The Bear That Failed

...When the bear dies a sacrificial death, avenging the innocents savaged by the slave traders, Kelderek is at last convinced of Shardik's sanctity...

...Shardik escapes from captivity, trailed into the wilderness by his false priest and the Tuginda...

...His narrative scope is breathtaking, his ability to render events in vivid detail stunning...

...Shardik, its successor, is also compelling reading...

...That this English author is a storyteller in the oldest and most honorable sense of the word is amply confirmed in Shardik, as is his essential seriousness of purpose, his intention to write about what Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech called "the old verities of the heart love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice...

...Or whether the boat crew who rhythmically chant "Shardik a lomda, Shardik a pron-ta...

...and let us await with genuine if somewhat qualified enthusiasm the third coming of Richard Adams...

...Ah, yes...

...Reviewed by Cyra McFadden Department of English, San Francisco Stale University Richard Adams' remarkable first novel, Watership Down, created an audience of converts: Readers who were initially suspicious of anthropomorphism in general and talking rabbits in particular, as I was, ended up, as the spell of the book vanquished their prejudices, eating more greens than usual and thumping out occasional messages to other admirers of its talented, naturalist author...

...Legends have perhaps been made of lesser stuff...

...Nevertheless, proportion is important on the largest canvas as well as the smallest, and Shardik suffers from the lack of it...

...but in graduating from the miniepic to the fullblown variety, and from smaller to larger quadrupeds, Adams may have made too precipitous a leap His animal protagonist this time is a bear who is also a god, the focus of a monumental tale of human folly and redemption in which conception, characters, plot, and prose are inflated to match the bear's immensity...

...His soldiers recapture Bekla, the Troy-like city that was once part of the Ortelgan empire, and turn it into a barbarian citadel with Kelderek as its ruler...

...Names like Bel-ka-Trazet and Ta-Kominion, both of whom are major characters in the work, are difficult enough...

...Because he is at first blind to his mission as the bear's human agent, divinely chosen, Kelderek enlists the animal's power in the service of a mercenary army...

...You...

...and who has sufficient austerity of mind to keep from wondering, when the presiding priestess of an ancient cult is named the Tuginda, if she succeeded the One-ginda...

...I'm afraid I don't know the word...

...Around the towering figure of the bear, Faulknerian in itself, Adams creates a vast allegory of good and evil...

...A long, labored footnote to the main story finds Kelderek, who briefly considered killing the bear-god to pursue a crasser passion in the form of Melathys, a fallen vestal virgin serving Shardik, married to the girl...

...Bek-la's high culture is destroyed, its enemies are ruthlessly purged, and its economy subverted when Kelderek revives the slave trade that exploits the helplessness of children...

...But the self-consciousness of passages like that one —and there are a seemingly infinite number of them—seriously hinders immersion in Adams' tale...

...Blurbs from reviews in English newspapers on the book's jacket proclaim that in Shardik, Adams has created an entire world...

...Divine...

...No—I myself was present when he died...

...Kelderek, however, still shows signs of conscience, and the power of the bear cannot finally be contained...

...Such excess is self-defeating...

...If during the course of Shardik one succumbs to punning on the word "unbearable," the fault is Adams' own...

...Whatever goodness remains is personified in the Tuginda, whom Kelderek has sent into exile...

...Other difficulties abound in Adams' fictitious land as well...

...She now runs a colony for the children who were the victims of his harsh rule, and the two engage in the following dialogue: "Lord Shardik was a bear.' "And he was—er—coming from God...

...All things considered then, one chorus of "Shardik a lomda, Shardik a pronta...

...Those who do, despite the sustaining presence of their faith, might admit to dozing off now and then—or at least to nodding among the genealogical tables...

...Like Watership Down, Shardik is the saga of a journey, in this case of the great bear seeking to fulfill his destiny in the corrupt and sacrilegious world of man...

...Although Shardik himself doesn't talk (he merely growls, snarls and barks most convincingly), the biped inhabitants seem to have trouble with the various bristly dialects of this mythical area bordered by Or-telga, on the north, and Yelda, on the south...

...and of Kelder-ek, the simple hunter whose fate is entwined with that of the bear and who twice betrays him before surrendering his true allegiance...

...Chaos and cruelty follow...

...For one thing, the indigenous language is fraught with problems...

...This was long ago...

...as they heave to aren't speaking Esbearanto...

...And I must admit that I stopped wisecracking and cried unabashedly when Shardik, cradling the body of the goldenhaired child in what I couldn't help thinking of as "his arms,'' floated down the Telthearna River on his flaming funeral pyre...

...Indeed he has, but the obvious and intentional parallels to our own planet aside, one wouldn't want to live there, nor can I recommend his empire of Bek-la as a nice place to visit...

...Overkill invites a kind of distancing even in a reader not only willing but eager to suspend disbelief...

...The result is Biblical, and even converts can't curl up contentedly to read the Bible cover to cover...

...So although all odds have seemed against it, virtue does triumph in the end...

...Thank you.' "He was the Power of God, but he was an actual bear...

...Too often exposition is entrusted to the kind of mechanical dialogue people never conduct in real life: "But seriously, Kelderek And too often, as well, Adams' attempts to drive home the reality of man's inhumanity to man take on the quality, literally, of overkill...

...But even minor characters, like Baraglat and Siris-trou, spell trouble for those who aren't personally familiar with Yeldashay or Deelguy...

...Too many times the action of the book lumbers to a stop while the characters make way for another Homeric simile, another extended descriptive passage too richly encrusted in metaphor...

...Fair, though, is fair: Shardik is firmly installed on the best-seller list, suggesting that many don't agree that more, in this context, is less...

...When the beautiful, blonde, female child is mercilessly slaughtered by a slavetrader, she is not only drowned, she is first brutalized in several sadistically ingenious ways...