Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
by Russell Hoban
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Book Summary Information
Author: Russell HobanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-22
ISBN: 0253212340
Number of pages: 254
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Book Reviews of Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
Book Review: Difficult, un-nerving and an effort to read, but flat brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
The issue of what a post-apocalyptic world might be like has been a staple of culture forever. I would go so far as to argue that most religious doctrine is built - in whole or in part - on the fact that there will be a cataclysmic event followed by "heaven or hell."
In Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' we are invited into a brief period in the life of one Riddley Walker, a young man living in what can be recognized as southeast England. There has been a nuclear war at some point in the distant past. It was certainly over 2,000 years ago because records - or at least a year count - have been kept from that point. The only other time reference given comes from a cornerstone with the inscription 1997 AD. It is unclear whether the new year count began with 1998. I tend to doubt it because of certain geological changes - namely plate tectonics that have severed southeast England from the island and an admittedly poor quality hand-drawn map that seems to show Pas de Calais to the south of Dover.
Regardless of the actual chronological passage of time, the premise is that the nuclear war was so extensive that the few survivors were compelled to resort to a hunter-gatherer culture for simple survival. Within this culture, formal education - beyond reading and writing - seems to have stopped. Distant history has become a pseudo-religious myth with satan being an anthropormized United States visually depicted as a fairy-like being name EUSA who follows a storyline not unlike Eve and snake in the Garden of Eden. Good is presentedv as a more-or-less Luddite view of the world wherein technology is seen - by and large - as dangerous due to its having caused the events that destroyed the old world. At the same time, mysticism, perhaps even outright magic (or majick, if you're so inlcined) has taken hold.
More recent history has seen mankind's organizational albatross re-asert itself. There is a regional government that is somewhat akin to a warlord culture. Its authority is derived from armed bands and manifested by two individuals whose messages are - in an almost post-anacronistic image of television-talking-commentators - delivered by a Punch 'n' Judy puppet show. This governing entity has expansion on its mind and believes - as is usually the case with humans - that conquest is the route to growth and conquest requires weapons.
Riddley Walker is thrust into this socio-political backdrop as the catalyst for change. For better or worse, his actions cause events to move forward at an ever-increasing velocity. In the end, it is muddily unclear what this allegoric tale has in store for Walker, his immediate group of companions and the world in general.
Beyond the storyline, however, is the creation of a post-English language by Hoban that is - to my mind - so utterly possible that it seems prescient in nature. Absent education, absent textbooks, absent libraries; what happens whene culture becomes oral? How - over hundreds and thousands of years (because you must remember that man spoke long before writing came along) - might language deteriorate in favor of simply staying alive. And, once basic survival was assured, it would be from that deteriorated form that language would begin to develop again.
I tell you this because the story is told by Walker in this new language, one that is far easier to understand if you read the book aloud. It's an effort to be sure, but one worth it, as this is one of the most brilliant stories I have ever had to pleasure of reading.
Summary of Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and?this matters most?intensely ponderable." ?Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
"This is what literature is meant to be." ?Anthony Burgess
"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." ?Anthony Thwaite, Observer
"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." ?Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." ?John Leonard, The New York Times
"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." ?Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." ?Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan
"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' ?Paul Gray, Time
Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state?and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture?rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.
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