Q4: Shardik the Novel

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Shardik is a long novel, certainly, and not always fast-paced, though at times it moves well enough. At other times, Adams takes his time, describing a river crossing over a page and a half, for example. What did you think of the pacing and sequence of events in the story? How well does it hold up as a story? Can you compare it to another story we’ve read?

Comments

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    Aha, I'd migrated slightly into this discussion starter while tackling the last one. I found it needlessly long - it was obvious for about 100 pages or so, if not more, that Kelderek was going to meet the Tuginda again (though I had not anticipated his re-meeting Melathys) and I really wasn't sure that we needed all of the delaying tactics!

    (To be strictly fair, I have not yet finished the book so the last maybe 150 pages are still there to be experienced)

    And I didn't enjoy Adams's writing style enough to have patience with his long circumlocutions. A better writer might well have held my interest in crossing a river in a page and a half, but I constantly found myself skimming it and thinking "come on, we know where this is going, please just get to the point".

    So I guess in ruthless summary I would say that - for me at least - Adams's imagination for the tale outstripped his ability to recount it.

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    The last 150 pages do (a) pick up the pace, (b) introduce some of the more interesting characters, and (c) tie the slavery angle back into the beginning, and in so doing might address some (likely not all) of your religious concerns, so I'd say to press on through the last 2 sections if you're willing. That said, I think your criticisms are fair and, at various times and places of my read, were shared by me.

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    @Apocryphal said:
    The last 150 pages do (a) pick up the pace, (b) introduce some of the more interesting characters, and (c) tie the slavery angle back into the beginning, and in so doing might address some (likely not all) of your religious concerns, so I'd say to press on through the last 2 sections if you're willing. That said, I think your criticisms are fair and, at various times and places of my read, were shared by me.

    Oh yes, I am intending to finish and have been reading at a faster pace the last few days :)

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    Again, my experiences mirror those of Richard. Reading the book got very fatiguing, and I was plowing my way through it many times. I did not enjoy his writing style, and thought his plotting was meh.

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    Finished last night and my feelings weren't really changed by the ending - it all felt too long and too slow with too much elaborate verbiage. I don't mind lengthy writing if someone's prose style can support it, but I don't think Adams's is up to the challenge. However, I am glad to have tackled the book
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    edited January 12

    Sorry - have been down for a few days with the flu - couldn't do much but sleep and drool.
    I thought the book started off well enough. Through the first two sections, I didn't mind the slow pace. It felt like someone who was deliberately wanting to write a long book, and the descriptions we good enough. A sword-and-sorcery writer I knew would have said this was lazy writing. Maybe he's right, but then Tolkien was also very lazy. Certainly Adams did not have Tolkien's skill (or maybe patience is the better word - when Michael was posting here he pointed out how often Tolkien broke the rules).

    Anyway, I like the first two sections, and the last two sections. The third section was OK, but the big gap in time and the introduction of it with a brand new character (and distancing us from Kelderek, even giving him a new name) was quite jarring. The fourth and fifth sections were downright boring, so it's really easy for me to see why anyone would give up the book at this stage, if not for the duty to continue the club read.

    However, I did really like the last two sections. I really zipped through the slaver section, and the denouement was slower but still satisfying. So I'm glad I persisted through the boring middle to get to the end, which tied together Kelderek's beginning with his end is a sort of redemption story, and makes sense of the slaver angle (which, introduced as it is in the middle of the book, has this sort of 'where did that come from? angle.

    So overall, not great, not terrible. It's nowhere near as good as Watership Down or The Plague Dogs, both of which as much tighter.

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    @Apocryphal said:
    Sorry - have been down for a few days with the flu - couldn't do much but sleep and drool.

    Sorry to hear that, hope you're on the mend now

    However, I did really like the last two sections. I really zipped through the slaver section, and the denouement was slower but still satisfying. So I'm glad I persisted through the boring middle to get to the end, which tied together Kelderek's beginning with his end is a sort of redemption story, and makes sense of the slaver angle (which, introduced as it is in the middle of the book, has this sort of 'where did that come from? angle.

