Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition

Aside from The Lord of the Rings, Hoban's Riddley Walker is the most imaginative piece of fiction I've ever read. This is a novel to savor, to prolong, if possible, to pore over, to backtrack upon, to celebrate.
Do not be put off by the post-apocalyptic plot description. This is not your father's Neville Schute story. Nor is it Stephen King. This is a multi-layered, cosmic, end of days tale, that far transcends all other entries in "the genre." Hoban has been compared to Joyce, but don't be put off by that either, if you struggled through Finnegan's Wake, as most do. This is accessible. Highly so. Sure, you have to invest some effort and if you are the type of reader who has to have everything conveyed immediately to you, you will not enjoy this work. Hoban is essentially playing a game with his reader. If you enjoy riddles ("Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddles where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same."), Hoban will definitely keep you guessing. This is probably modern fiction's most "interactive" novel. The progressive revelations clue you in as you "walk" with Riddley through Inland (England). The path is so devious, yet so honest, at the same time, that you never want Riddley to seperate from you (a motif in the work) and you never want to lose his companionship.
Suffice it to say that I've been so obsessed over this book that I have joined a Hoban fan club and I can't wait to read more from this astounding author. If you can read updated Chaucer, you should have no difficulty grasping Riddley's vernacular, though there are some similarities to earlier English speech. Allow at least three chapters to get into the cadence and the inner logic of the "Riddley Speak."
The only slight quibble I have, is that I wish that Hoban had written more dialogue, and a bit less first person narrative. I say this because the dialogue is the most hilarious I have read in recent memory. The Punch show interchanges are particularly amusing. They were droll enough to also make me take a whole new interest in traditional Punch and Judy Shows. These are confined primarily to the British Isles, these days, which is sad. I did learn, from one of the foremost practitioners of the tradition, that the book is very much appreciated on the part of the community that still take their get ups from venue to venue. I also would have to say that readers who may be computer programmers, IT professionals, etc., will take a particular delight in the way that Hoban works in computer language of our era into his central character's (and his culture's) partial understanding.
If you are looking for something that has Pythonesque, Pynchonesque, but ultimately Riddleyesque elements, and will leave you feeling as though your brain has actually been through some mental gymnastics, but isn't sweating...order this volume, immediately.
BEK

If you're going to be stranded forever on a desert island and could take one book, which would it be? This is my choice. I've read it at least once a year for the past 20 years. Each time I have found it no less challenging...and no less rewarding. Each time I laugh, I cry, I rejoice and despair, and I tell everyone around me who will listen that they must read /Riddley Walker/. Hoban has written half a dozen breathtaking novels about life and death, history and the future, free will and predestination, human nature and human culture, belief and practice--and I can't for the life of me understand why he isn't considered Earth's Author Laureate. He has also written dozens of deep-hearted children's books, including the Frances The Badger series (which were greatly loved in my adopted home state of Wisconsin). Perhaps some of the reviews below make it clear why this man is so underappreciated. In this age of prefab thinking and easily packaged messages, he's just plain too challenging for most people. No spoon feeding. No easy outs. /Riddley Walker/ is not a book for people accustomed to hearing what they think they want to hear. But for people who can do the work of meeting him halfway...jeez, the riches! Hoban grapples with big questions in this novel: --Are we destined, as a species, to destroy ourselves? --What is violence, and why do people do it? --What is religion, and where does it come from? --Who, or what, is god? --What can we look forward to, if we continue trying to blow ourselves up? --Is there a relationship between maturity/immaturity and violence? --What is the nature of human memory? --What the hell *is* it with men, anyway? There is no sniveling in this book. The harsh, post-apocalyptic society that Riddley inhabits is what it is--people don't wander around whining about how things are. And yet there is a deeply touching moment where Riddley himself realizes how far humanity has fallen from what it once was. The grief of that simple moment impacted me far more than any accounts of nuclear/apocalyptic horror. It's easy to create megadeath. What's harder is the housework of the aftermath. There is nothing easy about this book. Nothing facile. Nothing shallow. Every word, every action, is holographic. Hoban's sense of humor is a joy. The puns, neologisms, back-formations, and memory fragments of his invented dialect lack all irony and self-consciousness. Riddley's tribal initiation as a man, and his manhood journey, are stunningly crafted and told. Showing us a world where an Iron-Age-scavenger people have inherited the principles of nuclear physics through oral tradition, while remembering (misremembering?) the green gods--Hoban nudges us, or maybe shoves us, in the direction of giving serious thought to who we are, where we want to go. This book is a wake-up call to a species of violent primates who mistake their hearts for evil and their opposable thumbs for divinity. And who have been taught to expect that language and storytelling should be easy. Eliot

Reading Riddley Walker has been one of the most profound and moving experiences I've ever had with literature. Every sentence and every word stuck to me, and I couldn't help but want to get lost in the corrupted language.

