Riddley Walker

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The alder tree is traditionally associated with the human body because of its red sap. It burns poorly but is favored for charcoal. Alders figure greatly in the story of Bran. This book, and especially its dialect, were an inspiration to David Mitchell, when writing the central story of Cloud Atlas ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), Sloosha's Crossin', as he explains in this article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005...

I am simply an addict," he says. "If I am kept away from writing I become physically unwell. It is art and the creation of art that sustains me. Things like Conrad's Nostromo or Schubert's Winterreise or Haydn's Creation or paintings by Daumier make me feel it is a good thing to be part of the human race. Red Kettle Theatre Company, Waterford: Riddley Walker". red-kettle.com. November 2007. Archived from the original on 18 June 2009 . Retrieved 14 April 2013. Cairns both directed and designed the production and recalls Hoban's take on the mythology - again drawing heavily on the Orpheus myth - as "wonderfully off-centre. Despite the fact that we were dealing with the idea of a gorilla - not even the gorilla itself - and a woman from a Vermeer painting falling in love, he made it very human. He brought to it his own brand of how mythology and everyday lives collide. It was very well received."I cud feal it in the guts and barrils of me. You try to make your self 1 with some thing or some body but try as you wil the 2ness of every thing is working agenst you all the way. You try to take holt of the 1ness and it comes in 2 in your hans. (p. 149)

Russell Hoban has brought off an extroardinary feat of imagination and of style. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." In March 2015, a group of Aberystwyth drama students performed the play in Theatre y Castell over the course of two days. The production was directed by David Ian Rabey. Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) also includes surprising parallels. Much of Riddley's conception of the holocaust ultimately derives from a distorted interpretation of the life of St. Eustace (as described in a catalogue entry on the fifteenth-century painting The Legend of Saint Eustace) from whom "Eusa" derives.

Riddley Walker runs little chance of going out of print, but its fame may have grown in the past few years, as major writers have begun following Hoban’s path. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is probably the most prominent example; its sixth part takes place in a post-apocalyptic world presented through a similarly post-apocalyptic language. There’s even a devil figure, Old Georgie, who is not too different from Riddley’s Mr. Clevver. The film of Cloud Atlas retains the strange language, but it was not the first movie inspired by Hoban’s language games: George Miller is an admirer of Riddley Walker, and so the desert children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome speak a strange slang as they await the return of a vanished Captain Walker. Goodparley, one of the Eusa men (not to mention the prime minister) also possesses a rare bit of writing: a description of the painting of the Legend of St Eustace in Canterbury. Written in 20th-century English, it must have remained stable over the centuries. But even then, Goodparley’s interpretation is wild. When he reads “St Eustace is seen on his knees before his quarry”, he creates a story about digging in quarries. The result is that history feels more subjective than ever. And everything these people believe seems open to question. She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. [...] Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome, Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor. It don't realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. Whatever it is we dont come naturel to it.'[...]

Russell Hoban said that he was a good speller before he wrote Riddley Walker and a bad speller after finishing it. The first sentence shows why: “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.” Two thousand or so years after an atomic catastrophe—“the 1 Big 1”—civilization and the English language hobble on, the language marginally healthier than the society.Mullen, R. D. (November 2000). "Dialect, Grapholect, and Story: Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" as Science Fiction". Science Fiction Studies. 27 (3): 391–417. JSTOR 4241511.

And that leads to Riddley Walker, written entirely in a first person narrative in a language that resembles English, and I guess in a broad sense it still is, but is, to me at least, incomprehensible. Author Russell Hoban has created what very possibly may be a work of genius. This was no doubt a labor of inspired brilliance. Funetik Aksent: The form of English used in the book is actually based upon phonetic interpretations of the Kentish accent. Warren, Martin L. (March 2007). "The St. Eustace Legend as Palimpsest in Hoban's "Riddley Walker" ". Science Fiction Studies. 34 (1): 158–163. JSTOR 4241511.Roughly two thousand years after a nuclear war has devastated civilization, Riddley, the young narrator, stumbles upon efforts to recreate a weapon of the ancient world. Porter, Jeffrey (Winter 1990). " "Three Quarks for Muster Mark": Quantum Wordplay and Nuclear Discourse in Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" ". Contemporary Literature. 31 (4): 448–469. doi: 10.2307/1208323. JSTOR 1208323. No Party Like a Donner Party: Situational cannibalism in the immediate post-nuclear era is key to one of Riddley's people's myths, and the Punch and Judy story late in the book has... rather more cannibalism than is common in the present.