Shardik presents, in one way, a microcosm like the lapine universe of Watership Down. Bekla is a completely realized alternate world. Adams gives it language, culture, geography, and history. The novel offers therefore a total involvement and immersion in a world strange, wonderful, and terrible.

Shardik, like Watership Down, offers frequent natural description. Adams's prose is filled with long passages of scenic description, and the narrative often pauses for a paragraph-long metaphor or simile. Its purpose in Shardik, though, is to create the sublime rather than the pastoral. The landscape, like the events unfolding on it, is beyond human control. Whether it is divine wrath or lucky political rebellion that is ravaging Bekla, the reader is aware that the action is a life-anddeath struggle. Shardik is the epic of Bekla, the story of a turning point in the history of a civilization.