Riddley Walker

I started this book prepared for it to be difficult to get to grips with, because that's what most of the reviews say. The broken and twisted English, the mutated grammar and future-slang, all adding to the appeal of the story, but hard to wade through. That's not what I found, though.

Maybe it's exposure to text-spelling, Twitter-speak and Facebook-English, but I found the language of the book fell into place fairly quickly and naturally. That's not to say that there weren't words and phrases that I had to pause on and mull over, but that's part of the book's charm. I hope that nobody would be put off reading Hoban's amazing story by concerns over the language in which it's written.

The story comes from the science-fiction staple of the show more post-apocalyptic, nuclear-war-ravaged future, with people struggling to survive at an Iron Age level of technology, whilst surrounded by the ruins and shattered artifacts of the "advanced" civilization that destroyed itself. But it mixes into that Celtic mythology, English folklore, Christian iconography, and a jumbled, incomplete and incomprehensible science. The narrative is allusive and there are lots of double meanings that reward the reader's time in mulling over.

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. show less

After three readings, Hoban's novel is still an engrossing read.
It describes a very believable alternate, post apocalyptic world, together with its mythology, politics, and people. Ridley, the first-person protagonist narrator, speaks and writes in what the English language may become some day in the far future. In fact, the language is almost a character of itself, what Ridley can and can't say using it. Not many authors could carry off such a story.

From the first paragraph of this remarkable novel, you know you're in for a ride:
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'

Post-apocalytic dystopia, coming-of-age novel, survival thriller – it is a genre-breaking feat, show more written in a degenerate, demotic English spoken by those who populate the ragged bands and settlements that have survived the "1 big 1" and the "Master Chaynjis" which followed. It's not an easy read (although the language repays being read out loud) but is utterly compelling.

The fractured, post-nuclear, landscape which Riddley Walker, the eponymous narrator, moves across is a haunting remnant of a future England, bleakly and beautifully described. The social landscape, no less bleak and beautiful, is built through Riddley's encounters, nightmarish or absurd, and through the telling and retelling of myths – attempts to make sense of the world through a partially-rendered bricolage of genuine history, folk tales, misremembered science, puppet shows, religion and art. Violence is always very close to the surface – although the novel asks us to wonder about the possibility of transcending our violent nature, of finding and taming and using only for good what lies at the heart of things (the Littl Shyning Man, the Addom) or reaching and making peace with the idea that lurks at the heart of the self, "lorn and loan and oansome".

Riddley Walker is intense, richly textured, tragic and wonderful. I can't recommend it highly enough. show less

Bought on a whim while browsing a beer and book venue, I didn't know what to expect with Riddley Walker. I'm always intrigued by things that are trying something different though, and the opening page sends that message pretty loud and clear. Written entirely in broken English, from the perspective of a post-nuclear citizen, where history and fact evolve through stories, performances and "connexions", the book is a unique puzzle as much as it is a novel. Gene Wolfe springs to mind as a comparison, but somehow Gene's legible brand of the enigmatic felt more tedious and obnoxious to me than Hoban's less accessible approach here; a more apt comparison might be Joyce or Burgess, though this likely sits somewhere in-between the two. One show more would be forgiven for abandoning Riddley in spite of its short length, although I do think perseverance will have most finding it more readable than they expect, since much of the language involves familiar words spelt oddly, and only a handful of potentially impenetrable terms.

It's not a book I can recommend to just anyone. The story is inspired by and steeped in specific aspects of British culture, with a particularly heavy thematic drawn from Punch and Judy. If you don't know who Punch and Judy are, then I would recommend reading up on it and browsing a show or two on youtube for context before setting foot in this book. I grew up with showings of those mischievous puppets but I still felt out of my depth enough to do some refreshing. I think it also helps to know that understanding everything in Riddley Walker is probably neither possible nor required, and in some ways that's part of the appeal for me. It gives a greater sense of tangibility to the world and gives me the motivation to return for a reread. Atmosphere and ideas are something I'm a real sucker for and I think that's why this worked so well for me in spite of some occasionally frustrating passages. It's an entirely unique experience but also probably a jar of Marmite. Consider yourself warned. show less

Wow, this is quite a book. Ridley Walker, the narrator of the story, is a 12 year old living in a post-apocalyptic East England. His language is a heavily distorted, and simplified, English (making some parts tricky to decipher), reflecting the essentially medieval society he lives in, 2000 years after The Bad Time.

