fantasy, page 8 of 91

Gaskell’s continuation of her prehistorical fantasy saga, Atlan (1965) — either the second or the third volume, depending whether you’re reading it back then in hardback or now in paperback — was not only published simultaneously with another of her novels, a “witty look at modern Fleet Street” The Fabulous Heroine, but written simultaneously with it, too. According to an interview she gave to The Daily Mail (3 September 1965), “When I was feeling emotional I worked on ‘Atlan’. When I was in a calmer mood I got on with my other novel.”

It opens a year after the end of the previous book. Cija, now Empress of Atlan beside her husband Zerd, is pregnant. The trouble is, relations between herself and Zerd being what they are, the baby can’t be his, but her half-brother Smahil’s. As soon as she realises, she finds a way to hasten the baby’s entry into the world, so Zerd will think it’s his. Meanwhile, armies from the Northern and Southern kingdoms are seeking to enter Atlan to topple Zerd and take over for themselves. To make matters worse, the army of the Northern Kingdom is headed by Zerd’s first wife, Princess Sedili, and the army of the Southern Kingdom is headed by the father of Zerd’s second wife, Lara, who’s also along for the ride. The political situation, then, is indistinguishable from the rivalries of three women for Zerd, or at least for the throne at his side.

To keep Cija and his putative heir, Nal (who plainly looks nothing like him — Zerd, after all, has blue scales), safe, Zerd decides to send them to a remote castle. On the way, they’re attacked by the huge Yulven (wolves) of Atlan, who slaughter all but Cija and her son. Cija finds refuge in a nearby inn, where she’s forced to work as “a scullion, a scrubber and a dweller in grime and grease and backstairs slime”, at least until the winter ends. Thus begins the first of many reversals of fortune for our narrator-heroine.

The reversal is Gaskell’s main plot device. Sometimes, perhaps, reversal isn’t the word, as Cija might be rescued from one peril only to find her rescuers another sort of peril entirely. Every so often she finds herself restored to being an Empress, whereupon she becomes completely bored. But, not to worry, she’s going to find herself thrown into peril again: there’s a mad scientist hiding in the castle walls, or a disreputable member of her retinue shoves her and her children into a boat and pushes her out in a rough sea, or she wanders lost through an empty land foraging for food only to be picked up by her main rival, Princess Sedili. Like a fantasy version of The Perils of Pauline, the turns of this bottom-weighted Wheel of Fortune continue almost all the way to the end, where she finds herself crawling into the slimy lair of a swamp serpent in search of her daughter (she has, by now, acquired a second child, this time definitely Zerd’s). In a rare moment of self-awareness, Cija at one point reflects: “My own pattern appears clear to fate. The tower and the flight and then the tower again.”

But this isn’t a complaint. In fact, the best thing about reading Atlan and its predecessors The Serpent and The Dragon is how utterly mad they are. On the surface, Cija herself appears quite reasonable, almost ordinary, but the world around her is crazy-full of bandits, warriors, “robbers, rapists, killers, perverts and just plain brutes”, schemes, plots, wars, catastrophes, dangerous creatures, and innumerable other perils. Even in the relatively stable islands of non-adventure between these eruptions of plot-insanity, Gaskell can create some interesting and original settings. The inn where Cija is forced to scullion early in the book transcends the cliché of the fantasy inn by being convincing in its own shabby way. It’s a big establishment, with rivalries between the servants in the various wings; it’s presided over by a completely cynical and bullying old woman, who takes a particular dislike to Cija, forcing her to sleep Harry Potter style in a cupboard under the stairs; and each winter’s end, it’s regularly raided by cattle-thieves, who break in, steal, and cause havoc, in the face of which the staff are so helpless that they eventually give in and just treat the whole thing as a particularly out-of-hand party.

The main negative for me is Cija herself. As she’s the narrator, we see all this madness through her eyes, and she has a powerful dulling effect on the whole thing. As a character, she’s rather shallow, self-involved, a bit spoiled and somewhat insipid. (No negative trait in a literary character is a real negative if it’s carried out with brio, but Cija is just a little too lifeless for that.) At one point she says:

“I’ve a right to a life of my own, doing something I want to do. Not just playing a forgotten wife, a wife-in-waiting, a forsaken Queen all palely loitering — till I am pulled into the pit of the maelstrom just because I married someone famous…”

But there are points in the narrative where she’s got plenty of opportunity to do whatever she wants to do — when she’s Empress of her own little castle, for instance — but she does nothing except get bored. She has no aim, and no real interest in life. She needs all the peril just to perk up a bit. Her overall tone, to me, felt like she was constantly running her finger over the surface of things, then looking disgusted at the grime she’d picked up. She does a lot of complaining. Even when she and her children are in peril of their life, she’ll never fail to point out how her clothes are getting dirty, or she’s being forced to walk through cold puddles.

