Shardik

After Watership Down made him a world-famous writer, Richard Adams could have done what most writers do and produced a sequel for the rest of his career. Instead he wrote Shardik, a 600-page religious novel about a hunter from a primitive island who comes upon a giant wounded bear in a burning forest and decides the bear is the incarnation of a half-forgotten god named Shardik. The conviction takes him from being a hunter to being a priest-king. It then breaks him.

The book is a study in religious conviction and what conviction does to the person who carries it. Adams refuses to settle the question of whether Shardik really is divine. Kelderek believes it. The bear behaves like a bear. The Beklan empire that builds up around the discovery is rendered with the kind of careful political detail Adams brought to the warrens of Watership Down. The slave-trade chapters in the back half are some of the most difficult writing in serious post-war British fiction.

Whether the book works for you depends on whether you can ride with how slow it moves. Shardik takes its religious questions at the pace they deserve. The ending is hopeful in a hard-earned way that the cover copy will not warn you about.

Five stars. A genuine masterpiece that has been quietly underrated for nearly half a century. Best read with a clear week in front of you.