Just about all knowledge from our time has been lost, but there are fragments of it echoed in nursery rhymes and folk tales that recur throughout the novel. Just as Riddley's language is a distorted echo of our English, with faux-amis-like homonyms revealing unintended meanings, the nursery rhymes and folk tales contain kernels of forgotten knowledge from the time before the apocalypse. This is done exceptionally well - show more while part of the fun of the book is trying to spot the origins of these folk stories, they are not the clumsy, direct allegories one might expect, but have the real ring of organic myth.

It is interesting that the society seems restrained by their knowledge of the pre-apocalyptic world. If they were starting from scratch you feel they'd make greater progress. As it is, they are trying to recreate what they knew we have without the necessary foundations, and so seem doomed to stagger around in fruitless circles (like an emergent religion based on fossilised world models, à la J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough).

This, along with the depravation and sheer grimness of Riddley's world, and the inevitable power struggles and cruelty make the book a somewhat depressing, harrowing read with an underlying despair at the human condition. But then there are also definitely kernels of optimism, partly from the eponymous character's resilience, but also from the creativity evinced by their new myths and the emergent culture that comes from it.

Riddley Walker is a great book - linguistically rich and challenging, with a well-constructed future-primitive world with a convincing culture. Not always easy, but it grabbed me and kept me reading - even if, sometimes, only a couple of pages at a time. And as soon as I finished I wanted to go back and re-read sections of it - as well as look up other people's thoughts about the book (I haven't done that yet). There are so many characters, phrases and incidents which have firmly lodged themselves in my subconscious that Riddley Walker will stay with me for quite a while. show less

The tale itself is a short and slender one, but the way its told is an extraordinary literary achievement. The events of the book take place thousands of years after a nuclear war has destroyed civilization, and humans are living in a kind of Iron Age, dimly aware that mankind was once much greater, and trying to puzzle out the connections between that lost world and their own mucky one. The author immerses you in the look, feel and smell of this place. What is extraordinary is, the entire story is written in the dialect of the time--a kind of smashed English in which words have been broken and put back together many times, like bones that have been fractured and imperfectly set by someone over and over. Some of it will come to you from show more sounding the words phonetically, and some will come from repetition of the same phrases in different contexts. The hardest part for me were proper and place names-- I'm not overly familiar with the geography or proper names of England, which is where the story takes place. ( I had to look in the glossary to find out "rizlas" were cigarette papers.) The constant repetition wore me down after awhile, and sometimes it seemed like nothing was happening, the characters were just turning things over (and over and over) in their heads. Something truly momentous occurs at the end of chapter 16, and that was an "Aha!" moment for me. There were two Afterwords, a glossary and some notes at the end, and I might have had an easier time if I'd read them first, but I'm kind of glad I muddled through on my own. I will read it again now, and I'm sure I''ll pick up on things I missed the first time. Because the story is told first person by the title character, you really get to know him well and care about him--not so much the other characters. Strangely enough, the only secondary character I really felt anything for was a dog. This isn't an easy book to get through, but well worth the effort as I've never read anything like it. show less

This is the best book I've read so far this year, and the only postapocalyptic fiction I've ever loved. Hoban invents a whole new English (not that it's called that) for Riddley and his fellow Iron-Age survivors of a nuclear war two millennia earlier. The language isn't just a fun prop, the gaps between it and our English tell as much of the backstory as we're going to get. Hoban also invents a mythos based on a flyer from a twentieth-century cathedral, whose rituals have evolved from Punch and Judy shows. The whole thing is dazzling and surprisingly humane. The Onion AV Club's initial discussion says way more than I can, especially the entries from Leonard Pierce and Ellen Wernecke.