    I partly agree with this - I still struggled with the writing and flicked rapidly through it... but I did appreciate the way Adams tried to tie start and end together, most notably with the (as it were) fulfilment of his name "Play with the Children" which seemed a bit random at the start but then makes sense. But as well as that it seemed to me that he was trying to structure the two ends of the book in a neat way, with either inversions or parallels. For example Genshen was kind of an anti-Shardik. And so on. The problem was that I had lost the will to engage with the writing enough to follow all that through. There's probably some mileage in reading only the two sections at start and end and properly tracking all that, but I think it would be a while before I tackled that project :)

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    edited January 12

    I think if you cut out the middle and jump directly to the end the book would have been better for it. Like the guy that stitched the three 'Hobbit' movies together into two movies and vastly improved it all. Remembering of course that Jackson was forced to make his proposed two Hobbit movies into three by the studio.

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    edited January 13
    So I've been trying to finish this, but haven't. So perhaps my comments are off the mark.

    Anyway, like many others here, I think this author needed an editor. I wasn't disturbed by the religion aspect of the imagined society, but I don't really consider this fantasy. Actually seemed a more moralistic tale than anything else. Which chimes with my pre-existing opinion of Adams, so again, maybe an opinion not worth much.

    I found the world building the most frustrating part of the book. Some things we got in great detail, but they seemed unimportant, while other things that were important were not described at all. I attribute this to the work being more of a screed than a story.
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    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    So I've been trying to finish this, but haven't. So perhaps my comments are off the mark.

    Anyway, like many others here, I think this author needed an editor. I wasn't disturbed by the religion aspect of the imagined society, but I don't really consider this fantasy. Actually seemed a more moralistic tale than anything else. Which chimes with my pre-existing opinion of Adams, so again, maybe an opinion not worth much.

    I found the world building the most frustrating part of the book. Some things we got in great detail, but they seemed unimportant, while other things that were important were not described at all. I attribute this to the work being more of a screed than a story.

    Well, thanks to everyone for trying. I definitely never imagined the book would be this difficult to complete or certainly wouldn't have picked it. But onto your comments, which I find interesting in a broad sense as generally applicable to fiction, not just this book...

    In what way isn't it a fantasy? And why would being a moralizing tale exclude it from being a fantasy in your view? I'm not sure anyone else would see these as being mutually exclusive. Usually, a 'fantasy' is a story with impossible elements - either the setting doesn't and couldn't exist, or things in the book (like dragons and magic spells) don't or can't exist. Shardik seems to fit the bill.

    Same goes for the other comment. I read the meaning of 'screed' as a long and perhaps tedious essay, which you may be right about (certainly the long and tedious part, and he does seem to have a message to deliver), but why would that exclude it from being a story? It definitely has a beginning, middle, and end (and denouement), it features characters and describes events... how not a story?

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    I think Barner is exactly right on one thing - this book desperately needed an editor, one with a sharp scalpel and the good of the story at heart. There are the bones of something very cool here, but after Watership Down, they let Adams have his way, and the book foundered and sank under its own weight.

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    > @Apocryphal said:
    >
    > In what way isn't it a fantasy? <snip> Usually, a 'fantasy' is a story with impossible elements - either the setting doesn't and couldn't exist, or things in the book (like dragons and magic spells) don't or can't exist. Shardik seems to fit the bill.

    Hmmm. All fiction is impossible. Would you say Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or Conan Doyle's Sherlock stories fantasies? I don't think of them a fantasy, but perhaps I'm just narrow.

    Also I think the fantasy genre doesn't simply have beyond this world stuff, but that it needs to be understood by the reader as the significant how and why narrative events turned out the way they did. E.g. Macbeth's father's ghost does not make the play a fantasy.