Some 2347 years, give or take, after a nuclear holocaust has wiped out our present civilization, the world's been stagnating in its earliest stages. Riddley Walker's is a text written by its eponymous connexion man after his naming day (i.e., 12th birthday), which means the text is written in a form of English quite transformed from our own. His short-lived role of connexion man ties him as a go-between to the ruling elite of the local Inland and Eusa folk. In a dead world with no electricity, communications, methods of transportation, science, literature, &c., he’s trained to translate the Mincery’s (‘Ministry’) puppet renditions of Punch & Pooty (‘Judy’) shows and the teachings of Eusa (‘St. Eustace,’ taken from the Cambry (‘Canterbury’) cathedral).

Eusa’s dynamic teachings are the foundation for moral authority across the Inland (present-day Kent). He was, once upon a time, a religious martyr responsible for the 1 Big 1--tricked by the devil (‘Mr Clevver’) into splitting the atom (‘Little Shynin Man the Addom’) and causing the final holocaust. His head is spoken of as still speaking law at the mysterious island of Ram, where the ruling elite presumably live and dole out the Mincery’s law through puppet theater. His guilt is a guilt of a society driven by knowledge and power to be self-destructive, and it’s a guilt carried by the Eusa folk of Riddley’s time. Like many religious followers, the Eusa folk carry the suffering of Eusa in both physical and psychological mutations--their emotions form a telepathic connection between one another, and often packs of wild dogs. Riddley, as part of his connexion duties, has one version of Eusa’s Story and its core teachings memorized. The memorized text he uses for his work reflects modern religions: Its teachings were written long after the existence of Eusa, but centuries before Riddley Walker recites them, and the language itself is slightly less corrupted compared to the language the current Inlanders speak.

Punch & Judy pop up with significant influence throughout the book. At times, the creepy rebelliousness of Mr Punch is literally channeled through Riddley, who carries a pre-war, rotten Punch doll as a charm. For the central conflict, we even get a full performance of Punch & Judy mythologized for the people of the Inland. (Despite its unoriginality, that ranks among my favorite passages from any novel. I highly recommend those unfamiliar to give Neil Gaiman’s Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch a look-see first. I’d wager his creepy graphic novel knowingly takes a lot from Hoban’s use of the doll.)

Riddley Walker’s difficult at times, but is balanced enough between catchy lyricism and a Joycean nightmare that its messy style is more a boon than a distraction. Even though the language is of its own world, its vocabulary is as limited as the culture employing it. Keeping it simple, then, Hoban has riddled the language with as many layers and allusions as he could. You still have to slow down, but at least you'll want to--and ain't that a clear sign of great writing if ever there was one! (Indeed, the 1998 edition features an afterword by the author, with a sample from his first draft written in standard English. It carries little of the published novel's weight.)

While some guiding themes are built from typical Cold War fears, they're written in a way that effects a timelessness in this new mythology Hoban created. The corruption of language, and mythopoeic reconstruction of a moral belief system in this future Dark Age keeps Walker's text from feeling dated by Cold War ideology and its technological trappings. E.g., the Inland's folklore is often peppered with broken references to science and technology, but the backwards, '70s understanding of it benefits the backwards state of the Inland society. Puter Leat is Computer Elite; Belnot Phist is Nobel Physicist; 1stoan Phist is Einstein Physicist; and--a favorite--the sovereign galaxies and nebulae above are the sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye.

Knowledge is the currency of power in the Inland, particularly the lost knowledge of the industrial age. This is probably why no one ever seems to be headed anywhere in Riddley Walker: They’re fighting to take Eusa’s very steps and split the Little Shynin Man once again, taking equal movements forward and back with each Ful of the Moon. Kinda sucky world, but I really wanna go back.

Arga Warga.

I wanted to like this book I really did. I can read the language fine, that was in no way the problem. I even found the dialect amusing.

The problem is the story itself. If you loved "Donnie Darko" you will probably love this book. There are some folks who will find great personal meaning in purposely vague ambiguous ramblings, and unarticulated disjointed thoughts that are supposed to be symbolic.

"Humanity is the lone tree which shades the barren earth beneath from the scorching rays of endless power."

The above passage is not in the book, its nonsense I just made up. My point is if you get high enough, and read that passage over enough times. It's liable to mean something profound to you. Yet it doesn't. It's nonsensical gibberish I just typed up. Riddley Walker is full of such nonsense, and dare I say the entire story is such nonsense.

