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.

Jean Morris’s YA novel The Troy Game (1987), set in Dark Ages Britain, starts with Brannock, second son of the King of the Seven Kingdoms, being sent on a mission by the druid-like Elder, Mennor. There are rumours of invaders coming from the east, and Mennor needs a message taken to his Order at Caerdroia. He chooses Brannock because of his ability to use a “bob” to detect not just water and buried metal but hidden paths, as the way to Caerdroia is a secret to those not of the Order. Stopping off at his uncle’s kingdom, Brannock is given his eldest cousin Eilian as a guide, as she has accompanied their own Elder at least to the start of the hidden way. And as they embark on the final section of the journey, Brannock and Eilian begin to realise they are tracing a vast troy, like the ancient, now-fading dance-patterns in their own villages.

The book opens with such impatience to get Brannock on his way (entirely excusable in a YA novel) that the reason for his mission feels almost like an afterthought. Vague rumours of invaders from the east, and Mennor never explaining why he’s not able to take the message himself — it’s evident Morris basically wants to get her pair of protagonists onto the vast troy and tracing its weird path as soon as possible. And the troy is obviously the main point of interest, here, not the invaders from the east. It’s presented as not so much a man-made thing as a concentrated mystical aspect of the land itself. Walking the wrong way doesn’t just get you lost, it produces some dark, nightmare-like experiences; try to shortcut the circular path, and you’ll find yourself ejected and unable to find any part of the troy — entrance, exit, or even where you just were.

Perhaps it’s the effect of having read Mythago Wood and its sequels, but the troy, here, feels very much like one of Holdstock’s mythogenic landscapes — particularly with Holdstock using terms like “the oak-vortex”, and “the ley matrix”, as though the troy were just a more ordered version of the same whorls of weirdness. Inside the troy, what seems like a small forest proves to be immense; an old Roman villa with a slightly ghostly inhabitant can be entered at the same point from two different directions; there are sudden changes of weather, as well as of landscape, all just as in Ryhope Wood. There’s even a hint of the same ancient, pre-human world behind it all:

“This was ancient deep forest; not the mild open kind that could be travelled with little trouble, but the oldest oak forest, where men never went, where the vast trees grew and died and toppled and rotted untouched, as they had done since the beginning of the world.”

For most of the book, The Troy Game feels at the younger limit of YA — its getting quickly to the journey without bothering with much set-up, the vagueness about the invaders from the east and the broadly archetypal characters (kings and queens as parents, wizard-like old men as village elders) — but things take a disturbing and more complex turn towards the end of the book. The invaders from the east, when encountered, aren’t simply barging in Viking-like and taking over, they’re seeking alliances with the aim of fomenting a civil war, but claim to be merely looking for a new home. (In the wonderfully double-edged words of one of them: “we come in peace but in strength”.) The Elders themselves are divided as to what to do, and their leader seems too weak to really accomplish anything. Mennor, then, makes a desperate move, and summons the Wild Hunt, despite knowing it will not simply attack these invaders, but throw the land itself into chaos:

“The Wild Hunt may be invoked, but not controlled; once the Hunt is up, its prey is everything in its path.”

And that’s what happens. Chaos, then ruin. After recovering from the Hunt’s passing, Brannock begins his journey back from Caerdroia, and it’s as though the air of fantasy has gone from the lands he passes through: he’s out of story and into history. The Seven Kingdoms ruled by his father prove to be seven villages; the invaders from the east — blond and tall — are now scattered among the people of the land, married to village women, with young families already, making a go as farmers, not warriors. Why, then, the terror of the Wild Hunt? It’s as though all the Hunt did was stir everything up in one big land-wide cauldron, then leave people so disorientated there was no room for thoughts of war or conquest, merely survival. The invaders are part of the land now, and the land itself has spent something of its mystical power.

Brannock realises his recovery from the chaos of the Wild Hunt didn’t just take weeks or months, but perhaps years. None of his relatives recognise him. After the younger-end-of-YA feel at the start of the novel, there’s a distinct note of something broken and lost — the magic has gone away, and the Dark Ages story-world of kings and queens and elders has been replaced by a more realistic land of farmers and villagers repairing roofs and tilling the land.

None of this is overly examined and, in a way, that makes it less immediately dark than it sounds, but also more mysterious. Still, there’s a haunting feeling to the ending, the sense that the world has irretrievably changed from the magical-mystical to the historical. As a story — particularly read as an adult — it feels a little unsatisfying, but nevertheless there’s a poetic air which is quite appropriate for such a short book.

Every ten years or so, I read a cyberpunk classic, basically for nostalgic purposes. Snow Crash (first published 1992) is one of the A-list classics of the genre, though I’d not read it before. As it was written in the nineties, I wouldn’t consider it part of the first wave of cyberpunk, but this does mean it has a lot more chance to get its future technology predictions right (people have “personal phones”, for instance, whereas William Gibson has said that anyone coming to Neuromancer nowadays might think its lack of mobile phones a subtle plot point, rather than it being down to the fact that he’d not thought of it). But I think you can find enough about what the novel got right/wrong elsewhere on the internet, as it’s one of those books beloved of the net’s tech communities, and much talked about online.

