Maia

Maia is the Richard Adams novel that almost no one expects to exist. Set in the Beklan Empire a generation before Shardik, it follows a peasant girl sold into slavery whose intelligence and beauty take her into the political center of the empire. The book is 1,400 pages long, much of it given over to court intrigue and military campaigning and extended erotic content that is unusually explicit for a major British literary writer.

Whether the book works for you depends almost entirely on whether you can ride with the dissonance. Adams is treating the slave-system politics of Bekla with full seriousness; he is also writing scenes that read like an unusually thoughtful 18th-century French libertine novel. The interweaving is the thing.

When the book is on, it is mesmerising. Maia herself is one of Adams's best protagonists, intelligent and morally serious in ways the form does not usually allow. The political plot in the back third pays off with weight. When the book is off, it is too long.

Four stars. Recommended to readers who finished Shardik and want more of the world. Read Shardik first.