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Riddley Walker

4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 2,858 ratings · 363 reviews

Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and t...more

Paperback, Expanded, 256 pages

Published September 22nd 1998 by Indiana University Press (first published January 1st 1980)

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Apr 08, 2013 Terry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, post-apocalypse, sci-fi

_Riddley Walker_ is the book that put Russell Hoban on the map (inasmuch as he is on the map…he is criminally neglected as an author) and will likely be the one work for which he will be remembered (sadly he passed away in late 2011). So far I have read three other Hoban novels and while I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them I must admit that I think this one is his very best.

Many, upon reading the first page, will dismiss the book as “gimmicky” (I am growing to hate that term as applied to boo...more _Riddley Walker_ is the book that put Russell Hoban on the map (inasmuch as he is on the map…he is criminally neglected as an author) and will likely be the one work for which he will be remembered (sadly he passed away in late 2011). So far I have read three other Hoban novels and while I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them I must admit that I think this one is his very best.

Many, upon reading the first page, will dismiss the book as “gimmicky” (I am growing to hate that term as applied to books) due to the style in which Hoban writes. Admittedly his language isn’t easy to slip right into given that he has created his own broken, not quite phonetic, future version of English that is further complicated for many readers by being based on the Kentish dialect. Thus we have as our introduction to Riddley and his world:

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.

That’s definitely one of the easier passages and things get more complicated when words and phrases are elided or significantly changed when they refer to things from the deep past (our present), and concepts that people in Riddley’s day don’t fully comprehend or whose meaning has changed in their time. Still, for me _Riddley Walker_ is probably the non plus ultra of post-apocalyptic fiction. Sure there are many others out there that are excellent, and I have by no means read in the genre exhaustively (I still have to read classics like The Death of Grass and Earth Abides), but there is something about Hoban’s work that seems to define the genre for me. His ability to capture a world that is at the same time horrifying and homely, a world that shows humanity utterly changed and yet exactly the same as we’ve always been is superlative.

Our hero, the eponymous Riddley Walker, is a young boy just coming of age at a moment when his world stands at a crossroads, change is either going to sweep humanity forward or back into the dustbin of history. Riddley truly is the crux of the novel (both thematically through the role he plays in the plot and stylistically given that the narrative is his own first-person account), the centre around which it revolves and also the primary element upon which it succeeds or fails for the reader. For me his character is an unqualified success. He is an everyman who harbours within himself unknown potential. He is a realist not given to self-delusion and yet in him is a belief in the human spirit, a sense of the positive, that is uplifting without being cloying. Through Riddley we are given an effective melding of hopelessness and hopefulness: a picture of a world steeped in melancholy and loss that may be the dying gasp of humanity or its first step forward out of the ashes.

Riddley's world is a grey one, painted in the broad strokes of grizzled rain, decaying edifices of the past, and a hard life of scrounging amidst the muck and ruins in search of the bare necessities of survival. Despite this bleak setting Hoban still presents us with a fully realized world of warmth, humanity, danger, and loss. It is obviously a post-apocalyptic world that stands on the far edge of the fall: the ‘Bad Time’ of fire and destruction is now only a distant legend (as is the world that preceded it), as opposed to those ‘survivalist’ post-apocalyptic books that take place while the horror of loss and oblivion is still a fresh wound. As is to be expected Riddley’s world is not an easy one. He lives in an Iron Age society in an England that had been bombed back to the Stone Age and is slowly clawing its way back up the ladder. The old ways are starting to die out as the nomadic, foraging lifestyle is gradually being replaced by the more settled life of farming. The old tales and stories of our own lost time are perpetuated primarily through the existence of a modified Punch and Judy show. This puppet show is a government-sponsored propaganda machine wherein the main character is Eusa (a degraded and highly modified version of St. Eustace), a stand-in for the perpetrators of Armageddon, in which old knowledge and new superstition are mixed together to create a truly unique experience. Through the Eusa Show and the legends it spawned we come to see the hum drum aspects of our own age both through the eyes of wonder and awe, a sort of golden age when giants walked the earth, and through the lens of condemnation: how could those so wise have been so foolish? How could the god-like beings humans had once been have allowed Armageddon to have occurred? ”O what we ben! And what we come to!” laments Riddley at one point. These people are keenly aware of their loss. Whether it is through fluid medium of stories and legends or the more concrete witness of the ruins of burnt out cities and the hulks of dead machines, the ghost of the past lives on in Riddley’s present and is carried on the backs of those that remain as both a reminder and a deadly weight.