    > And why would being a moralizing tale exclude it from being a fantasy in your view? I'm not sure anyone else would see these as being mutually exclusive.

    They're not of course, but again I'm going to say the point was moralizing.

    > Same goes for the other comment. I read the meaning of 'screed' as a long and perhaps tedious essay, which you may be right about (certainly the long and tedious part, and he does seem to have a message to deliver), but why would that exclude it from being a story? It definitely has a beginning, middle, and end (and denouement), it features characters and describes events... how not a story?

    Well, all speech has a beginning, middle, and end. And all speech is about something. I think a story in our time, as opposed to say the "original" Arabian Nights, has, or should have, more to it than characters and events. It needs to show the reader that it is speech that was constructed or contrived to understand how what it contains itself beyond itself itself matters.

    As opposed to a screed, which is more a long and uninterrupted stream of speech, which is thin on importance, and only part of the bigger fabric that someone is talking. I guess for me, what indicates a screed is that what matters is the speaking, not what is beyond the speaking. See https://www.etymonline.com/word/screed#etymonline_v_22982 I think that is what happened here. Adams got lost in his own words.
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    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    Hmmm. All fiction is impossible. Would you say Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or Conan Doyle's Sherlock stories fantasies? I don't think of them a fantasy, but perhaps I'm just narrow.

    That echoes something Ursula LeGuin wrote in the forward to Left Hand of Darkness:

    Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth... But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists of inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion... They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies [examples including Marshalsea Prison, the battle of Borodino, the process of cloning or the deterioration of personality)... This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behaviour makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention... I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

    Now, whilst I agree with that as a matter of principle, it doesn't IMHO address the practical problem that we face when reading a genre book... I have certain expectations if I'm reading historical fiction, that the author will have done enough research to credibly present the place and time in question without horrifically glaring anachronisms. If I'm reading SF/F I expect the author to have thought through their world, and for their to be an underlying pleasing logic to the way it all hangs together (even if at first sight it appears counterfactual). And I'm happy with things like historical fantasy (in another thread we're talking about Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell) where the author sets themself the harder task of making the world both how it was and not how it was, but in a consistent way (if you see what I mean).

    So speaking personally I do find myself addressing different genre books in different ways. So it was clear from the start that Shardik wasn't HF, but that the societies described were a bit like medieval ones from history. And I think Adams stayed pretty faithful to that - nothing anachronistic happened or was introduced, and people's reaction to lower- or higher-ranked people and to Shardik himself remained in keeping. There wasn't magic, though there was religious ceremony which might easily be confused with magic, so it was very much at the "rational" end of fantasy.

    So to try and make sense of that ramble, I would say that while all fiction is impossible (or at very least invented) some fiction is more impossible than others. And also that whatever the genre, it's the author's job to make their world seem as possible as possible while you are reading it.

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    I actually thought I was paraphrasing LeGuin in saying that, but I suppose it was actually Clarke:

    “...science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could.”

    While all fiction is made up, meaning it is invented, it is not all impossible. The events described in Heart of Darkness certainly could have happened. Many similar events did happen. Sherlock Holmes pushes the envelope, but even his feats of deduction are not impossible, just improbable.

    Also, fantasy and genre fantasy are quite different things. But those are much muddier waters not really relevant to the discussion, I don't think. Though on a related note, a book I'm currently reading: Fantasy, The 100 Best Books by James Cawthorn & Michael Moorcock (from 1988) lists many books not traditionally considered fantasies, like Moby Dick and The Turn of the Screw and Kafka's The Trial & The Castle, plus a number of ghost stories and two books which also appear in the 100 Best SF Novels by the same publisher. The author doesn't offer a definition of fantasy, though, and just says "'Fantasy' is what I point to when I say it."

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    I don't play well with genres - or lit crit - so I shall stay in the shallow end of the pool with the other kids... ;)

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    Fair enough. I guess I think that in fantasy the magic is the food and not the icing. It nourishes us differently than journalism. Did you find any magic in Shardik? Or nourishment?

