Monday, Apr. 28, 1975
Ursus Saves?
By John Skow
SHARDIK by RICHARD ADAMS 604 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.
Richard Adams has written a second novel, and may the Great Bear God help him. It seems certain that he is in for a spell of heavyweight reviewing, the kind of borborygmic reappraisal the critical community indulges in when it feels slightly ill and foolish after a gorge of overpraise. What was overpraised, of course, was Watership Down, a bunny epic greeted last year as if it were a cross between Moby-Dick and The Wind in the Willows. The excessive praise was a critical phenomenon that occurs every year or so when reviewers tire of the stinginess that honesty requires, and heap all of their withheld love on some more or less fragile volume.
Seen without regard to its predecessor, Shardik resembles good science fiction, unsatisfactorily diluted with Victorian romanticism. The author postulates a tribe of Iron Age men called Ortelgans, in ancient times the builders and rulers of a splendid city called Bekla, but now, because of military and moral decline, a ragtag band of hunters huddling fearfully on a river island at the edge of the Beklan empire. The planet is earth, but the local geography is all of the author's making, and he has great fun with maps, invented place names and at least four different languages.
Adolescent Bluff. The central figure of the Ortelgan religion is Shardik, a giant bear god. Though only a caste of virgin priestesses preserves this memory, Shardik actually lived as a real bear during the time of Ortelga's supremacy. When Adams' story begins, a great bear appears, driven to the edge of the River Telthearna by a forest fire. Confused and maddened, he stops, rises awesomely on his hind legs, standing more than twice as tall as a man, and beats at the flames. Burned and half-conscious, he is driven into the river, across which he drifts to the Ortelgans' island. There the bear is discovered by a young hunter, Kelderek, and soon everyone in Ortelga believes he is Shardik come to life again.
Adams is absolutely first-rate at making the reader feel the river mist on his face, feel the brush of wet leaves across the skin of arms and thighs, or smell the stench of a sodden bear. This extraordinary ability to evoke physical detail carries the book to whatever success it has. Where the author seems weak is in the sentimentality of his conceptions. These shape what is not meant to be a children's tale into a kind of pretentious adolescent bluff: a tragic chronicle of conquest, corruption and decline that dribbles off into happily-ever-after.
Enflamed by the presence of Shardik, the Ortelgans reconquer their old capital city. There they rule, under the guidance of Kelderek, who has become the bear's priest and interpreter (he is a simple, open-hearted man, who plays with children, shuns grown women --with an aversion that seems less priestly chastity than schoolboy prudery). To keep Bekla's economy prosperous, the Ortelgans revive a particularly obnoxious slave trade dealing in children. Kelderek, his mind on the possibilities of sainthood, thoughtlessly gives his approval of this abomination. Thus morally undermined, the bear cult deteriorates until enemies threaten Bekla. The bear Shardik is wounded, escapes to the countryside, kills an evil slave trader, then dies himself. After some hideous adventures, Kelderek atones for his misrule, marries a beautiful but slightly soiled virgin priestess, and sets up a community to care for former slave children.
There is no iron to this Iron Age fable. The grimness is fake, the fascination with virginity is a naughty bore, and the monstrous figure of Shardik is cheapened by watery supernaturalism. It is one thing for Kelderek and his primitive fellow tribesmen--a few skeptics to the contrary --to believe the bear is a god, quite another for author and reader to pretend to believe it. This pretense is what Adams insists on, and it smacks of Pan worship, that Victorian silliness in which refined city dwellers pretended that they glimpsed the wicked, goat-footed god as they strolled through an orderly countryside.
Adams begins his tale with an epigraph from Jung: "Superstition and accident manifest the will of God." Perhaps, but not here. The author spins out his romance entertainingly, but without dealing seriously with the questions he raises: of belief and its perversion, of authority and its corruption. Good as he is at nature walks, Adams does not venture far into the forests of the mind.
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