Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

Simply stunning

 

I think Riddley Walker is simply stunning. I first read it forty years ago when it was first published and it is just as brilliant on re-reading now.

So much has been written about the book that another review from me is perhaps rather redundant, but it is worth saying that it’s a fantastic read. A story written in an unfamiliar dialect and set a couple of thousand years after a nuclear holocaust which took place roughly in our present may sound unwelcoming, but this really isn’t one of those almost unreadable books which people who have always read the entire Booker Long List tell you that you ought to read because it Will Be Good For You. I found it quite easy to read, incredibly atmospheric, a gripping story and full of thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas.

It’s very hard to summarise, but it’s about independent thought and its dangers, how ideas may become lost or changed in a largely illiterate society and much, much more.

I absolutely loved the language and the brilliant way in which Russell Hoban suggests it may have evolved – like "vack your weight" for leaving (evacuating) somewhere, for example and then finding it declines to "vack my weight" etc. The use of language is just fantastic, as is Hoban's understanding of what might be passed down and distorted in a long oral tradition. There's the vocabulary, like the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer, tiny traces of the 20th century, as in the chant which begins "Heard it and the news of 10..." which is presumably a reference to News At Ten, the building of new creation myths and so on. I found it quite easy to get into, only having to pause occasionally to sound a word or phrase in my head - and even that was a pleasure. I found the whole effect mesmerising and although not everything is explained (and is possibly not explicable) it set off resonances, pulled me in and held me spellbound for long periods.

I am reminded of Alan Bennett's essay Comfortable Words about the Book Of Common Prayer in which he says, "Those who rewrote the Prayer Book complained very much at the time  - and understandably - that many of the protests came from those, such as myself, whose connection with the Church was tenuous, the argument implicit in this being that the clergy know what is best for their congregations.  This is the same argument that is advanced by farmers in answer to protests about the grubbing-up of hedges and the destruction of field patterns. The land is the farmer's bread and butter, the argument goes, and so he must therefore have its welfare more at heart than the occasional visitor.  So in their own field the liturgical reformers grub up the awkward thickets of language that make the harvest of souls more difficult, plough in the sixteenth century hedges that are hard to penetrate but for that reason shelter all manner of rare creatures: poetry, mystery, transcendence.  All must be flat, dull, accessible and rational.  Fields and worship."

Riddley Walker has some similar thickets which shelter all manner of rare creatures, but it’s still wonderfully readable. It is genuinely among the best, most enjoyable and most rewarding books I have read and I would urge anyone to give it a try.