When finally he is brought before her, he confesses his earth-shattering suspicion: that the creature he encountered is a reincarnated Lord Shardik, the mythical beast slain long ago by a slave trader, whose return the inhabitants of Quiso await. Kelderek realises that this is no ordinary bear: returning to his settlement on the river island of Ortelga, he defies the local baron, and refuses to tell his story to anyone but the Tuginda, the head priestess on the neighbouring island of Quiso. We start with a simpler scenario: a hunter who encounters a great big bear in a burning forest, “such a bear as never was, a bear tall as a dwelling-hut, his pelt like a waterfall, his muzzle a wedge across the sky”. The villainous situation – progress that is built on the back of enslavement – is not apparent at the start of this 600-page, multi-sectioned novel, and a lot of complicated things have happened by the time we get to it. It is, he says, his masterpiece, one that fulfils all his requirements for a good novel: a beginning, middle and end, a hero or heroine, and a villain or, alternatively, “a villainous situation calling for redress”. But Adams’s regard for the book extends beyond the reinforcement of a hoped-for career change. I knew then that writing was to become my full-time occupation, and I was able to leave the civil service for good”. Shardik had taken Adams three years of evening working to finish, until, as he writes in the introduction to this 40th anniversary edition, “at last a point came when the story was complete and only needed polishing.
And big animals were definitely in the air (or sea) Jaws was also published that year. It’s hard to see direct similarities with the work of other writers, although there are echoes of CS Lewis and Tolkien.
Published in 1974, it is a heady piece of fantasy centred on the creation of an animal-based religion, in which a giant bear is the object of worship of a developing human society riven by territorial and ideological dispute.
And although Richard Adams’s debut novel, Watership Down, is his most celebrated, it was Shardik, his second, that convinced him to quit the office. A ll writers love the book that allows them to give up their day job.
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