Government lackeys travel from place to place and perform their ‘Eusa Shows’ based on a memorized approved text, usually in order to give a government spin on recent events and enforce the accepted truths of what has been and what will be. In the midst of this endless round of ‘business as usual’ there is beginning to grow a renewed interest in the “cleverness” of the old ways and knowledge, especially that which revolves around power and destruction (known in Riddley’s vernacular as the “1 Little 1” and the ”1 Big 1”)…it’s a common theme in this type of literature: the human fascination with the worst side of our nature that seems inevitably to lead us to commit the same horrible mistakes time and time again no matter how harsh the lessons taught us (see Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz for another example of this; these two books would actually make for a good paired reading).

You can get jus as dead from a kick in the head as you can from the 1 Littl 1 but its tha natur of it gets people as cited. I mean your foot is all ways on the end of your leg innit. So if youre going to kick some 1 to death it aint all that thrilling is it. This other tho youve got to have the Nos. of the mixter then youve got to fynd your gready mints then youve got to do the mixing of the mixter and youve got to say the fissional seakerts of the act befor you kil some body its all that chemistery and fizzics of it you see. Its some thing new. Which ever way you look at it I dont think Aunty and her red eyed rat be too far from us.

Of course the huge stumbling block for this book is obvious, it jumps out at you once you flip to the first page: the language itself. Is this degraded form of English nothing more than a gimmick? There will I suppose always be those for whom the answer is “yes”, but for me that isn’t the case…or at least it could have been simply a gimmick if it didn’t work, if there wasn’t more to the text than a degraded phonetic spelling. Luckily the language is built around a great story with much thoughtfulness on the human condition and human nature. Who are we and why do we act as we do? What does it mean to be human at all? Why do we live, and what is the purpose of our seemingly unimportant little lives? How do we connect with each other, and what are the things in life that are truly worth cultivating? How much of our life is determined and how much is freely chosen? All of these questions and more are asked in the text and while precious few answers may be given the possibilities that are presented give much food for thought. The language also allows the required distance between our world and this one of the far off future to be built and emphasized. Perhaps most importantly it allows us to zero in on what matters as we are forced to pay close attention not only to what is said, but how it is said. The strangeness of the language forces you to look at the familiar in a new way, to see things with new eyes as you work your way towards an understanding of what exactly is being discussed or viewed. Finally it also lets us inhabit the mind of our narrator and protagonist Riddley (as well as his world) in a uniquely engaging way.

This book is one of my favourites and it is highly recommended. The labour expended in reading it will be amply repaid as we go “roading thru that rainy dark” with Riddley Walker.

Also posted at Shelf Inflicted (less)

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Oct 08, 2012 Cecily rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi-or-futuristic, dystopian, language-related

Set in a primitive future society and told in the imagined dialect of the time, involving malapropistic phoneticisms and accidental puns (and clearly an inspiration for one story of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), so not something you can read quickly - at least, not till you get used to it.

This is the story of a would-be story-teller, trying to make sense of the present in the light of (minimal) understanding of the past, tied in with versions of 20th century...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Fionnuala rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If ye lyke readen, if ye lyke a tchalinge, if yure tirt of all them comin of age books with predicable hinerd nerators, if yed as lief not be man pulated by the pubshing peoples as to what ye should be readin nex, then try this here buk. Ye mi not be able to buy it in shop as it was pubshed way back time back but meby your libryd hev it. An if ye do try it, yell relise dat peoples needs storys an if peoples lose all de storys, dey jus up an mek more storys, don dey?

