“I don’t have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you.” Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
I don’t intend to devote a lot of space to book reviews, but there are novels so transcendent, so utterly fascinating, that failing to pay tribute to them would feel like a disservice to fantasy. Whether they influenced me or just awed me, these are the titans of the pantheon. The cardinal directions on the genre’s metamap.
Which brings me to Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Oh my goodness gracious this is a strange story. Full confession, my dad got this for me a good decade before I actually read it. It had a puppet on the cover, which I found off-putting (in my defense, their creepiness is an objective fact). I picked it up finally as part of a project to clean my bookshelves out, thinking Oh there’s no way I’ll like this, it can go, and it’s so slender, it’ll take an afternoon.
Well first things first, no, it isn’t a particularly fast read. This story is set in post-apocalyptic ‘Inland,’ written by the eponymous narrator in the first person. English has evolved, while humanity, by their own account, is traveling in the opposite direction. Their only education comes in the form of the state-sponsored Eusa shows, puppet plays depicting the events leading up to the end of the world.
It’s impossible to tell what happened; there’s a lot of talk of ‘berms,’ but Riddley has this incredible moment of apotheosis in the ruins of what felt to me like a particle collider. All we know for certain is that Cambry, once Canterbury, is Zero Groun where the white shadders stood up. Civilization has been reduced to rubble, the prime minister a literal puppeteer telling ghost stories about the bogeyman, science, with a traveling Punch and Judy show. Humanity lives in wretched little fortified communities, moving in groups whenever they leave their settlements for fear of feral dogs.
The protagonist’s father dies at the outset, leaving twelve-year-old Riddley to take on his duty as his community’s Connexion Man. It’s his job to make ‘connexions’ from the Eusa shows, interpretations that might be political observations or mysticism. Faith, politics, basic survival, and the terrible specter of science are all part of the same baffling hodgepodge that is their culture. Riddley’s got the ‘follerme,’ but before he can become a leader, he has to decide where he’s going.
Easy to explain the premise, harder to articulate what makes it so compelling. The protagonist passes the whole of the story walking in circles whilst changing his mind, and I came across the occasional sentence I had to read aloud multiple times before I could figure out what he was saying. This is nonetheless one of the best books I’ve read. Riddley conveys a sense of intense, even vertiginous speed at all times. Even when he’s standing still, his head is spinning, and you never feel frustrated or impotent watching him run in circles. Riddley may be trying to arrive somewhere, but for the reader, the journey is enough.
The imagery is deeply unsettling, the prose inimitable, the protagonist fearless and fearlessly honest. What stuck with me afterward was the way this world, having passed through the filter of these people’s animistic, fearful, hopeless worldview, based on games of telephone and the fragments our society left behind to puzzle them, defies the reader to make sense of it. You just can’t force Riddley’s Inland to fit into what you understand about how anything works. Mr Clevver tore the Littl Shyning Man in 2, and there’s no putting him back together.
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