Riddley Walker

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I just finished reading Russel Hoban’s 1980 masterpiece “Riddley Walker.” It took a lot of thought to get through it (for reasons explained below) but it was time well worth spending. It is a wonderful short novel.

The novel is set many many years after England (and presumably the world) has been devastated by nuclear war. The descendants of the survivors live at something like an Iron Age level amid the decaying ruins of towns and cities. They scratch a bare living by farming, foraging, and manual labour, in isolated settlements surrounded by packs of feral dogs. Whatever government exists proclaims its rule via travelling puppet shows.

The eponymous hero of the book, Riddley Walker, is the son of a “connextion man” — a kind of shaman — who inherits his father’s role when the older man dies in an accident. He learns through arcane songs and tales how the “clevver bloakes” in “time back way way back” destroyed the world by their manipulations of the great power of atom splitting. But the secrets of chemistry and physics have all but been lost.

After leaving his group, Walker wanders around southern England and becomes involved against his will (and often his knowledge) in plots to regain access to nuclear weapons. But throughout, young Riddley remains his own man.

The difficulty in the text comes from the language used. It is written in a made-up language that some essayists have called Riddleyspeak. This is Hoban’s vision of what the dialect of southern England might become after so many generations. It almost forces the reader to read the text out loud in order to gather the full meaning. As a Londoner myself, I found most of this quite easy to follow, but I am sure that with some patience (and sounding out the oddly-spelled words) anyone interested will get the hang of it.

A strange book, but a really good one, too.