Even more than in The Serpent, there’s something non-connective about her. She just doesn’t like anyone. “I am all alone,” she says, “even if there are people and animals alone with me, all alone just as I always was.” But she’s never alone in this book. She just doesn’t connect with the people she’s with. Even her children. Of her son Nal, for instance, she says “Do I love him? No, he makes my flesh creep.” And Zerd, who for a brief moment she decides she really does love, only for that to fade a few pages later, she calls “the man I suppose I certainly seem to love”. The Lady doth equivocate too much. (She’s even not too keen on herself. She decides she is, to the men in her life, “Too much trouble, no returns.”)

She dislikes places, too. Of the castle which is her home, she comes to feel that “The inn with all its squalor and degradation seemed nearer to my bones than this great shell in which I wander aimlessly.” And, finally, she dislikes Atlan itself:

“I spent a lifetime yearning for Atlan, the great good stronghold, the lost purity, before ever I heard its name. I curse the day I first set foot on it… and I hope never to see Atlan again.”

But Atlan itself has secrets still to be explored. The thing that kept me going through this novel — when Cija’s insipidity as a narrator blinded me to the utter madness of the plot — were the hints of “Ancient Atlan”, the land-within-the-land that Cija glimpsed on her first arrival there: a mystical place of faerie-like beings and strange powers, something closer to the world of her first novel, Strange Evil, perhaps. The Yulven who spare her life, and who seem to have a particular reverence for her son (who, being born of Cija and Smahil, both of whom are descended from alien gods, has “the wild blood, the gods’ blood, the darkness-divinity”), the mysterious pipe-player who pops up to enchant people with his weird playing, the grumpy old women who have witchy powers: all of these pointed towards a journey into that far more magical realm. But that journey isn’t made in this book. I can only hope it is in one of the following two volumes.

My favourite contemporary review for Atlan is a short one (The Aberdeen Press and Journal, 14 Aug 1965):

“Jules Verne could have written this novel but he would have kept it clean.”

Though, “Jules Verne” is probably named as he’s the only imaginative writer the reviewer knew, because Atlan is hardly Jules Verne material, and that hint the novel is somewhat racy is overselling things a bit. Perhaps it was for mid-60s Britain, but it’s nowhere near as salacious as, say Robert E Howard could be. But that brief review does at least hint at how frankly unhinged this book can be — and how much more so it must have seemed at the time (in the UK, anyway), which was on the cusp of the 60s social revolutions that would soon turn the real world on its head.

I was reminded of Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga — another series I remember being in plenty of bookshops at the height of my fantasy-reading phase, in the mid-80s — when I came across a 20-minute filmed interview with her at the BFI’s site, in which she’s asked about late-1960s youth, which she was young enough to have insight into, but just that little bit older than, so presumably had some objectivity about. Looking her up on the British Newspaper Archive, I was surprised to see how much of an accepted, even happening author she was in the 60s — I’d assumed her first novel (written at the age of 16), the highly individualistic fantasy Strange Evil, would have made her a bit of an outsider in the literary market of the day, but no, she was busy publishing books, some fantasy (King’s Daughter in 1958, set in the lost continent of Mu, and so perhaps in the same world as the Atlan books, but called “her only truly bad book” in an excellent LA Review of Books article on Gaskell), some realistic/comic tales of young women’s travails in Swinging London (what the LA Review of Books calls “the novel of countercultural manners”), and even some that mixed the two (the very-hard-to-find contemporary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin, from 1964). The second book of the Atlan series — Atlan (1965) — even came out on the same day as one of her realistic novels, The Fabulous Heroine. What’s more, both her fantastic and realistic books were reviewed by the general press of the day.