    I think it's interesting also that, judging by memories of it being a good book, it was somehow nourishing for a time. Perhaps, like food, when fantasy goes off it is no longer fantasy. Magic also I suppose.
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    edited January 15

    I agree, no overt magic. But there's also no magic in much of Guy Gavriel Kay's work, like The Lions of Al-Rassan. But it is entirely set in a fictional place that is obviously not our world, which makes it a fantasy.

    I do find a certain magic in the idea (mostly mentioned in another thread) of people assigning for themselves a destiny based on the seemingly random actions of someone (or something, in the case of The Zone) they meet. Another Adams, Douglas Adams, described this as the practice of 'zen navigation' in his Dirk Gently novels - you can get to where you want to go by following someone who looks like they know where they are going. I never read those books, just had a friend describe them to me, so that might be muddling things a bit, but it's the idea that I find magical. Whether that means following a prophetic bear, a decisive driver, an escapee from an asylum who might be an alien, or ancient writings from 2000 years ago, or heading toward a mysterious region, isn't it a kind of magic when people get to where they think they 'ought to be'?

    And some nourishment, I do find some in the complete story arc - spoilers below.

    Kelderek begins his life as a hunter to takes joy in speaking to children, to the point where it becomes a slightly mocking nickname. Then he sees a huge bear - a bear which he's been raised to believe has special significance as an avatar of God. Because he first spotted the Bear (among the people he knows, mind you) he decides he's special. When other people tell him he's special, he believes them. This leads him to both great and terrible things - betrayal, kingship, and the revival of a national slave trade in children. As events unfold, he gets stripped of his kingship, then follows the bear into imprisonment. While imprisoned, he meets other prisoners, children who are to be sold as slaves. He becomes woke to his role in this. Later, when the actions of the bear free him, he is offered the chance to lead a community. He founds a community based on improving the lives of abused children. It's a bit simplistic, but so are many moralistic tales.

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    @Apocryphal said:
    Kelderek begins his life as a hunter to takes joy in speaking to children, to the point where it becomes a slightly mocking nickname. Then he sees a huge bear - a bear which he's been raised to believe has special significance as an avatar of God. Because he first spotted the Bear (among the people he knows, mind you) he decides he's special. When other people tell him he's special, he believes them. This leads him to both great and terrible things - betrayal, kingship, and the revival of a national slave trade in children. As events unfold, he gets stripped of his kingship, then follows the bear into imprisonment. While imprisoned, he meets other prisoners, children who are to be sold as slaves. He becomes woke to his role in this. Later, when the actions of the bear free him, he is offered the chance to lead a community. He founds a community based on improving the lives of abused children. It's a bit simplistic, but so are many moralistic tales.

    That's a really nice summary, and got me thinking about other story arcs. The classic (and slightly simplistic) distinction between comedy and tragedy is that comedy follows an arc like \/ - it goes down first when everything's going wrong, but then recovers to a great ending like happiness, marriage, etc. Tragedy on the other hand goes like /\ - it all looks as though things are going well but then fails and disintegrates towards death or whatever. (Comedy and tragedy aren't necessarily quite the right words but they're the ones traditionally used, based in no small part on readings of Shakespeare's plays).

    Now, following your description Adams has created a story which looks as though it has a tragic plot arc - Kelderek gets to be king, but then it all goes wrong and he is deposed, abused etc and ends his days in an obscure place that nobody cares about. But in fact seen morally it's a comedy - Kelderek's coronation is in fact a low point for him personally (though he doesn't realise it at the time) and also for the land as a whole, and the end of the book sees him working for the good of others and united in marriage with a girl who he saw right at the start.

    So there's nothing wrong with his planning, or his grand design... but we seem to be all agreed that its his execution in terms of prose style and verbosity that lets it down. As a few of us have said, it might well have been a much better book if pruned down to half the size. Of course you'd still need the middle bit where he's king, but maybe we'd all have appreciated it a lot more if he'd been more ruthless with himself!

