I don’t recommend my favorite book, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, without a lot of caveats. People have gotten mad at me—legitimately mad—when they’ve heard me say “this is my favorite book” and interpreted that as “you should read it” even though I never said so, and then the first sentence is “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”
If you aren’t prepared for that sort of thing—and Riddley Walker, while very much a classic, also isn’t nearly as well-known as I think it deserves—it’s not unreasonable to be like “Jess what the fuck.”
So I try to make sure that people understand that this is a book about a young boy’s quest through a post-apocalyptic world in which civilization has been all but destroyed and then gradually, over hundreds or thousands of years, clawed its way back to approximately the Bronze Age—and like many other books I love or have loved (A Clockwork Orange, The Faerie Queene), it is written in a fictionalized English appropriate to the fictionalized England it wants to evoke.
Now that that’s out of the way: it’s my favorite book in the world and you should probably read it. Because yes, you have to essentially learn a new language or at least a new dialect to understand what’s going on, but every single part of that dialect is a deeply-considered commentary on how we remember, forget, and reframe our distant past—and, in the process, often badly distort not only the past but the future.
Not all of the word mutations are especially load-bearing, but all of them change the way you think about the palimpsest of older language and culture that underpins modernity. Take, for instance, the town Widder’s Bel (“widder” is widow in Riddley’s language). Once you understand how this post-post-post-apocalyptic landscape maps onto the U.K. county of Kent, it’s clear that this is the town we now know as Whitstable. But Whitstable was previously Witestaple or Witenestaple, “white post” (from the Old English hwit) or “wise man’s post” (from the Old English wita). Our modern English plucked nonsense from a meaningful word—whit stable, like a tiny place to keep horses? What?—and Riddley’s compatriots have put meaning back, combining the familiar concept bell and the probably even more familiar concept widow.
The most interesting erasures and re-inscriptions in Riddley’s world are biggies: science, religion. The loss, attempted recreation, and ultimate tragedy of certain scientific capabilities—which turn out to be inextricable from destruction—drive the plot. But the novel’s biggest moments of epiphany are animated by old religious (and misappropriated non-religious) artifacts that have been divorced from their contexts and scrambled into a kind of scriptural-historical pastiche. These are revelatory moments for Riddley and also, separately, for the reader: he experiences something he understands as enlightenment, and we, with a clearer understanding of these decontextualized images, understand a little more.
I love these moments for what they tell us about our unconquerable hunger both for cultural amnesia and for pattern-finding and mythmaking: we destroy the past, and then use the shards to create an imagined history. But I also love that Riddley’s patchwork dogma, built out of fragments of religion and art and language that survived the flood of disaster, has never gotten around to recreating the concept of God.
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Spear
It would spoil the story to detail some of the ways that the unspecified apocalypse in Riddley Walker has digested deistic religion and spat out the godless bones. But it wouldn’t spoil anything to talk about the one line I think most beautifully epitomizes what Riddley’s language tells us about the parallel evolution of words, thoughts, and beliefs. Early in the book, only four very short chapters in, we’re introduced to a hymn that’s survived from our near future to Riddley’s very far one. To the reader, it’s very clearly a Christian hymn, but written at a time when space travel was routine. Here’s how it goes:
Pas the sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye
Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky
Thine the han what shapit the black
Guyd us there and guyd us back
That’s all in Riddley’s dialect, but many of the words don’t appear anywhere else in the book, because the concepts they represent—sovereign galaxies, flaming nebulae—are meaningless in Riddley’s time. The hymn itself rode some kind of cultural ark into the future, but like many of our modern hymns, its referents are all but lost. (How many average churchgoers can really unpack “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”?) But what’s interesting to me is the word that does show up again immediately after the song: “Straiter Empy said, ‘Thine hans for Brooder Walker.’ We all thinet hans then round the fire.” We all did what around the fire? We thined hands.
Did you get what happened there? At some point, the post-apocalyptic, neo-primitive culture in which Riddley lives heard the phrase “thine the hand”—for us, clearly a reference to a Christian God, using an obsolete pronoun which has hitched its way into our present in a specifically religious context just as this hymn did for Riddley—and, lacking context for both the meaning of “thine” and who the “thou” might be, came to the reasonable conclusion that it must be something you do with hands. From there it’s an easy leap: obviously if you “thine” hands with someone else it means you entwine them, because that’s what it sounds like that would mean. And so, as part of the ritual, you thine hands, and later unthine them.
As a person who is fascinated by language and also has no connection to theism, how freaking much do I love this! This single half-page is actually full of similarly perfect illustrations of how we struggle to fit the unfamiliar into our mental framework—see also “well, I don’t know what a galaxies or nebulae are but I know what seas and eyes are so I guess they’re a kind of sea and a kind of eye”—but “we all thinet hands” is the line I’ll bang on about if I’m drunk and you get me started about this book. If you don’t like it, you won’t like Riddley Walker. Like I said, that’s fine; it’s not for everyone, and I said as much, so you’re not allowed to get mad. For those who do, though—I find this example especially exquisite, but the language and world that Hoban created is studded with gems like this. If you’re excited by this, and you haven’t read Riddley Walker yet: don’t Riddley walk, Riddley run.