Which makes the Atlan series a bit of an outlier, as far as fantasy novels are concerned. Atlan would have completely fit in with the early 1970s fantasy boom, when sword-and-sorcery-flavoured action started to blend with Tolkienesque trilogies — and, indeed, they were republished then, as they were again in the 1980s, when the more High Fantasy feel of that decade held sway. But she was producing these books in the early 60s, and in the UK — who else was doing that? (Okay, Michael Moorcock. But who else?) It’s almost comical to read a review of the first book, in The Westminster and Pimlico News (4 Oct 1963), which concludes:

“It would be interesting to study readers’ reactions to The Serpent. It could easily start a new vogue in books which the public demand.”

Yeah. Maybe it will. The earliest paperback cover I can find (Sphere 1967) looks so utterly un-fantasy, it’s obvious she was doing something UK publishers, at least, had no idea how to market. Gaskell was something of a pioneer, then (which makes finding her other books all the more frustrating — none of them had the afterlife of Atlan, and that isn’t in print, even in these Romantasy-loving days).

The first book in the series, The Serpent (1963), was later split into two for paperback publication (the two volumes being called, confusingly, The Serpent and The Dragon). I was going to review just the first paperback, initially, but it ended in a rather unsatisfying fashion, so I went on to read The Dragon immediately afterwards, which both perked up the narrative and provided a proper ending, so it makes sense to read The Serpent and The Dragon as a single (though long) book, as they were originally written.

The setting is prehistoric Earth in the days when the continent of Mu was “at the world’s foot”, and Atlan, once the most potent power in the world, has for centuries cloaked itself behind an invisible wall of mile-wide vacuum, leading to it enjoying “an era of utter peace… [with] no trade, no communication between them and any of the other continents”. At this time, the moon has fallen from the sky — another one will soon replace it — and the world is inhabited by both human beings and a “brutish race” of presumably Neanderthals, or something similar. People ride horses and giant warrior-birds. Gaskell ends her novel with a brief bibliography, with a note saying almost every detail of the world she’s created has “some basis in prehistory”, though the books she mentions are mostly of the “Atlantis was real” type, so “basis” may not be the right word.

The narrator of the novel is Cija (pronounced Keeya), daughter of “the Dictatress”, living in seclusion in a crumbling corner of her mother’s massive and ancient palace, because of a prophecy made at the time of her birth. She is, she’s told by her nursemaids:

“…one whom it would be hard to prevent from bringing disaster—that unless every precaution were taken, before maturity you would have fallen in love and by that love you would bring the fulfilment of an older prophecy… [to] throw our country into absolute degradation and ruin—let our country fall under stranger-rule—foreign rule.”

Cija has been brought up to believe men are extinct. All her knowledge about the world comes from the trashy novels in her private library. Then, one day, at the age of 17, she’s taken out of her rooms and told, first of all, that men still exist, and second, that one particularly egregious version has conquered the country and been in charge for some time. Now this General Zerd is moving onto another conquest and needs to take hostages to ensure the Dictatress and her people keep in line. Cija is to be one of the hostages. Her mother, however, has a special mission for her: get close to Zerd, by any means possible, and kill him, thus freeing their land, and disproving the prophecy.

Zerd, though, isn’t just any man. He’s not even properly human. The details are not clear — Cija, in her diary, doesn’t provide the sort of world-building a modern fantasy reader would expect, but is tantalising light in terms of explanations about the world she inhabits. Zerd, she jokes, is half crocodile. He has a scaled black and red skin:

“Except in strong light, one can mistake him for a man, but now he stood, clearly seen, a monster — and, my God, he was beautiful! I found him beautiful, in his arrogance and his evil, shining like a mighty dragon that fears nothing.”

And so begins the first of her many adventures. Cija, along with several other pampered hostages, is taken along with Zerd’s army. Well-treated at first, they spend their time gossiping and idling. As the army gets farther from Cija’s native land, though, the hostages have less and less value, and eventually someone tells her that, at some point, they’ll have no value at all, and will be discarded, killed, or made some other use of, if they prove to have any.

