Richard Adams

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.

A short while ago, I realised I hadn’t read a really immersive book in what seemed like ages — I’d read good books, and interesting books, but not one of those really moreish ones that keep calling you back, and once you are back, keep making you want to read one more chapter, or just one more page, one more page, one more page.

Two books I read recently I chose specifically because I thought they’d fit this ideal. One did, one almost did. So I thought I’d try and work out what makes a damned good read from that result.

The first book was Richard Adams’ Watership Down. I hadn’t read this before, or anything else by Adams, so I don’t know why I thought it would make a really good read. There was, of course, part of my mind saying “No, no, no, it’s a cutesy book about rabbits!” But I also knew that it had been popular in its time, and continues to be, which is a good indication that it was doing something right. (Not that being popular is a good indication — books, like anything else, can just be fashionable. But staying popular, staying in print, is a good indication, I think.)

The other book, which I finished last week, was Stephen King’s Duma Key, chosen largely because some of my earliest memories of really immersive, getting-into-it reading came from Salem’s Lot, IT and The Stand. I’d pretty much given up reading King after some disappointments (The Dark Half and Bag of Bones), but some Amazon reviews implied that Duma Key (despite its bad title) might be something of a return to form.

So, what worked in these books, and what didn’t?

There are two essential aspects to a damned good read, I think. The first is getting into it, the second is staying with it. By “getting into it” I mean how well the author gets you into their world. There are a few ways they can do this. It can be through character, it can be through world-building (particularly in SF or fantasy), or it can be simply through style. All of these make up the “world of words” a writer creates, and the writer can use one or all of them to make that world inviting enough to lure you in. Obviously, the ideal is that they use all of them, but I think very few authors really do well on all three counts, and I’m happy to live with just one done well, if it’s done sufficiently well. The other point, “staying with it”, has fewer options. In fact, I think there’s really only one, for me, and that’s story. A damned good read has to have a story that keeps drawing you back. In my opinion there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, as satisfying as a well-told story.

In terms of “getting into it”, even though there aren’t really any fantastic elements in Watership Down (apart from attributing human-level intelligence, self-awareness, and communication ability to rabbits), the book has a lot in common with fantasy. In fact, it owes a lot to The Lord of the Rings specifically, not only because it’s a quest story told from the point of view of lowly (hobbit/rabbit) characters who find themselves forced into heroic roles, but because Richard Adams uses some of Tolkien’s methods for “thickening” or “deepening” the world he creates, by for instance providing his rabbits with an invented language (though his “Lapine” is limited to only a few words, and doesn’t quite have that living feel of Tolkien’s Elvish languages) and with their own culture of stories and myths. In a way, Watership Down has an advantage over truly otherworld fantasy, in that the reader knows that the world is their world, so it feels familiar, but they are experiencing it from a different point of view (that of the rabbits). Adams does a good job of re-visioning our world from this alternative perspective, not just in the way that rabbits don’t understand the human things they come across, but also because they have their own concerns, and so their own way of evaluating things. So, to Watership Down‘s rabbits, a road is at first a confusing, frightening thing, but when they realise the cars that zoom along it aren’t interested in eating them, they just cross it at full speed then forget about it. One thing Adams does well is to introduce a few concepts that relate only to rabbits, which he gives names in his invented rabbit language, making these ideas seem at once alien to us as readers but familiar to the rabbits. So, for instance, there’s a Lapine word (tharn) for that particular state of glazed, frozen panic that hits a rabbit when it is overwhelmed or exhausted, which is a danger the questing rabbits have to be constantly aware of. As Adams uses such new words sparingly, this method of getting you into his world works without seeming overly technical or geeky. In essence, he’s created a story-world which is the world we know, but skewed with a few rabbit-specific rules and ways of seeing things. Once you’ve got these in mind, you’re into his book’s world.

King, on the other hand, is writing about our world, though with the addition of some supernatural goings on. But as he introduces the supernatural slowly, that’s not the thing that gets you into his book’s world. Instead, it’s the other two things: character and style. And as Duma Key is written in the first person, with the main character narrating his own story, the two could be said to be sides of the same coin. King’s narrator, Edgar Freemantle, is a successful construction entrepreneur who, just before the start of the book, is involved in a near-fatal accident which changes his life forever. As a result, he loses an arm, and for a while has his speech impaired, so that he can’t recall some words properly. He also has angry rages that he has to learn to control, and which cost him his marriage. In a way, this sets up a few rules of character rather like those of Watership Down‘s rabbits: Edgar Freemantle’s world is one in which he finds himself with only one arm, where before he had two. This means he has to think about his life, and the world he lives in, in a different way; as do we, as readers. This might seem a crude way of creating a character, but in terms of getting you into the world of a book, it’s remarkably effective. Unless you, as reader, have just the one arm yourself, learning to think about things as a one-armed rather than a two-armed person takes some effort, and that effort is the essential magic required to get you into the book’s world. King’s writing style is, I think, one of the things that really makes his books successful. He’s managed to find a way of writing that is not only accessible, but which is downright friendly, and even chummy, while still being interesting. So, while “accessible” writing might just be clear, uncluttered, and unpretentious prose, King writes with a folksiness that doesn’t sound dry and literary, but which still has room for his use of language to be interesting. He likes, for instance, using “homely” words and phrases, like “vicey-versey”, “lookie-loos”, “boot-scootin”, and “swee’pea”. His characters “duck into the mall”, and talk of something being “bad, powerful medicine”. This suppleness of style lets King get away with blatantly literary devices, like metaphors, through sheer liveliness of delivery: “as if she had whistled for a dog and gotten a wolf”, is one example.

