This was no ordinary bear

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33959, 27 September 1975, Page 10

This was no ordinary bear

Shardik. By Richard Adams. Allen Lane. 526 pp. N.Z. price $9.50. Few who revelled in Richard Adams’s first novel “Watership Down” expected him to sustain his creative impetus into a second major novel. But with “Shardik” he has more than sustained it: he has brilliantly extended his reputation with an epic novel which can only be compared in scope, in bounding imagination, in characterisation and in power with the work of Tolkien in our own times, with John Bunyan or with the author (ess?) of the Odyssey. With “Shardik”, Adams easily establishes himself as a great imaginative writer. “Shardik” may be appreciated at many levels. If it is a memorable exploration of man’s concept of divine incarnation, it is also a wide-ranging and gripping story of war, greed, horror and the sweetness of love. If it is set in strange lands with strange beliefs and customs and in far-off times, it explores problems and passions as relevant as today. And if its central theme is that power corrupts, it also shows that humility may lead to redemption. These may seem high-flown ideas to express and elucidate in a story devoted to a bear, but Adams is no ordinary novelist and Shardik, more than twice the size of a man, is no ordinary bear. It takes refuge from a forest fire on the island of Ortelga on the wild Telthearna River and its discovery by Kelderek, a lowly hunter, sets in motion a fantastic train of events: the rise and fall of an empire, a wild unforgettable jorney and finally safe anchorage in a life of service, Kelderek, at the risk of his life, proclaimed the great bear to be the

messenger of God, the reincarnation of

divine favour towards the Ortelgan people. But his discovery left him in a profound intellectual predicament. Was the bear a sacred mystery, as it was seen by the clairvoyant high priestess

of Quiso, the Tuginda, or was its return a sign that the bear would lead the Ortelgans to victory over the wellorganised Beklan empire, as the young rebel leader, Ta-Kominion, saw it? Kelderek, the only male able to approach the bear in safety, saw the spiritiual aspect more clearly, but he temporised. By allowing the bear to be chained and used to weld the Ortelgans into a fighting force and to play a dominant part in a decisive battle with the Beklans, he set his foot on a slippery slope that led to his presiding over a police State in which murder and torture were commonplace, war ravaged families and the land and child slavery buttressed finances.

It was the bear’s escape from its Ortelgan prison that made Kelderek understand the mounting consequences of his first small blasphemous act and in his frenzied search for Shardik he fell from power, only to discover through his own desperate adventures and bitter suffering the deeper meaning implicit in his belief in the bear’s divinity. At last, tasting ultimate degradation when captured by a slave trader for whose activities he was responsible, Kelderek is saved by the mysterious intervention of the bear in a scene that will linger in the memory. Adams has a rich, inventive imagination and the novel moves easily over strange terrain, people and a host of characters. The prevailing mood is intensely sombre and tragic, but it does not repel — indeed it fits both style and story perfectly. Nor is the length of the novel any handicap It flows easily over its vast canvas and one finishes it almost with a sense of loss.

“Shardik” is a remarkable novel and Adams richly deserves the critical acclaim with which it has been greeted. That it will be a best-seller is certain; what is equally certain is that it truly merits that status.