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    Should have jumped to him losing his kingship and gone forward from there, bringing in flashbacks as needed.

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    edited January 15
    @RichardAbbott On the other hand I would say that efforts to separate style from substance, while maybe justified in terms of analysis, should not be used to rescue the evaluation of the whole because it is the style which is the foundation for the substance, not the other way round.

    When I walked away from where I got in the book, I was thinking about why Adams chose to work on making this, and haven't come up with a satisfactory answer. There may not be one.

    I think critical analysis is of great use for makers / poets looking to improve their craft, but for evaluation not so much. It is true that the reader/ audience / recipient needs to be educated to receive any kind of message, and a maker should keep that in mind when making something so it is appropriate. But when recipients engage in analysis, it becomes less about the work / working, and more about social differentiation, and humans are creative enough that they can use anything for that.

    Edit: I think what I'm trying to say is that criticism from a recipient's pov is valid, as long as it is about the reception of the work rather than the work itself. And to evaluate a work by its reception is valid, but that really tells us more about the recipients than the work. Don't know, it's a little early here.

    I got to about page 250. I had trouble reading the book because it contained what really seemed like extraneous detail, e.g. the description of the Ledges and the people there, but then those details seemed to be just dropped. Made me think of Chekhov and the pistol at the beginning. There just wasn't enough to get me to wait 350-400 pages to get to why this was important. Did the book cycle back to that?

    Part of my difficulty was simply that I didn't like Adams' voice / tone / style. He liked listening to himself more that considering who else was listening to him. That is likely because I am not the intended reader (social differentiation), but the fact that a work is not for everybody is not a valid basis to say that such differentiating has good qualities. The quality of the differentiation depends on the evaluation of the society, not the work.
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    edited January 15

    I'm not sure about that, but if I went that route I'd probably start with him as a captive and interlace that with memories of him encountering the bear to eventually becoming king, then skip most of the journey up to him getting captured altogether, since that was the dull(est) part.

    Interesting thing about the \/ analogy, when he is king, he's hardly present in the story himself - that whole section is told from the viewpoint of others. So we don't really get to know him as king - there's no real sense of this being a high point. This supports your comedy shape. BTW, likely a coincidence, but if you trace his journey on the map, it does make a V.

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    @BarnerCobblewood yes I tend to agree with a lot of what you said. I was trying to puzzle through the question "what did Adams think he was trying to achieve" given that collectively we've all decided that the book failed in various ways to secure our interest and enthusiasm. It's clear that he wanted Kelderek to experience a political high point and a personal low point, and end up fulfilling his early promise of Plays with the Children. Now this could have been done in lots of ways but the particular way Adams chose was very cumbersome and verbose. I don't think any of us liked the writing: quite a few didn't finish it.

    However, I am convinced that Adams set out with a shape and form in mind, and we can see some of that shape in the way the novel's beginning and end tie up. Some authors do a lot of structural planning before getting to grips with writing while others don't ("plotters" and "panthers" in common parlance). My guess is that he spent a fair time plotting before getting down to writing. I guess he must have chosen the very verbose writing style as well (unless he always writes like that, but as I've not read any of his other books I don't know) - it seems a weird choice to me, and I don't understand it. But I still think that the basic idea of Shardik the novel was sound, and if there is a failure it's one of execution rather than imagination.
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    I didn't find myself NOT enjoying the book, but the prose style forced me to slow down, and not in the way I usually like. I have no problems with books that have long stretches of descriptions (working my way through Les Miserables right now and it just spent like 50 pages describing a convent) as long as I feel like it's being done for a purpose that I can understand. Sometimes Shardik felt like it stumbled off the path a bit, but it always came back - for me at least.

    At times it almost felt like it was being written as a play, where we just get check ins with characters who are chatting away.

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    That's largely how I felt about it.

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