I enjoyed the beginning of the book, then slowly but surely the story became endless and pointless symbolism, with no real foundation to ground the story into something that is actually meaningful. After 200+ pages of incoherent gibberish the point of the book states little more than the obvious. Much would be lost if there was an apocalypse. Well... duh. Thats hardly profound. It's also worth mentioning the majority of the plot is based on telepathy and predestination.

I doubt anyone can give a concise, articulate synopsis of what the author wanted to express, and I include the author in that statement. As Hoban himself stresses he wanted to have words, stories, and phrases that have multiple meanings. In other words much of it doesn't mean anything outside of what the reader chooses to see in it. All I saw in it was a pretty pathetic attempt at writing an allegorical story. Don't let the diminutive size of the book fool you, this is one of the longest reads I ever had.

If you consider yourself a "down to Earth" person, then don't waste your time on this fantastical nonsense.

I have a keen interest in apocalyptic fiction, so when the subject came up with a friend last year, he mentioned RIDDLEY WALKER, insisting that I would love it. He warned me about the broken English the author used to convey the first person tale of the hero in a world nearly reverted to the stone age. Intrigued, I looked it up and saw all the glowing reviews. It seemed to be all that my friend said it was. I ordered a copy and was actually looking forward to the experience. Alas, after getting about two thirds of the way through this novel (and that was a slog, I assure you!) I finally closed the covers and gave up. I see how much work was put into the novel, I get how this novel could attain a cult status; however, as with nearly all things "cultish", you either love it or hate it. RIDDLEY WALKER turned out to be the first book I gave up on in years.

Hoban's "Riddley Walker" is a dystopic vision set in a future, post-apocalyptic England. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, society has reverted to a level of Iron-Age sophistication; wild dogs roam the countryside. Most problematically for the reader, Hoban's view involves language and communication reverting to an imagined pre-civilized patois, and the entire book is written as a first-person narrative by the main protagonist, Riddley Walker, in this invented "proto-language". Think of the Russian-based slang of 'A Clockwork Orange" and multiply the degree of unintelligibility tenfold. Here is an example:

"The Ardship he begun to gether with the Eusa folk they all took off ther cloes and tangelt ther selfs to gether all nekkit and twining like a nes of snakes which they callit that some poasyum. Which they done trantsing with it and hy telling. Doing it in that old Power Station in Fork Stoan where the out poast is. Which that place its so big and eckowing it wer realy some thing to hear them telling of the many cools of Addom and the party cools of stoan and all the diffrent colourt seeds and that."

In his excellent recommendations for reviewers, John Updike admonishes us to keep an open mind when reviewing, to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Advice that is particularly germane to "Riddley Walker" because, guaranteed, there will come a point (probably about 20 pages or so into the book) when the bizarreness of the language, and the resulting difficulty in reading, force you to make a conscious choice: "Am I really going to take the trouble to keep plowing through this, or should I cut my losses now?" Mindful of Updike's advice, I chose to read the book all the way through. But it seems fair to ask: "Is the extra investment of effort that the author asks of the reader worth it?"

For me, the answer to that question is a fairly unequivocal "No". In the end, it was not at all clear what the author is trying to say in this muddle of a book. There's an obvious quest motif, and some fairly banal stuff about the difficulty of communication, but any kind of deeper meaning eluded me. It doesn't help that the author uses the traditional Punch and Judy show as central to his story. It obviously holds deep significance for the author, and possibly for English readers, but its specificity to English culture precludes any broader resonance. As best as I could figure, some statement is being made about the importance of storytelling even in primitive cultures. My reaction was "That's it? I ploughed through over 200 pages of idiosyncratic, incoherent maundering prose for this?"

I use the word "incoherent" quite consciously here, because there's a kind of laziness to Hoban's invented patois which is ultimately deeply irritating. He goes to great lengths to ensure that it will be difficult to read (by his own admission he wants to slow the reader down, as a device to make people think), but there is a lack of internal coherence which seems lazy and damages the overall plausibility. Why is "telling" spelled correctly, but not "really"? Sometimes it's "which", sometimes it's "which that". "Stone" is spelled as "stoan", yet "know", "twining" and "folk" retain their correct spellings. These seem like completely arbitrary inventions of the author, which seem frankly unlikely - why would such inconsistent orthography develop, following an apocalyptic event?* There are similar inconsistencies in the liberties taken with syntax and vocabulary. When Tolkien invents language in LOTR, he takes the trouble to make it linguistically and etymologically coherent. Hoban appears to have taken a much sloppier approach. But it's the reader who has to pay the price when trying to wade through the incoherent, barely comprehensible mess that results.