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Jun 01, 2013 [P] rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The prologue

I’m suspicious of sympathy; empathy is a mysterious island whose location is known to me but which I am disinclined to visit. In truth, I find these two emotions somewhat inauthentic. I did some work while at university on the nature of our emotional responses to art and literature, focusing on what exactly is happening when people cry or feel upset when exposed to ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’ stories. It struck me then, and strikes me still now, that these reactions say much more about the p...more

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Jan 28, 2013 Suzanne added it · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who like post-apocalyptic worlds and a linguistic challenge

Whoa. I am not really sure what just happened here. This is the strangest book I have ever read.

I was drawn to read this when I learned that Riddley Walker had been an inspiration and influence for the Sloosha’s Crossin' chapter of Cloud Atlas, which was my favorite part of that wonderful book. The language is similarly a specially developed dialect, but where David Mitchell’s invented language is a little difficult until you find the rhythm, it became easier and, on my second reading of CA, I...more Whoa. I am not really sure what just happened here. This is the strangest book I have ever read.

I was drawn to read this when I learned that Riddley Walker had been an inspiration and influence for the Sloosha’s Crossin' chapter of Cloud Atlas, which was my favorite part of that wonderful book. The language is similarly a specially developed dialect, but where David Mitchell’s invented language is a little difficult until you find the rhythm, it became easier and, on my second reading of CA, I even found it poetic. In Riddley Walker, however, it was more complex to begin with and it never got much easier. I was enjoying trying to ferret out the truth in the story, but got frustrated at times and kept thinking, “Does it have to be this hard?” About half way through, I realized, yes, it did.

Riddley is a 12-year-old boy who becomes a man at that age in this primitive, post-apocalyptic world, and he also succeeds his father as his tribe’s “connexion man,” when dad is killed in an accident. A connexion man interprets meanings and events in this society where a travelling morality play attempts to keep alive old stories and songs. The people in this world wonder about how the former civilization of “Inland,” where they had “ships in the air” and “pictures on the wind,” crumbled when their leaders’ “clevverness” and Power exceeded their ability to manage it, resulting in “the Bad Time.” There are only shadowy and dimly understood notions about exactly what happened and why, with bizarre and often grotesque mythologies standing in for history. There is also the quest for a certain type of arcane knowledge universally lusted after that will put the people back on a forward path toward new power (for good or ill, but that is human nature: to lust after power). Riddley’s father’s death puts the boy walking on the road to a sort of hero’s journey where he has adventures discovering the nature of the world and himself. He learns he is not only an intuitive, but a “happener,” one who makes things happen, because that too is human nature, to want to have an effect on the world and cause it to move forward.

I think the challenge of having to struggle with the language and seeing that world through a foggy lens (it’ a riddle!) mirrors the difficulty Riddley and his people have trying to understand the world that is gone, when there is literally almost nothing left but “bernt” dead towns and the ruins of the Power Ring at “Cambry,” no records or history, except the handed-down stories, songs and plays that attempt to understand the past, present and possibly the future.

I loved the way this book is so full of layers upon layers of myth and ritual, allegory, parables, symbolism and archetypes, wordplay and imagery, bursting with it, while hints of our history, though twisted and distorted, bleed through to that future world to anchor it. But the subject is actually more cosmic than that, about the nature of power and long cycles of repeatability in the human experience (echoes of David Mitchell here). Mostly I was left with impressions, rather than a strong sense of plot or events, impressions that are so rich and dense, they would need to be sorted out and analyzed on a second and third and maybe fourth reading. But I will probably never do that . . . because this first time, I thought my head was going to explode. That is not meant to discourage anyone. It is a most interesting reading experience and as unusual as anything I’ve ever attempted. Ultimately, I appreciated the theme of human potential that sounded throughout, the unstoppable force within us, no matter the age or era, to try to keep going forward.