Jess Zimmerman is an an editor at Quirk Books and previously the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature. Her essays, fiction, opinion pieces, and prose poetry have appeared in publications such as Slate, The Cut, The Guardian, Catapult, Hazlitt, and The New Republic. She lives in Brooklyn.
This is, also one of my favorite books – brilliant and too little read. But, then, this kind of writing is a hurdle for some to get through. By the time I had read 10 or 20 pages it was no longer problematic but fascinating and very powerful because of it.
Great piece. I especially like the part about “thine” because that’s something I missed on many readings— there’s only that one sentence to hint that “thine” is a verb, it never comes up again— and when it finally jumped out at me, I had the same reaction you did.
By the way, years back I put together a Riddley Walker annotations page by myself and others that some people might find useful— although I wouldn’t recommend that anyone read it before the book because it might spoil the feeling of newness. Your note on Whitstable has some details I had missed; I’ll add a mention of the original derivation, citing your piece.
I love this book, and I am a theist–just saying one doesn’t have to be post-theistic to appreciate what Hoban does with language here! I will also echo Bob’s encouragement to dive into the strange language and swim on past the first page: you will feel at home in the dialect fairly quickly. It does help to read it aloud when you’re stumped!
To me, this book does excellently what Station Eleven does less convincingly: show the enduring importance of story (symbol, myth, artistic performance) in the face of apocalypse. Someone could write a fun study comparing these two with Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land on this front. Though only Hoban contributes his own constant remythologizing of language by deconstructing words, detaching them from their roots and creating new, surprisingly resonant words out of the shards of sound and meaning. It’s like fine poetry in the way that it makes us see our own language in a radically new light.
I started reading it out loud to myself, and after the first few pages, both reading and hearing it shifted my brain into the correct gear to follow the new-old language. It sunk deeply enough that ‘parbly’ and ‘oansome’ have been added to my private vocabulary.
Eli, I know and love your annotations page! Sometimes I just read it by itself, not even as a companion to the novel.
I may just have to pick this one up. I discovered in my English Lit Class in college, while reading Beowulf and The Faerie Queen, the only way to read it is out loud – works surprisingly well with Shakespeare as well. I also remember another of my English teachers (a grad student) mentioning that she was reading Riddley Walker for one of her Grad classes.
@5 Aw, thanks.
If you liked this, you should try some of Hoban’s other books like Bedtime for Frances
Eli, I love those annotations! I liked them so much I poked around your website some, and liked a lot of what I saw. I love your take on The Scarlet Plague, which is kind of Riddley-Walker-ish in your rendition. Awesome stuff! Thanks for sharing!
@9 – Thanks. There are definitely a couple of thematic connections between Riddley Walker and The Scarlet Plague in terms of post-apocalyptic people talking about the mythical glories of a past era that’s still the future to us, and also they both have a character called Granser (I’m not sure if that was ever an actual slang for Grandpa, or if it was London imagining a little bit of future dialect), but the style is super different— most of it is a pretty straightforward adventure story. The comic cuts out all of that and just uses some fragments of the text, so what’s left has more of the haunted and unpunctuated feeling of RW. London probably wouldn’t be happy with it but I do recommend the original novella, it’s a good read.
I may need to add this to my To-read list; the dialect is peculiar, but no more odd than reading books two centuries or more old (Especially when at least part of those books happen to be written in Scots).
So, after reading your presentation of Hoban’s book, I headed over to Goodreads to see what folks had to say there.
I see mainly comments on the language, just as in your essay.
I’m now wondering: is Riddley Walker all style or is there also an interesting story to be found? Is there a plot worth talking about?
@12: I would say there’s definitely way more than style, but the style is the most immediately attention-getting thing and so it’s no surprise that it’s often the main thing people will mention in brief things like Goodreads reviews. It’s also harder to talk about the story and character and thematic stuff without getting into a lot of detail – they’re not easy to summarize. You might want to take a look at this piece which was the first part of a longer discussion (I can’t find a link to the whole series, but searching on the title will turn up the rest): https://www.avclub.com/riddley-walker-opening-thoughts-on-the-end-of-the-worl-1798219794/amp
The story basically is about a 12-year-old coming of age in his tribe and taking over his dad’s political shaman job and trying to invent non-folkloric storytelling and accidentally getting mixed up in intrigues among the traveling puppeteers who are also the church and the government who, along with trying to push hunter-gatherers out of England in favor of farmers, would like to rediscover the secret of nuclear weapons which they wrongly think they can get from a description of a 15th-century religious painting. So, you see what I mean.
Eli, that is the most brilliant one-sentence summary of a subtle, complex work of fiction that I’ve ever seen. Concise, specific, accurate. But sheesh, imagine if that was your pitch to a publisher!
Oh, another thing. On my first reading, if I recall, it took only a few pages for me to be reading fluently, while still striving to get a grip on Ridley’s society and situation. After that, it was all the latter — though running into a few knotty expressions such as Jess shows us. (“Thinet hands”, wow.)
The secret is to read it to yourself, aloud. I believe you’ll soon recognize the kind of spoken English it is: a general-use, not terribly highbrow vernacular which you might hear in any pub today, and which I recognize from many shows featuring talkative Londoners, including some Monty Python skits.
Severing galaxies, surely?
Now this is what I call a great book review.