Here it’s worth pausing to mention something lacking in Gaskell’s world-building. She doesn’t name any of the lands she’s talking about. Zerd comes from the Northern Kingdom; he’s heading for the Southern Kingdom. Cija’s homeland — never named — is between the two, and at one point Gaskell/Cija ties herself in knots explaining it as “the land south of the Northern Kingdom”. Other places aren’t named, either. The capital of the Southern Kingdom is either “the Southern Capital” or just “the City”, from which flows “the River”. The only named land is Atlan itself — which is, it turns out, the General’s ultimate aim of conquest, for he knows a secret that will get him through the vacuum-wall. Either Gaskell is making a point that only Atlan is worth naming, and everywhere else can be treated as generic and archetypal, or she couldn’t be bothered to name the lands and cities and towns, and did her best to tiptoe over those awkward moments (“the land south of the Northern Kingdom”) were it would have been best if she had named them. Elsewhere, Gaskell’s naming of characters can be a bit slapdash: there’s an Ow, and a man called Blob. (On the other hand, she does drop some subtle hints that this world is different to ours — at one point, for instance, Cija refers to her “six senses”, and a nice moment of cultural difference occurs when Zerd and others are amazed at Cija’s effortless ability to run upstairs: stairs, to them, are just alien enough that they can only walk up them.)

For most of The Serpent, Cija is carried on by the action, rather than taking any active role. Although she is (she knows) a goddess, being descended from “ancient alien spirits which fell from the Moon”, she finds herself demoted to being a servant to the General’s current paramour, known only as the Beauty. They pass through extensive jungles, and get to see some of the sort of scenery that really makes a fantasy novel, include a truly massive waterfall (where the army are attacked by undescribed beings known as Fouls), and a section of the jungle where hibernating giant snails entirely cover the trees. (The soldiers, in passing, mindlessly smash the snails.) Cija has, up to this point, mostly been in at worst mild peril, but the tone suddenly changes when she decides to leave the army. Captured by a minor local official, she’s held captive and raped until the official tires of her. She escapes into the wild, then lives for a while in a village (befriending a boy who dresses in her clothes in secret). She enters the Southern Capital dressed as a boy, and finds work for a while as General Zerd’s wife’s stew-chef. (“When I was a self-important little girl with a knife hanging round my neck I thought I could change the fates of the world. Now I use the knife to slice onions.”) She then spends time as the “doxy” of one of her fellow hostages, who has now joined the army — and eventually turns out to be her half-brother. (The tone in this section is almost squalid kitchen sink drama.) Escaping once more, she ends up in “a Court of polished sex-addicts”, attached to the pope-like Superlativity, who is attempting to eradicate the worship of all gods but his own. Fleeing once more, she’s taken up by bandits, then returns to the Southern Capital just as it’s hit by a combination of the Northern army, earthquakes, and a volcanic eruption. Finally, at this late stage of the novel, she’s given a purpose: to redeem herself for all her idle sinning, she’s told to travel to Atlan and warn it of the General’s impending invasion. And so, finally, she enters that fabled land, to find it a sort of beautiful Eden. But the Serpent has found its way in, all the same…

As Moorcock & Cawthorn say in their Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, The Serpent is “stuffed with battle, rape, gossip and wild coincidence.” (L. Sprague de Camp, in Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme, says: “Miss Gaskell certainly tells a whale of a story, with keen humour and some wonderful orgies and chases.”)

The most obvious difference between The Serpent and the sort of thing you find in more standard genre fantasies is the tone. Written as a translated diary, Gaskell says in her Foreword that she has used modern language to indicate Cija’s own slangy tone, and this is one of the things picked up by critics at the time (the New Statesman said it was written in “the flat-heeled language of a teenager”), and later (Lin Carter, in Imaginary Worlds, called her writing “klutzy” with “the most blatant anachronisms”). I wasn’t sure if the very teenage-diary tone — sometimes poetic, sometimes flighty and frivolous, but also at times succinct and brutal — was a refreshingly light take, or one that didn’t quite work. The decider, for me, wasn’t so much the language as the use of concepts which felt too modern: terms like “safety valve” or “guilt complex”, even “sublimation” used in the strictly Freudian sense. The killer was when someone described Cija’s diary as being written in a “No. 8 High Quality Paper Account Book”.

That LA Review of Books article mentioned above describes Gaskell’s protagonists as being almost always “a youthful heroine who is brave but alert to her vulnerability, inquisitive yet vaguely lazy, intelligent and personable but also a bit of a brat”, and Cija is no exception. She comes across, generally, as rather self-involved, and makes few genuine connections with anyone else in her world. It’s obvious the main relationship is between her and Zerd, but she’s so sure, for most of the novel, that Zerd is evil, and that he must hate her, that it’s not really a relationship. (The most sustained relationship she has with a man is with Smahil — “we are violently young together” — who turns out to be her half-brother, and who “is never particularly gentle. He really dislikes me, I’m sure.”) The one loyalty she has, in the end, is to her riding-bird Ums — or, rather, it has a loyalty to her, but her own feelings to it are sometimes ambiguous.

