I have started to read Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban's cult novel, for the third time. Riddley, first published in 1980, was one of the first serious books that I finished from title page to back cover. I discovered it in junior high, at about the same time I read my first great Michael Ondaatje book, the lyrical and historical In the Skin of a Lion.
Hoban's story is told by--you guessed it--Riddley Walker, an adolescent boy confronting adulthood in a post-apocalyptic England (In Land) denuded and degraded by nuclear war. Its bleak and circular tale of man's destruction by his own artifacts scared the living shit out of me as a kid. It's not surprising that this book left a deep impression, being a post-and-perhaps-proto-civilisation bildungsromans written in a vernacular of disintegrated English, but it was Riddley's voice that made it great; despite the novelty of his language (in which wood becomes wuld and changes has morphed into chaynjis), it felt much like my own. The book has become a benchmark in dystopian science fiction that has only been approached (at least in my mind) by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake.
I picked up a used copy of the Indiana University Press expanded edition (1998) this afternoon. Additions to the original text include an afterward, author notes, maps and a glossary - which is particularly useful to readers adjusting to the Riddley's unique dialect. Insights in Hoban's source material and writing process are also included.
Given that interest in the book continues almost thirty years after its initial publication--it has been recently feted by sources as diverse as Green Anarchy and The Washington Post--it's not surprising that related materials have proliferated online. Good places to start? The collaborative Riddley Walker Annotations and the RW site at The Head of Orpheus, a Hoban fan page. Language Log offers a linguistic perspective on the novel, specifically the folk etymologies that fill Riddley's narrative.
I have started some preliminary reading on St. Eustache, who appears in the book as the demigogic Eusa, and whose story influences much of Riddley's mythology. Riddley kills Inland's last boar on the day of his entry into manhood, his naming day, a scene that echoes the the conversion of the second century martyr (later a patron of hunters) to Christianity after a cross appears to him within the rack of a stag.
Jagermeister aficionados take note: the appearance of a crucifix suspended between stag antlers on the Jag label was borrowed from the iconography of the eight century Saint Hubert, which was itself adapted from the story of Eustache.
The Golden Legend: The Life of Saint Eustache
Saint Eustache's entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia
I look forward to the book and remember how much I enjoyed it as a child, despite the spectre of nuclear holocaust. But with age's dark realisations--among them the possibility that Hoban's Inland (or Atwood's Gilead) could become in some way a reality-- Riddley Walker could be more frightening to an adult.
Bottoms up and here's to my inner eighth-grader.
