paragraphs—then compared to the current action. As a device, it harkens back to classical texts, and gives the writing an air of antiquity, but there are periods where it feels somewhat repetitive, being employed over and over again in quick succession.
This is a small matter, though, and doesn’t detract form the book’s overall power. It deserves to be ranked among the great 20th century novels.