So both books, I think, score well on the first ingredient of being a damned good read, though in different ways.

What about “staying with it”?

Watership Down had a clearly mapped-out story. (It also has a map! Some people groan when a book has a map. I love ’em.) At the start of the book, one of the rabbits, Fiver, who is a sort of natural rabbit-shaman, has a vision of the burrow they live in being destroyed, so he and a few others set off to found a new one. So, the first story goal is clear: find a new home. The first half of the book is all about that journey, with the young rabbits having to face various dangers on the way. Once they’ve found a suitable place, the story gains a new direction: to make it a proper home, the troop of male rabbits need some doe-rabbits to share it with. (At this point, Watership Down teeters on the borders of political incorrectness. Adams gets round it by having some doe-rabbits living oppressed and unhappy in a nearby overcrowded, tyrannically-ruled burrow. If he hadn’t pushed the situation to such melodramatic heights, it’s doubtful whether the second part of the story would have seemed anywhere near as heroic as the first, with the acquisition of doe-rabbits seeming more like kidnapping.) Having acquired (liberated, not kidnapped) some does, there’s a final against-the-odds battle with the big-baddie rabbit of the piece, General Woundwort. For me, the book’s story just got more and more gripping as it went along. One of the reasons for this was that the rabbits were put into situations, or faced with problems, where I couldn’t see how they could win, but they did — and not through luck, but through wits. (The rabbits’ physical weaknesses are constantly emphasised throughout the book, making their efforts seem all the more heroic.) The thing that really made it work, for me, was how clearly the goals of the story were laid out, while the outcome never was. I knew what had to happen next, but never how it was going to be achieved. That was the thing that kept bringing me back.

Duma Key, though, didn’t have as strong a story. Rather than Watership Down‘s quest, it was a mystery. Mysteries are, in a sense, even simpler, and so potentially more powerful, story types than quests. Mysteries boil down to a single question. They’re “who killed Professor X”-type stories. With Duma Key, we have a supernatural mystery, so this means it’s a “what the Hell is going on?” type story, with the emphasis on the “Hell”. I’ve always felt that supernatural mysteries need to be very precise and finely-honed. There needs to be one, single source of mystery, one type of supernatural occurrence, and it needs to be worked with a great deal of subtlety and power. The great temptation for writers, though, is to dab on great dollops of supernatural happenings for sheer effect, and then mop up the difficulties and contradictions afterwards. And this, I think, is where Duma Key starts to fail. There are loads of different supernatural events. The narrator finds he has special insight into situations when he touches pictures with his “ghost” limb (the one he lost in the accident); meanwhile, he hears strange voices in the night sea sounds beneath the house he’s staying in; meanwhile, the overgrown south end of the island has a nasty effect on him and his daughter when they visit it; meanwhile, he sees a couple of ghosts; meanwhile, he paints pictures that allow him to see the future; meanwhile, there’s a mystery associated with an old rich lady living nearby; meanwhile, the man looking after the old rich lady has minor telepathic powers; meanwhile… And so on. Too many mysteries, too diffuse. By the time I was getting near the end of Duma Key I realised it wasn’t going to be the really satisfying solution I wanted. I’m not saying all books should tie themselves up neatly — there’s that tired old argument, “life’s not like that”, but I think that’s way beside the point — but I am saying that when an author starts to tell a story, you as reader can’t help but have certain expectations raised. Whenever an author asks a question, explicitly or implicitly, you as reader speculate on what the answer might be, then keep reading to see if you’re right. (And in part, you keep reading because you want to be given a better answer that you thought up. That’s what makes a book really satisfying.)

All this, you might argue, is a bit simplistic. And, yes it is, but I do think that the really deep pleasures of reading boil down to quite simple things.

Anyway, this blog post has gone on a bit, but I’ll add just one more thing. I think there may be a third thing that’s involved in a damned good read, and that’s what you’re left with once a book’s finished. It’s not about the world-building or the story, but something else. It’s the thing that calls you back to re-read a book, even though you know what happens. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect it is to be found in the things a book leaves unresolved. I know I said I like a neatly tied-up ending, but I mean that in story terms. Behind the story, there’s got to be a sort of magic or poetry, a deep tension, a final unresolvedness, that is the thing that is “just like life”, and which is the thing that really makes a book live. But I don’t think it’s something that is easy to spot while you’re reading. It’s the thing that makes a book keep popping up in your thinking months and years after you’ve read it. (A Wizard of Earthsea, which I must have first read before I was ten, still pops up in my head when I’m thinking about life in general, often in surprising ways.) So, at the moment, I can’t say if either Watership Down or Duma Key will have this — I very much doubt Duma Key will, though I enjoyed reading it well enough. It’s a very rare thing, and perhaps I’ll do some thinking on it and write about it in a future Mewsings.

Till then, or till something else crops up…