Word: shardik
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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...Shardik, Adams...
...prophesies the future and sets them off on their adventure. Adams has that streak of Pessimism too, he's just more cautious. Even after the "most extraordinary phenomemon" of Watership's success. Adams didn't quit his Civil Service job. He waited until the publishers accepted his second novel. Shardik, and told him that it was "great, that they'd start with 100,000 copies, and all that sort of thing." Adams says, "I thought, well here we go, apparently I was meant to be a novelist, so I retired...
ADAMS DOES HAVE his causes, though. His new novel. Shardik, is a retelling of the divine incarnation story in an attempt to make a moral point. The bear Shardik has such an awesome destructive force that it is perceived as a god of conquest and bloodshed by humans who set up an empire based on the enslavement of the conquered. Brutality is commonplace in this society: slavers drown a little girl, for instance, and hack off a boy's hand. The great bear finally kills the chief slave trader, but undergoes great suffering in doing so, and ends the book...
...Promise of Joy, Drury (5) 5-A. Month of Sundays, Updike (4) 6-The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer (6) 7-Shardik, Adams 8 -Black Sunday, Harris (10) 9-The Massacre at Fall Creek, West (7) 10-Spindrift, Whitney
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...