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Oct 16, 2008 Jude rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i did a lot of things wrong and painful with and to my daughter. seriously. that's not guilt, that's the reality. we are fine and ever finer.

and then there are the things i did inadvertently that made some kind of wild & tender balance - that built in a tool kit with which to cope with me and everything else that was ever gonna traumatize her for no good reason.

this book is one of those things. even kids you are fucking with love you and pay attention to what moves you. maybe they pay attent...more

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Jul 24, 2007 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: codebreakers and fans of dystopian lit

Shelves: 5qs, dystopianpostapocalyptic, own-currently

This book is truly unlike any other I have read. It is really HARD to read, for one thing -- it's set in post-apocalyptic "Inland" (England) and is told in a language invented by Hoban. However, don't let this discourage you. I was dumb enough not to notice the glossary at the back that would have saved me a lot of time and confusion. Anyway, all kinds of mystical things happen to young Riddley as he goes on a quest to find (I forget what -- the owner of a severed hand found in a Punch puppet? t...more

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Dec 03, 2011 Isabel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

It's all about connexions isn't it? Riddley's assigned role in life was to be a connexion man, watching the shows putt on by the travelling Eusa men and making the connexions. Interpreting the allegorical stories coming from the government at the Ram and explaining them to the people of How Fents in his reveals.

But I don't think he would ever have been content with that. For as Goodparley says about Riddley 'hes a mover hes a happener'. Throughout the book, he roams through Inland, making connex...more

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Apr 29, 2011 Betty rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, book-club-books, 2011

I enjoyed this the first time around, but this re-reading made me really love it. This is mostly because I felt more comfortable making assumptions about the symbolism and interpreting the language. It's also worth perusing the notes and glossary in the back (or have a British person explain things to you). Hoban does an excellent job of building a world not just with description but through his use of language and the way his characters interact. It's eerie and beautiful and poetic. One other n...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Hannah Eiseman-Renyard rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-classics, playing-with-form, subculture

Rich essay material

This is a book which I get is smart, clever, filled with interesting insights, suppositions and - frankly - prophesies. (All the stuff with Eusa and putting all his cleverness in a box, and the leet - well before mass computerisation, the internet, or anyone calling themselves the l33t... spooky as hell.)

However, it just didn't really grab me as a piece of story telling. It was a well-constructed world and full of many interesting themes which I enjoyed unpicking and would've...more

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Aug 20, 2008 Donna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Donna by: Dan Reed

This is an idea book, not a plot book. Most fascinating was the history and culture that these intelligent and introspective people developed based on the few relics they found and the lore they passed down over generations. Fascinating because of its illustration of the drive to make sense of the world, and fascinating because of the sometimes amusing inaccuracies. I thought the language was fun to decipher. I'm not sure I would recommend it to all readers. I think it would be helpful to read s...more

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Apr 26, 2012 Glasgowchivas rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ive been reading Ridley Walker for close to six months, continually held back and slowed down by the language. But I'm glad I persevered as in the end it's a bold and hopeful, post-apocalyptic story and is probably the truest vision of a broken future that I've read. But it is tough going. If you're put off by the language in the first ten pages you probably won't make it to the end.

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Aug 06, 2011 Matthew added it

Hoban's Riddley Walker is an amazing work. Reminiscent of the constructed language of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Adams' Watership Down, in Riddley Walker Hoban creates a new and plausible world and then looks at how narratives form, change over time, become distorted and ultimately provide organizing activities within societies. Imagine the Jesus story (a redemptive saviour come to save mankind after a Fall from grace and an eviction from some golden age, ie. Garden of Eden) merged with Cam...more

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Nov 26, 2008 Laura rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, sci-fi

God, this book is fantastic.

