Word: beare
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
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...
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...
...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...