And in a way, that angle — what it got right, what it got wrong — can sort of blind you to other interesting aspects of the novel. Early on in reading it, for instance, I thought it felt more like the work of Thomas Pynchon (or the two novels of his I’ve read, anyway, Inherent Vice and The Crying of Lot 49). It had that lightly humorous, or constantly ironic, tone throughout, as though to underline the fact that this isn’t meant to be taken as a serious prediction of the future, but more as literary play. As much as it’s predictive science fiction, it’s a postmodern novel, a thing whose reality is meant to be taken as literary rather than literal, playing with ideas about language and narrative and how they work with the virtual worlds of computers.

This playful/postmodern aspect comes to the fore when the novel’s protagonist — who’s called Hiro Protagonist, so there’s some in-your-face literary self-consciousness right there — gets a series of info-dump-style lectures from “the Librarian”, a piece of software used to interface with the massive store of data owned by the Central Intelligence Corporation. These info-dumps are, like Hiro Protagonist’s name, so blatant about what they are, that there’s none of the awkwardness of the “As you know…” type speech that usually marks an info-dump. They just are what they are, delivered with no apology, so they work.

The story is set in an uncomfortably close future (uncomfortably, because I suspect if I worked out what year it was, it would already have passed) where the United States as a governed nation has pretty much turned into a series of franchises. The Mafia, for instance, is now a franchise operation, with outlets as regular as MacDonalds and 7-11s throughout the nation’s cities. Similarly with religions (Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, and the NeoAquarian Temple), countries (you can become a citizen of Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong and be welcomed in any of its “franchulates” — franchise consulates, I’m guessing), as well as services like prisons and so on. If you’re rich enough, you live in a ring-fenced “burbclave”, policed by one of the many independent policing firms to have replaced the actual police.

The two main characters are Hiro and YT. Hiro starts the novel as a pizza delivery man for the Mafia, but when he fails to make his latest delivery in the required thirty minutes, walks away from that job (and his crashed car) and returns to his usual work as a hacker, gathering info and trying to sell it through the CIC’s digital Library. Hiro is thirty years old, and as his father fought in World War II, this is probably a way to work out when the novel occurs. YT, on the other hand (those initials stand for “Yours Truly”), is fifteen years old and working as a Kourier, delivering packages via a techno-skateboard, mostly powered by magnetically “pooning” herself onto passing motor vehicles.

The plot proper kicks off when Hiro’s friend and fellow (though more successful) hacker Da5id is given a dose of a new “drug” called Snow Crash — and not in the real world, but in the virtual reality of the Metaverse. This “drug” consists of a black and white, seemingly random bitmap image which causes his brain to crash and put him into a coma. Someone, it turns out, has found a way to hack the human brain, and Hiro and YT set out to find out who, and how, plus a little bit of why.

The how goes into the origins of language, the myth of the Tower of Babel, and the workings of Sumerian culture. The idea is that humans, being receptive to language, are capable of being programmed — not by the languages we speak, but the more basic types of signal that are an inherent part of our neural set-up, the equivalent of machine code in a computer as compared to higher level programming languages:

“We’ve got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we’re using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we’re learning it. But there’s also a tongue that’s based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defences and sink right into your brainstem.”

As well as buying into the widespread (though surely simplistic) idea that the human brain is just a sort of computer, therefore it can be treated as one (can be “uploaded” onto a data store, for instance, or, in this case, can be programmed, or hacked into), this also reminded me of William Burroughs’ idea that language is a sort of parasite feeding off its human hosts, and just one more of the world’s systems of control. This, for instance, is from Burroughs’ essay “On Coincidence”:

“In the beginning was the word and the word was God. And what does that make us? Ventriloquist’s dummies. Time to leave the Word-God behind.”

Which all makes it a little bit worrying that one of the things you’ll read about Snow Crash if you do even a little bit of research online, is how much of an influence and inspiration it’s been to today’s tech entrepreneurs, who either haven’t noticed the fact that the book’s villain (L. Bob Rife, whose name couldn’t help but remind me of that other would-be mind-controller, L. Ron Hubbard) is a tech entrepreneur seeking to control the minds of the human race through hacking their brains — or have noticed it, but don’t care about hiding how much they admire the idea…

After finishing Stephenson’s novel, with no particular intent I went on to re-read some of Borges’s short stories, and was struck by how much resonance there was between Borges’s fiction and the virtual realities depicted in cyberpunk. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, a group of people set about creating an entirely fictitious world, one which foregrounds ideal existence over reality, and begins to impinge upon the real world. Coming off reading Snow Crash, it felt like the first iteration of the Metaverse. And then there’s “The Library of Babel” with its books containing every permutation of writing symbols, meaning that some contain the absolute truth about the nature of the universe, others a slightly tarnished version of that truth, others complete lies, and still others, utter nonsense.

Who, I wonder, predicted the internet best?