The closest thing to a declaration of a philosophy, towards the end of the book, sounds good, but doesn’t really feel as though it has been demonstrated by Cija herself:

“If one loves everything, saving only war and cruelty and inside-out mockeries of realities, one is right from heaven’s point of view; love everything, as I incline to do, having come from the tower where I had nothing to love except the sky — love everything (but it must be love) and one is right for the spinning, dark, self-sufficient Earth.”

The tale itself is full of wild coincidences. Making her way through a crowded city where people are fleeing a volcanic eruption, she happens to ask help of the one person in the entire continent who really can help her. Wherever she goes — usually after fleeing Zerd — she finds she’s ended up where Zerd was going anyway. For an adventure that takes place over an entire continent, the cast of characters is small, and always popping up. But, I have to say, that doesn’t seem to matter. This doesn’t feel like the sort of realistic (if that’s the right word) fantasy you’d get nowadays. The torrid, wild improbability is part of the point. Moorcock & Cawthorn sum it up best, when they say that Gaskell “possesses to an outstanding degree… the ability to daydream constructively.” That’s what this is, a wild daydream, and best taken as such.

Aside from adventure, does the novel have a meaning? Cija’s journey takes her from believing men to be extinct, even mythical, to finding herself in a world full of them:

“I’ve lived with an army, off and on, for two years—I’ve even masqueraded as a boy for months—but I can’t lose a kind of shock at them, especially if there are a sudden lot of them… They are a bit overpowering in the mass, surely anyone would admit that.”

Among these men, General Zerd is “elemental man” — something, to Cija’s eyes, both beautiful and evil, alluring and not-quite human.

Male-female relations, then, are a key part of the story: “Suddenly I realised a fact quite new to me. I realised that most women in the world are used by most men in the world.” But Cija’s thinking about the men she encounters is more like the sort of thing you find in Angela Carter (Heroes & Villains, say), a push-pull to both the “beautiful” and the “brutal”, even more so when they’re combined, a love or desire that’s constantly tipping into hate. In this, then, she perhaps is demonstrating a little of that “love everything” ethos: she doesn’t seem to hate or resent the men for what they are, but comes to her own sense of how to relate to them.

Her initial, brutal abuse by the minor official becomes, in a way, the larger theme of the book. The Superlativity talks about the coming invasion of that self-sequestered continent as “the Pious Rape of the Introvert Soil of Atlan”. And Cija, uncomfortably, sees herself as part of that “rape”. When she arrives, Atlan seems to be idyllic. She encounters a scene where a (perhaps fairy) musician is leading a mass of animals, both predators and prey, in a harmonious dance. That ends when Cija’s warrior-bird, unaffected by the music, wades in, intent on mating, and with no qualms about casually killing the other animals in his way. Cija is at first mildly embarrassed, like a dog owner whose pet is doing something impolite; then she realises how alien to Atlan this brutality, that she’s come to accept as normal, is. A little while later, the Dragon himself, General Zerd, rides into Atlan, its new Emperor. The innocence has gone — but was she the Eve that brought this particular Serpent into Eden?

The adventure continues in Atlan…

The Martin White cover of Richard Adams’ second novel is one I remember seeing a lot in bookshops and school libraries growing up. I assumed Shardik (1974) was about a bear in the same way Watership Down was about rabbits, and it was only when I read Adams’ entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy that I found out it’s actually a fantasy novel, set in an invented world/lost past known as the Beklan Empire. I was intrigued to read it, even more so after Douglas A Anderson’s discovery of a review by Adams of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. I’d assumed Adams would be one of those literary-minded writers who wrote fantasy but scorned it in its more outright forms, but no, he was full-on enthusiastic for Tolkien at his most Tolkienesque. So I was even more intrigued to see what his own fantasy effort would be like.