* For that matter, why should linguistic development be set back so far to begin with - presumably the immediate survivors are not going to lose their existing linguistic mastery, so what would stop them from passing it on to subsequent generations? The reversion of language to some more primitive version seems fundamentally implausible to me and this particular choice of Hoban ultimately kills the book.

I bought Riddle Walker along with a few other books here on amazon. Being only 200 pages, I thought I'd read this one first. 3weeks later, I am 3/4 of the way through the book and Im just about fed up!

This book is an acquired taste. It's a salty oyster waiting to be devoured by the right person. Im not that person. I struggled through the first chapters, and Im pretty much completey lost.
To say the semi-literate language is a hurdle at first is an understatement!

Every darn line is a riddle
And im not in the mood to play
...heck im ready to walk away

This is certainly not a night time read for relaxing. It needs every bit of your concentration. Wise man once said, the easier the read the better the read, and this is surely an example of "when reads go wrong".

aye teal ye waht... I cant wait to dig into a page that is readable!

Too bad, I liked the thought provoking ideas behind it. Someone give me a yell when they reprint it in english.
Arggga wargga my ass!

A truly extraordinary book. If you've conquered Joyce's Ulysses, but find Finnegans Wake too much at present, this is your jam. I needed some (thankfully readily available) Internet resources to parse it, but it's perfectly doable, once you're properly armed with references. When you make it to the end--which you will--you'll feel superhuman. You'll also be slightly depressed. But Hoban's art will make up for it. I originally read Riddley Walker to determine whether it would suffice for a college-level high school course on utopian and dystopian literature, but I decided in the end that it was too much to expect for one semester when combined with the other required readings (altogether a very heavy load). However, it is an absolutely phenomenal literary accomplishment. Hoban speaks metaphorically and clearly to us as we are now--not, hopefully, as he fears we will one day be.

I'm very glad that the more literate types exult over this book. I was not impressed. Full disclosure: I've been reading all sorts of speculative fiction for over 45 years, and I've gotten pretty picky, and perhaps more than a little snobbish.

Riddley Walker, an uber-precocious 12-year old, wanders around southeastern England roughly 4400 A.D. In Riddley's world, they scorn A.D. as "all done," and have reached 2347 O.C. ("our count") after the nuclear war and the Bad Times. I can well imagine that Anthony Burgess enjoyed surfing on Riddley's broken English narration, some of which is quite amusing ("curse roads" for cross roads). If you read it out loud, Hoban's work is nowhere near as difficult as "A Clockwork Orange." The book reminds me more of Edgar Pangborn's "Davey," which was also a much-praised post-apocalypse novel, but in the course of which nothing much happened. It does bug me just a little bit that they don't know how to say "Canterbury" any more, but refer to the various "tracks" they travel by the common, modern highway numbers, like the A20.

Make no mistake: for the most part, Mr. Hoban imagines this world in breadth and in depth. If you're looking for that sort of atmosphere, you've come to the right place. If you're looking to build to a meaningful climax, though, you will perhaps be as disappointed as I was.

In the fullness of this story, two things of old are revived. Mr. Punch is reborn, though "Punch and Judy" is now "Punch and Pooty," Pooty being a lascivious pig. Despite some serious miscalculations, it also seems that gunpower is about to be rediscovered. On that score, I would refer anyone to H. Beam Piper's "Gunpowder God," aka "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen."

I started this novel once, years ago, and threw it aside. This time I plowed through the whole thing, and wound up feeling I'd wasted my time. So, what's your opinion?

I hate to be a contrarian, but add me to the relative few who didn't care for this novel. Other than the post-apocalyptic English, there's not much to sink your teeth into - the plot and ideas are unoriginal and and the characterizations are pretty standard. This book came to me highly recommended, and I really looked forward to reading it, but it was a slog to get through.

The idea of the English language changing and evolving after a cataclysm is good and true, but at least in book form I think it works better in theory than in practice. When you're watching Shakespeare, you usually get to the point where you forget the archaic phrasing and just begin to enjoy the beauty of the language; that did not happen for me here. Reading this seemed like a tedious intellectual exercise as I read and reread paragraphs trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

I read this from the point of view of someone who likes thoughtful and artfully done post-apocalyptic stories. Riddley Walker might have more appeal to someone who comes at it from a literary perspective especially if they've had limited exposure to the ideas in science fiction. But I suspect this book is of limited appeal to most genre fans.