Ever wonder what it must have been like to live in a world where all that you have is all that's around you, where the earth could hold any kind of horror at all and you'd believe it because all you know is what you see and what you whisper about at night around the fire? That's the kind of world Hoban's created for Riddley and his people. It's an utterly believable (mentally, that is-- there are some sciencefictiony things about the plot that are obviously not natura...more God, this book is fantastic.

Ever wonder what it must have been like to live in a world where all that you have is all that's around you, where the earth could hold any kind of horror at all and you'd believe it because all you know is what you see and what you whisper about at night around the fire? That's the kind of world Hoban's created for Riddley and his people. It's an utterly believable (mentally, that is-- there are some sciencefictiony things about the plot that are obviously not natural) society. The sheer thought that went into this-- it's as if Hoban went off and lived as an iron-age peasant himself for a lifetime.

It's the mentality of these characters that really gets me. In the passages where Riddley, our Huck-Finn-esque hero, visits the old 'stannins' of the 'bernt towns' and roams among the ruins of our destroyed society, the feelings he describes are so earnest and bowelsy, so bewilderingly human, that it's hard not to be awed. His philosophical reflections are relevant an honest. This book is, in a large part, about the philosophy of what it means to be human-- what the "idear of us" really is. But there's no frivolity of thought here. The idea that simple people in touch with the world can know things our society can't is borne out in full by what Riddley has to say. What is the idear of Power? Should the 2 come 1? What are we-- are we in 2, are we loan and oansome, or ought we come gether? When we try to move forward in life-- when we try to progress, when we plumb the secrets of the world, searching for the Nos. of the many cools and the party cools, what are we doing? Are we hurtling towards our own destruction? What does man do to himself, in the end-- is there nothing for us in the future but the 1 Big 1, the moment when we finally destroy ourselves? Or is there another way?

The language above is from the book. Yes, it's a bit intimidating. But he's created such a tight linguistic web of meaning with his Riddelyspeak that it's better, at times, to read straight on through without hesitation, to let the allusions and ideas that these worn-down words create just flow on into your head. Every word means more than one thing. Our convoluted latinate multisyllables have been broken down here into nuggets of real meaning, and Hoban's word choices often work on so many levels that it's difficult to tell what he's actually doing. The reader is as bewildered as Riddley is. This book is designed to bewilder. It works wonderfully.

A classic if I ever knew one. Astonishing and brutal and profound. There is absolutely no reason why not to read this book. Absolutely none at all. It's got a kind of mastery in it that you rarely get to see in most contemporary work. This is the 20th century looking back at itself with horror, and it's a lesson for anyone.(less)

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May 11, 2012 Scott rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't know if it's monitoring political 'debates' (probably too kind of a word) between democrats and republicans, or watching people quit where I work, or if it could be something as simple as the bathroom scale I bought to monitor my weight, but I've been reading a lot of stories about the end of the world.
Riddley Walker is very similar to a lot of other books that feature the remnants of the human race after an apocalyptic event. Things are plenty primitive.
What's different about this book...more

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May 05, 2012 BeeQuiet rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Our story is set in a time where we find people living in iron age style communities. After thousands of years of human development following a catastrophic nuclear war which has effectively sent the race back in time, this development has progressed from the darkest days of nuclear darkness, a time of foraging, through to hunter gatherers. Now the history of this race is mangled, handed down through oral histories which flex according to the morality of the time. The people in Holborn's book st...more Our story is set in a time where we find people living in iron age style communities. After thousands of years of human development following a catastrophic nuclear war which has effectively sent the race back in time, this development has progressed from the darkest days of nuclear darkness, a time of foraging, through to hunter gatherers. Now the history of this race is mangled, handed down through oral histories which flex according to the morality of the time. The people in Holborn's book still bear remembrance to the mistakes made in the past, wary of moving forward, yet in awe of the people of the past with their boats in the air.