Shardik opens with a bear fleeing a forest fire. Injured and desperate, it plunges into the massive Telthearna river, then struggles, exhausted, to the shore of an island. Lying there, this monster of a bear is seen by the hunter Kelderek, who immediately recognises it as the promised return of Lord Shardik, not a god but “the Power of God”, and so best treated as a god all the same. Returning to his people, the Ortelgans, he’s so dumbstruck he can’t make the expected report, even to the Baron Bel-ka-Trazet, and even under threat of death. A message arrives, summoning the Baron to the isle of Quiso (the holy isle of the bear-cult) and he takes Kelderek with him. There, the hunter can speak at last, and tells the high priestess, the Tuginda, what he saw. Equally convinced this is Lord Shardik, the Tuginda and her priestesses set about the dangerous task of tending to its wounds and following it wherever it goes. It strikes one of them dead, seemingly at random, but they accept this as the act of their god. (Kelderek, meanwhile, is apparently able to go right up close to it and remain unharmed, though he doesn’t do this often enough for it to be absolutely non-coincidental.) It’s a brilliant beginning, which really conjures these peoples’ puzzled awe at this dangerous but sacred creature, with no clear indication of where the story is going next.

The second of the novel’s seven sections sets things on a different tack. Not all the Ortelgans are immediately convinced the bear really is a messenger from God, but one, Ta-Kominion, decides to take advantage of it anyway. Declaring the bear’s appearance to be a sign that the Ortelgans — once rulers of the Beklan Empire, but now living in semi-primitive conditions on an island far from the central city they built — must rise and re-take the capital. An army sets forth, but Ta-Kominion knows it will only succeed if the bear is there, at the front, as a symbol and inspiration. He bullies Kelderek into dropping his reverence for the animal enough to drug it, cage it, and transport it to the head of the army. And just as the Ortelgan rabble encounter the Beklan army, Shardik wakes from his stupor, breaks out of his cage, and goes on a hangover-fuelled rampage into the opposing force. It’s another great moment, perfectly avoiding the question of whether this bear really is a messenger from God, or just a big, angry animal.

It was from here, though, that the novel started to lose its power, for me. The next section begins with Kelderek installed as Priest King of Bekla, and basically the head of the entire Beklan Empire. We learn that, to get there, he had to further compromise his principles. To break the siege of the central citadel, it was necessary (we’re told) to start executing hostages — including children — until the citadel surrendered; then (we’re also told) it has also been found necessary to start up the slave trade — again, including children — in order to fund this new incarnation of the Beklan Empire. We don’t actually get these decisive moments described, they’re just summarised as having happened, and this, I think, is a major mistake. In the first part, Kelderek was an innocent: just a hunter, awed by the sight of this massive bear, and something of an outsider among his people, who called him “Kelderek Play-with-the-Children” for his befriending of orphans. Suddenly he’s responsible for child enslavement and murder, and we don’t get to see him making those decisions, so we don’t know why he made them, or what he felt about doing so. Already compromised by Ta-Kominion’s persuading him to give up his reverence for the bear and cage it, whatever presence as a character he had is now utterly broken, for me as a reader. Kelderek didn’t have enough character-weight to bear these self-betrayals, and for the rest of the novel came across, to me, as a blank, a cipher, a cut-out of a character rather than anything like a real person. Unfortunately, he’s also the main character, and so he has to carry the novel.

What made this a bit more damaging was that the book also backed off from exploring the implications of its intriguing set-up — the fact that a savage bear was being treated as a messenger from God — and all its many potential meanings. After that moment where Shardik seemed to lead the Ortelgans against an enemy army — but could have been just an angry bear in the right place at the right time — I wondered if the novel was going to keep up a string of such moments, where people interpreted the actions of what might simply be a savage creature as those of their God. It might have started to feel a bit absurd after a while, but would have made for a fun read. Adams, though, didn’t do this, and from this point the bear doesn’t do much at all.

I started wondering why Adams was writing this book. Sometimes it’s evident why a writer’s telling the story they’re telling. They might be simply following the course of a plot, they might be seeing where a particular character takes them, they might be exploring an idea or theme, or they might have a definite thing they want to say. In his introduction to the 2014 edition of Shardik, Adams wrote, of the origins of this novel:

“The idea came to me spontaneously to write about a character like the tragic heroes of Ancient Greece, who secured great blessings for their society but paid heavily for their accomplishments in terms of personal suffering…”

But Kelderek, to me, just didn’t have enough weight to be either tragic or a hero. His sufferings, when they came, just didn’t happen to a character for whom I felt capable of registering suffering — he was too passive, too empty — and the only “great blessings” he brings to his society I can think of are when he says, near the end of the novel:

“…children are the future, you see. If there were no unhappy children, then the future would be secure.”

