'Riddley Walker' by Russell Hoban

Reading Anna Smaill’s The Chimes (especially the astounding first half) earlier this year reminded me of Riddley Walker, so I re-read it (after a space of about what must now be three decades). The book is set many hundreds of years after what was evidently a widespread nuclear devastation, and the surviving humans scratch a hard life and have raised themselves to a level of acculturation equivalent to the iron age (the practice of farming is spreading, iron is salvaged from machines in swamps). What makes this book so much more than quite interesting, though, is the language in which it is told. The narrator, Riddley Walker, is the first person to begin to write down the phonetic speech, a degenerated and reforming dialect of English which perfectly conveys a conceptual world which is being rebuilt from the chance survivals and recombination of various pieces of cultural, religious and scientific jetsam. The government (Abel Goodparley the Pry Mincer and the others of the Mincery) maintains order through the performance of puppet shows, which re-enact the founding mythos of Eusa, Mr Clevver and the Littl Shyning Man the Addom, conflations of the rags of the story of St Eustace combined with the tatters of atomic theory. When Riddley finds a buried Punch head from the old times (with a puppeteer’s hand still inside), he climbs over the fence and, accompanied by a pack of wild dogs (one of the major threats to post-apocalyptic survival) leaves the life he knew, and frees a young eyeless mutant, the Ardship of Cambry (from ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’), from the hole in which he is being kept until he can be brought together with other genetic mutants (the Puter Leat (from ‘Computer Elite’)) in a ceremony seemingly intended to recreate the atomic reaction that marked the cultural escarpment that meant that humanity had to restart itself. “O wat we ben! And what we come to. How cud any 1 not want to get that Power back from time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals turning?” Climate change may have replaced nuclear war as the looming agent of societal collapse, but that the prospect of the near-animal struggle just to stay alive may belong to our near future rather than just to our deep past is as urgent as when the book was written. The broken-and-remade language forces the reader to slow down and be initiated (indelibly) into a different way of thinking, full of surprising beauty and import.

July 2015