“Something got hold of me and didn’t let go until it got itself down on paper in the way that it wanted to be.”
Russell Hoban
I'm recently back from a week in Kent, which was the location for Russell Hoban's wonderful 'Riddley Walker', published 45 years ago.
The Isle of Thanet is called The Ram here after Ramsgate. Widders Bel is Whistable. Cambry is obvious.
This is a book written in an imagined post-apocalyptic language. It takes some time to get into the flow of the book but that is part of the magic... slow down and try to piece together what has been lost... and the new Iron Age which is emerging.
“Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?”
Riddley Walker is Russell Hoban’s genre-defying masterpiece. A free-wheeling road-novel it is set in post-apocalyptic Kent, 2,500 years after a nuclear catastrophe has plunged England back into a second Iron Age. The survivors huddle in fenced settlements, packs of killer dogs roam the countryside and the rudimentary government communicates its policies through travelling puppet shows. This is a world where the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral are misinterpreted as the remains of a power station, and a post-nuclear mutant incarnation of the Archbishop might just know the secret of nuclear fission.
The map is also worth exploring, and the North arrow is literally an arrow.
There's a good piece of work to do here perhaps on the emerging geographies of the land, with their new names drawing on a misremembered past...
Much has been written about the book.
The map is also worth exploring, and the North arrow is literally an arrow.
Sarah Hudston's piece here is very good. Some further analysis here too, which refers to the weather, and the lack of women in the story.
I also covet a copy of the Folio Society's limited edition of the book with illustrations and signed by Quentin Blake. A beautiful thing...
There's a good piece of work to do here perhaps on the emerging geographies of the land, with their new names drawing on a misremembered past...
The original map was drawn by Hoban himself. The piece on this link explains the meanings of the various places in the book.
It's part of a bigger project to annotate the book and explain various aspects of it to aid analysis and understanding.
I also liked this blog which walks in the footsteps of the book to see if the journeys it describes are possible (they do lots of other books too).
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