So Two Months Later...

I'm finally back.  Of sorts.  I've been in school for almost a month and am doing amazingly well.  Stenography is a fascinating field and one I'm surprisingly adept at.  So when I'm not working or practicing, I'm trying to get focused on what used to be important to me: books and movies.

I was going to do a post on the latest superhero movies: The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, both of which I thought were excellent (I don't care what anyone says about the latest Spidey flick, that was a lot of fun.)

But I can't quite bring myself to talk about those because I just finished a story more important than either of those: Shardik by Richard Adams.

WARNING TO ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE: I spoil stories.  I can't talk about them properly otherwise, not the way I want to anyways.  Just a quick summary, this novel is about Kelderek, a hunter-turned-prophet for Lord Shardik, a giant bear representing the power of God to teach mankind a great lesson.  Kelderek has to endure pain and humiliation before he can unlock the secret he is sure Shardik has come into the world to teach him.

NOW THE SPOILERS:

As the story begins, the giant bear saves Kelderek from a leopard and he informs the Tuginda (the high priestess of this cult) that Shardik has been reincarnated.  Since this day has been foretold for centuries, the Tuginda realizes that their religious duty now is to follow the bear wherever it may go.  Nothing more; just follow.

But Kelderek's people have different ideas.  They've been oppressed by the Beklan Empire and now that Shardik is here, they believe this to be the sign to take Bekla for themselves.  They rouse an army and go out to war immediately (I couldn't help but think of how the Jews in Christ's time expected the Messiah's purpose was to overthrow their Roman oppressors and save them from that tyranny.)  The saddening part is that how Kelderek is coerced into abetting them.  He takes a major role in supplanting the Tuginda's authority and imprisoning the bear for their war.  Instead of following Shardik and letting its will take precedence, he imposes his own will on what the bear should do.

This leads to a point later on in the book about how blasphemous Kelderek and his people are.  They do take over Bekla and Kelderek rules as emperor for five years, thus all of them take this as a sign that their war must have been God's will.  This rationalization ends up being the height of their blasphemy.

This led me to think about how blasphemy is a generally misunderstood sin in our culture.  Many think that it is merely the taking of God's name in vain and treating the sacred lightly.  True, but there's much more to it.  Blasphemy in its most odious sense is in assuming that you own God's powers and authority, that you possess all he has.  This is essentially what causes Kelderek's downfall and eventual exile from his own kingdom.

I've pretty well condensed the first four-fifths of the story right there.  It's a great story and well-told up until that point.  The man has a gift for prose that few others are capable of or could even aspire to.  Anybody who has read Watership Down or The Plague Dogs knows what I'm talking about.  He writes about the most ordinary things and makes them profound.  His stories feel less like words on a page but instruments in an orchestra and he is the composer putting the score together.  There is music in his prose.  I would read him just for the imagery and philosophy alone; that he tells a good story is merely a bonus.

Still, as good as Shardik was, I wasn't affected by what was going on.  I'd seen many of the elements of this kind of story and expected a lot of what happened to happen all the way through his exile--and frankly, I wanted the exile to happen.  Kelderek was a terrible ruler.  Some awful crimes took place, including child slavery, while he was on the throne.  Much of the evil in the kingdom if he doesn't outright condone he turns a blind eye.  Frankly, what made him so bad as a ruler was that he didn't have the courage to say, "No," no matter what his conscience would tell him.

And then he gets captured by Genshed, the notorious and worst child slaver of them all.  Indeed, Genshed is in for contention as the most evil villain in all literature that I've ever encountered.  Certainly, he is in the Top Three.

I used to think that the Joker from The Dark Knight was as close to Satan as anybody has ever depicted.  Not so.  Genshed takes that spot.  See, it's not enough for him to do bad things.  Genshed starves the children, beats them, tortures them, mutilates them, even murders them, but that's not the worst thing he does.  What makes him so terrible is that he inspires some of the children to become like him.  He is known for making the children want to be like him.  This is his most satanic quality: the devil doesn't have to do his own dirty work.  The devil succeeds when he gets others to want to do it for him.

It's hard to read and yet, it needs to be read.  In fact, for a while I thought that the Genshed section was the heart of the story.  In order for Kelderek to be redeemed of his crimes, he had to suffer from the monster he let run rampant in his own kingdom.  He is in the rare position of seeing all the worst consequences of his actions, a gift not many would see as a gift, but how else can we expect to change without knowing the full effect of what we've done?

And there's a happy ending of sorts: Kelderek and the children are saved.  Shardik appears and dies slaying Genshed.  It's a great moment.  The story could have ended there.  I figured the last fifty pages was just denouement.

I was wrong.  The whole book is about the last chapter.  I didn't see it at first.  The last chapter takes place years after Shardik's passing, from the perspective of some random guy who wasn't a part of the story before and knew nothing about any of the events of the story.  In fact, the point-of-view character isn't all that likeable.  I didn't like him, anyways.  Yet, if the Genshed section gives the story closure, the last chapter gives it meaning.

Kelderek, who left so many children to suffer, has now created a society where no child is left unwanted.  He takes in all the former slaves, the neglected, the orphans, the abused, any who can make it to him, and gives them a home.  In the end, he feels that this was the secret Shardik had come to share, that "when all the children are happy, then the future is secure."

In a way, I think that this story is perfect for families, especially the parents.  This may sound strange, but this story has made me think about my responsibilities as a father when I get to that point and what kind of parent I want to be, as well as who I want with me for raising those children.  There has not been another work of fiction that's done that to me.  Very worth the time.

Shardik is Richard Adam's second novel.  It might be his most important.