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| Why Riddley Walker rivals the Passion as the perfect Easter story | Why Riddley Walker rivals the Passion as the perfect Easter story |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| I don't do God, but I do do dystopias, and I do feast days too. Easter is the best one, because you get a four-day weekend, fish pie and a lamb dinner. I like its mix of sombreness and celebration too, and second coming or not, the Passion is a hell of a drama. Betrayal! Sacrifice! Torture! All my favourite narrative elements – and this is where the dystopias come in, because all those things feature in the book I'm re-reading this Easter weekend: Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic pilgrimage Riddley Walker. | I don't do God, but I do do dystopias, and I do feast days too. Easter is the best one, because you get a four-day weekend, fish pie and a lamb dinner. I like its mix of sombreness and celebration too, and second coming or not, the Passion is a hell of a drama. Betrayal! Sacrifice! Torture! All my favourite narrative elements – and this is where the dystopias come in, because all those things feature in the book I'm re-reading this Easter weekend: Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic pilgrimage Riddley Walker. |
| Riddley Walker has literary cousins, but as a work of imagination, it's quite singular. You can trace patterns of influence and common themes with Alasdair Gray, James Joyce or Margaret Atwood; but nothing approaches the completeness of Hoban's invention in Riddley Walker. He's fashioned not just a complete world, but also the language to describe that world: the entire novel is written in the strange future-dialect of its eponymous narrator and hero. Riddley Walker exists wholly on its own terms. | |
| That doesn't mean it's unmarked by the time and place of its creation. Published in 1980, Riddley Walker fully realises the twin cold war terrors: that the end is coming, and that surviving it would be the worst thing that could happen to you. If you think Threads turns out a bit grim, Riddley Walker is essentially the final scene, extended over 214 pages and a couple of millennia of civil degeneration. | |
| Humans live short lives in dismal settlements. Communications and transport have been destroyed, so society is constrained to walking distance: the characters talk about "Inland" in place of England, but it's never quite clear whether Kent, where the novel is set, is included in Inland or apart from it. The only thing that seems to be binding Inland's fragmented society together is a form of government called "the mincery", which acts as church and state together. | Humans live short lives in dismal settlements. Communications and transport have been destroyed, so society is constrained to walking distance: the characters talk about "Inland" in place of England, but it's never quite clear whether Kent, where the novel is set, is included in Inland or apart from it. The only thing that seems to be binding Inland's fragmented society together is a form of government called "the mincery", which acts as church and state together. |
| With only pre-industrial technology available, the people of Inland live by scavenging, digging out the detritus of civilisation to use again, and their belief system is likewise a scavenger theology, combining whatever elements are available. There's some Christianity: the central figure of the mythology is Eusa, based on St Eustace. There's a bit of paganism: the green man features. And it takes in physics too. In the central legend, a trickster character called Mr Clevver encourages Eusa to find and tear in two someone called "the Littl Shynin Man the Addom". | With only pre-industrial technology available, the people of Inland live by scavenging, digging out the detritus of civilisation to use again, and their belief system is likewise a scavenger theology, combining whatever elements are available. There's some Christianity: the central figure of the mythology is Eusa, based on St Eustace. There's a bit of paganism: the green man features. And it takes in physics too. In the central legend, a trickster character called Mr Clevver encourages Eusa to find and tear in two someone called "the Littl Shynin Man the Addom". |
| There's a temptation to read Riddley Walker as, precisely, a riddle – to think that by matching every element to a literal antecedent, you might be able to weasel out the truth of the book. And this sort of reading works, up to a point: Eusa is humanity seduced by knowledge and power, the Littl Shynin Man is the atom, and both unleash terrible chaos when split. It's satisfying to note these correspondences, in the same way that it's satisfying to realise that the novel's Cambry exists on the site of our Canterbury, its Dog Et on our Dargate. | There's a temptation to read Riddley Walker as, precisely, a riddle – to think that by matching every element to a literal antecedent, you might be able to weasel out the truth of the book. And this sort of reading works, up to a point: Eusa is humanity seduced by knowledge and power, the Littl Shynin Man is the atom, and both unleash terrible chaos when split. It's satisfying to note these correspondences, in the same way that it's satisfying to realise that the novel's Cambry exists on the site of our Canterbury, its Dog Et on our Dargate. |
| Then having excavated these supposed truths, you realise that you've lost more than you've gained, translating away the richness and myth of the novel and its language. Hoban calls it a "broken-up and worn-down vernacular", but it doesn't seem in need of fixing. Riddley Walker's language is poetic in the sense that it's made to be spoken more than read in silence. My first reading was punctuated by a lot of stopping-and-saying-out-loud when I stumbled on "moufing" or "binses" or "chaynjis". | Then having excavated these supposed truths, you realise that you've lost more than you've gained, translating away the richness and myth of the novel and its language. Hoban calls it a "broken-up and worn-down vernacular", but it doesn't seem in need of fixing. Riddley Walker's language is poetic in the sense that it's made to be spoken more than read in silence. My first reading was punctuated by a lot of stopping-and-saying-out-loud when I stumbled on "moufing" or "binses" or "chaynjis". |
| Rendering these pronunciations on paper gives Riddley Walker the physical intimacy of throat and mouth working, but there's depth and allusion to it to. The relative smallness of the Riddley vocabulary and the apparent simplicity of its syntax means that meanings are layered on meanings, and that becomes meaningful in itself. Nothing is ever what it seems to be: instead, things are "blipful", intermittent revelations of something beyond that can never be fixed. | Rendering these pronunciations on paper gives Riddley Walker the physical intimacy of throat and mouth working, but there's depth and allusion to it to. The relative smallness of the Riddley vocabulary and the apparent simplicity of its syntax means that meanings are layered on meanings, and that becomes meaningful in itself. Nothing is ever what it seems to be: instead, things are "blipful", intermittent revelations of something beyond that can never be fixed. |
| That intimation of the something beyond is my favourite thing about Riddley Walker. Lorna, the "tel woman", gives Riddley this speech early on: "Theres some thing in us it dont have no name … It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can. … It puts us on like we put on our cloes … What ever it is we dont come naturel to it." Out of all the characters' efforts to impose sense and order on their world through makeshift theology, I don't think any improves on Lorna's, but all of them prove her point: there is something more than human in being human, and the urge to describe that is maybe more important than the description you fix on. |