Shardik is a difficult book. I have not yet fully decided if it is a good book or a bad book, or if those words hold any real meaning, but it is undeniably a difficult book. Intentionally archaic, didactic, and difficult. The kind of book where the hero protagonist reinstitutes child slavery in his efforts to enact the will of a giant bear he believes to be the reincarnation of god. It is also the kind of book that would probably be a couple hundred pages shorter if not for multiple-page-spanning extended metaphors, lengthy internal monologues, and confusingly constructed environmental descriptions. But there is something beautiful about this book’s overwritten, overwrought excess. It calls to mind other overlong epics and classic novels which achieve storytelling greatness through bombarding the reader with so much information that some of it is bound to be poignant. As with Les Misérables or Moby-Dick, most readers of Shardik will agree that parts of it should have been cut, but as with those other novels, I doubt any two readers would agree on exactly which sections should go.

 

Much like Moby-Dick, this is a book that cannot survive on its plot alone. I read an abridged version of Moby-Dick as a child and hated it. The plot was boring, the execution uninteresting, the characters one-dimensional. Moby-Dick cannot be reduced to plot, because it exists in the world of metaphor, parable, and allegory more than it exists in any tangible reality. To adapt, abridge, or edit this sort of story to its bare essentials is to utterly destroy it. So too with Shardik. It is immense and messy, but it also feels crucial that it should be this way.

 

Shardik is a book about religion, ethics, and obsession. The novel never makes a claim as to whether the titular Shardik is divine or whether he is merely a large bear. Perhaps the book doesn’t distinguish between these two possibilities because it doesn’t matter. More important to the story is the baggage each character brings to their encounters with Shardik and the meanings they wring out of his acts of animal violence. From the priestess who has waited her whole life for god to appear, to the Baron who sees the bear’s appearance as an opportunity to reclaim old territory, to the protagonist, Kelderek, so caught up in his obsession with his role as the bear’s priest-king that he is unable to make his own decisions. Shardik begins with a quote from Malakai which sets the stage for everything that happens within: “Behold, I will send my messenger...But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire...” The characters are then dragged through this fire. Like the Biblical Job, they are defined by their suffering and little else.

​

Shardik—with its Odyssean plot punctuated with enormous internal monologues and religious musings, with its sometimes ambivalent morality followed by very strict, clear-cut belief systems—feels both familiar and strange. John Gardner once claimed that there are only two kinds of stories: either a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a journey. Shardik is both stories, but the stranger is a bear and the journey is more of a character study blended with a drunken essay about religion. Perhaps everything about Shardik is best summed up in a speech given by the antagonist (who is not really an antagonist) to the hero (who is not really a hero):

​

“The sky will grow dark, cold rain will fall and all trace of the right way will be blotted out. You will be all alone. And still you will have to go on. There will be ghosts in the dark and voices in the air, disgusting prophecies coming true...and absent faces present on every side...And still you will have to go on. The last bridge will fall behind you and the last lights will go out, followed by the sun, the moon, and the stars; and still you will have to go on. You will come to regions more desolate and wretched than you ever dreamed could exist, places of sorrow created entirely by that mean superstition which you yourself have put about for so long. But still you will have to go on” (296-297)

 

Shardik is a book uncomfortable with religion, but which nonetheless seems to insist upon its necessity. Adams seems to suggest that our suffering comes from our own religious convictions while also suggesting that religion may be the answer to these same sufferings. The final chapter of the novel introduces an entirely new character from an entirely new continent exploring for the first time the primary region in which the novel takes place (Ortelga) in order to establish trade routes. The decision to end here, with a brand new character’s point of view, is baffling, but little more baffling than the rest of the novel. Adams seems to have fun with this new character, a metaphysician named Siristrou. Siristrou is stuck-up and holier-than-thou and thinks very little of the Ortelgan people. He thinks little of Shardik the Bear and seems to think the Ortelgans a backwards lot for their religion. And yet Sirirstrou’s own people are implied to worship a god equally as arbitrary. In one of the novel’s final conversations, Siristrou asks Kelderek how he knows Shardik was truly God. “If music were played in [horses’] hearing and in ours,” Kelderek says, “I suppose their ears would catch all the actual sounds that yours and mine would catch. Yet for all that, it’s little they’d understand. You and I might weep; they wouldn’t. The truth—those who hear it are in doubt. Yet there are always others who know for a fact that nothing out of the ordinary took place” (598). And with this metaphor about horses—an animal with which the Ortelgans are entirely unfamiliar—Adams leaves us, 600 pages of religious musings and violence behind us.

​

​

​

​

​