Which was his attitude at the start of the novel anyway, so he didn’t need his experience with Shardik to learn them — in fact, his experience with Shardik took him away from his valuing of children, and it’s not like, when he recovers it, he spreads the belief throughout the Empire. He just continues to do it locally, as he did at the beginning of the novel. (Plus, that “children are the future” grates in the mouth of a fantasy character, though that may be down to it being the first line in a Whitney Houston hit from the next decade…)

Another thing Adams says in his introduction:

“Shardik is about the religious impulse and the nature of worship. Its themes are as relevant today as they have ever been — power, politics, corruption, and the nature of religious faith.”

But I don’t think Adams examines these things as much as you’d need in a long book like this, for them to feel like they really are his themes. By placing a savage animal at the centre of this religion, you’d expect him to be saying something — either about misplaced beliefs, or the innate savagery of human nature, or the proper reverence for nature, or how you can take anything as an object of reverence if you interpret it right — but I don’t think he does. A quote from Jung in the book’s epigraph — “Superstition and accident manifest the will of God” — is equally ambiguous. (Is Jung, here, saying that the will of an actual God comes through in seemingly random events, or that it’s how we human beings interpret random events that reveals to us what we’d expect our “God” to be saying, and so they’re really just a way of revealing our own beliefs to ourselves? I’d expect the latter from Jung-the-psychologist, but Jung-the-mystic might have meant the former.)

There’s another reason people write books, and one I quite like, which is where a writer is processing some difficult, even un-processable, experience, and are driven to create, to try and understand themselves and what happened to them. Usually this comes with a feeling of a particularly strong imaginative charge centred on some situation or occurrence. I only began to feel that might be happening in the penultimate section of Shardik, where Kelderek finds himself captured by the child-slaver Genshed. Genshed, although just a human being — even if an utterly reprehensible one — is invested with an almost supernatural aura, as one of his captives explains:

“He’s been granted the power to make others evil—to make them believe in the strength of evil, to inspire them to become as evil as himself. What he offers is the joy of evil, not just money, or safety, or anything that you and I could understand.”

And:

“God’s given in. Either that or He’s got no power over Genshed.”

The Second World War — which Adams served in — is just the sort of thing to provide one of those “difficult, even un-processable” experiences. (And Adams says, in his 2014 introduction: “lest any should suppose that I set my wits to invent the cruelties of Genshed, the slave trader, I say here that all lie within my knowledge and some — would they did not — within my experience.”) The way Shardik’s reappearance is almost immediately twisted to become a pretext for war could be taken as a comment on how the Nazis curated a new version of their national mythology to back up their belligerence. And another statement made of Genshed is exactly the sort of thing you find so many people saying, in so many ways, after the Second World War:

“Cruelty and evil—they’re not very far down in anyone. It’s only a matter of digging them up, you know.”

The section with the child-slaver Genshed was, for me, a slight revival in the book’s narrative — in terms of the meaning the book was exploring, anyway, though it didn’t entirely connect, to my mind, with the earlier sections. Overall, though, I think it’s the opening where Shardik is at its best (and the very first chapter, with the huge bear floundering in the face of a forest fire is absolutely the best), but after that it really didn’t repay the effort required to read it. (Which sounds harsh, but there was something about Adams’ prose style in this novel that I just couldn’t read as quickly as I wanted. It wasn’t bad, just somehow slow. He had, for instance, a fondness for some very convoluted similes that took several sentences to convey. An example being: “as when some severe and demanding leader, whom his men both respected and feared, is reported lost, they loiter silently, addressing themselves with assumed diligence to trivial or futile duties in attempts to evade the thought that none will utter—that they are now without him whom they trusted to stand between them and the enemy…”)

Adams was evidently pleased with Shardik. (He even wrote a prequel, Maia, in 1984.) His Times obituary quotes him as saying:

“I thought it was my best book, but no one else thought so … They wanted another Watership Down. What they got was Shardik and they didn’t like it.”

Apart from Watership Down, the only other book by him I’ve read is The Girl in a Swing, a supernatural-tinged love story with hints of pagan mythic forces being brought against modern, middle-class Christian mores — again, very different from Watership Down, but more successful, I think, than Shardik.