It is impossible to give a review for this book without discussing the language in which it is written. Riddley Walker forces you to slow down by being written in a form of English conceived of as being a future version, one developed and changed through years of oral history tradition. Written records are sparse and held by the few, leaving the community in the dark, both in terms of the ability to wield the technology and in the literal sense, nights filled with the fear of life outside the encampments, where people only travel in groups.

In this circumstance we find Riddley Walker, who tells us his tale, writing it down from memory as best he can, linking in the mythology of his people which gives us glimmers of information about what happened long ago. His path is a strange one, one that he follows with almost as little information as the reader has. We feel his fear and his uncertainty, which is heightened once again by having to negotiate our way around a strange language of which we have little comprehension. It is important not to rush this book, take your time and allow yourself to slowly understand the language as you slowly understand the plot and the motives of the various people involved.

Not being your average dystopian tale, this book is about community and tells us the importance of myth not just in terms of explaining the past, but the potential present and future also.(less)

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Apr 01, 2012 Christopher Hawkes rated it 5 of 5 stars

I’ve just finished ‘Riddley Walker’ by Russell Hoban for probably the fourth time. It’s an amazing book recommended to me by Mr Tate, my old high-school English teacher. For the uninitiated, it’s a novel written from the perspective of 12-year-old Riddley soon after his ‘naming day’. Soon after, his father is killed while digging for iron and, with little time to grieve, Riddley assumes his father’s secondary role as the village’s ‘connexion man’, an interpreter of seemingly random events. His f...more I’ve just finished ‘Riddley Walker’ by Russell Hoban for probably the fourth time. It’s an amazing book recommended to me by Mr Tate, my old high-school English teacher. For the uninitiated, it’s a novel written from the perspective of 12-year-old Riddley soon after his ‘naming day’. Soon after, his father is killed while digging for iron and, with little time to grieve, Riddley assumes his father’s secondary role as the village’s ‘connexion man’, an interpreter of seemingly random events. His first ‘reveal’ does not go well, however, and soon he is ‘over the fents’ where the wild dogs are waiting for him.

It’s a strange book set in strange times. Approximately 2000 years after a nuclear war, civilisation has been knocked back into the Iron Age. Fragments of the old world – including nursery rhymes, a wall painting from Canterbury Cathedral, and Punch and Judy – have been gathered by the bewildered people as a means of understanding their present condition. One of the rhymes contains the recipe for gunpowder and by the end of the book the world enters a new and more complex age.

The plot is ambitious enough, but what is most striking about the book is it’s language. Here is the opening paragraph:

‘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. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clatter his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, “Your tern now my tern later…”‘

The English used is degraded but intensely evocative. ‘Sharna pax and get the poal/When the Ardship of Cambry comes out of the hoal’ defeated me until I realised it referred to the sharpening of an axe in readiness of a very specific type of ‘telling’. Other favourites include the ‘grooling and smarling’ of the wild dogs (unless you’re ‘dog frendy’), ‘helping the qwirys’ (i.e. torture), which often ends in ‘arga warga’. It’s also a very witty book. Many of the place names are bodily functions, punning on actual locations in Kent (e.g. ‘Horny Boy’ is Herne Bay, ‘Dunk Your Arse’ Dungeness, and ‘Sams Itch’ Sandwich).

It’s not the easiest read but well worth the challenge.(less)

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Mar 18, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

In the canon of post-apocalyptic novels, Riddley Walker is much closer to The Slynx than A Canticle for Leibowitz which is good company to be in. No direct allegory with any society at or near the time of its publication seems intended; the nuclear upheaval is a premise from which to examine the nature of myth, religion and political power. The puppet shows which the government allows are sort of a travesty of religious services and the alternate show that arises at the end of the book may illus...more

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Jan 12, 2012 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wow, this is quite a book. Ridley Walker, the narrator of the story, is a 12 year old living in a post-apocalyptic East England. His language is a heavily distorted, and simplified, English (making some parts tricky to decipher), reflecting the essentially medieval society he lives in, 2000 years after The Bad Time.

Just about all knowledge from our time has been lost, but there are fragments of it echoed in nursery rhymes and folk tales that recur throughout the novel. Just as Riddley's languag...more Wow, this is quite a book. Ridley Walker, the narrator of the story, is a 12 year old living in a post-apocalyptic East England. His language is a heavily distorted, and simplified, English (making some parts tricky to decipher), reflecting the essentially medieval society he lives in, 2000 years after The Bad Time.

Just about all knowledge from our time has been lost, but there are fragments of it echoed in nursery rhymes and folk tales that recur throughout the novel. Just as Riddley's language is a distorted echo of our English, with faux-amis-like homonyms revealing unintended meanings, the nursery rhymes and folk tales contain kernels of forgotten knowledge from the time before the apocalypse. This is done exceptionally well - while part of the fun of the book is trying to spot the origins of these folk stories, they are not the clumsy, direct allegories one might expect, but have the real ring of organic myth.

It is interesting that the society seems restrained by their knowledge of the pre-apocalyptic world. If they were starting from scratch you feel they'd make greater progress. As it is, they are trying to recreate what they knew we have without the necessary foundations, and so seem doomed to stagger around in fruitless circles (like an emergent religion based on fossilised world models, à la J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough).

This, along with the depravation and sheer grimness of Riddley's world, and the inevitable power struggles and cruelty make the book a somewhat depressing, harrowing read with an underlying despair at the human condition. But then there are also definitely kernels of optimism, partly from the eponymous character's resilience, but also from the creativity evinced by their new myths and the emergent culture that comes from it.

Riddley Walker is a great book - linguistically rich and challenging, with a well-constructed future-primitive world with a convincing culture. Not always easy, but it grabbed me and kept me reading - even if, sometimes, only a couple of pages at a time. And as soon as I finished I wanted to go back and re-read sections of it - as well as look up other people's thoughts about the book (I haven't done that yet). There are so many characters, phrases and incidents which have firmly lodged themselves in my subconscious that Riddley Walker will stay with me for quite a while.
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Oct 02, 2011 Elvis Brown rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-favs

It is a sad truth that if we ever lost the modern world with electricity and all its communications infrastructure then within 3 generations we would be primitives surrounded my artifacts. If anyone could describe what the artifacts once did they would not be believed.

That is the kind of world in which Riddley Walker lives. Events happen to Riddley that make him for a time the central figure in an unfolding story that the participants of which dimly realise is both portent and potent.

Every time...more

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Mar 05, 2011 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, favorites

If you love language, word play, etymology, puzzles, etc., you'll live in this book while you're reading it, and maybe even while you're not.

The language of Riddley Walker is an invented one, but it rings true. In an illiterate, dirty, mostly agrarian post-apocalyptic society, written language (for the few who can even write) represents words the way they sound. Hence, someone who is enthusiastic is 'as cited.' The local bigwig is known as the 'Pry Mincer.'

Meanings have also changed, with words...more

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Jan 01, 2011 Jon Stout rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: historians and poets

Recommended to Jon by: Dennis Percher

Shelves: scifi

With some resemblance to A Canticle for Leibowitz, this book describes a post-nuclear dark age in the environs of Canterbury, England. The hero, Riddley Walker, is an enterprising young shaman adventurer trying to make sense of it all, using remnants of culture from Canterbury Cathedral and the atomic age.

He uses an invented language which sounds as jarring as the Middle English of the Canterbury Tales, but which has embedded in it familiar jargon, such as “spare the mending and tryl narrer” fo...more

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Dec 07, 2010 Stasa Fritz rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this for my current MFA work, so my review is more from a writer's craft perspective. Below is a cut and past from a response paper. The Japanese Kanji that I put in to illustrate some things will be (is) lost.

Despite the author’s protestations to the contrary, this is classic—nearly archetypical—quality science fiction. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for approximately 42 years, at one time probably consuming thirty to forty books per year (albeit not all were quality!)....more

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May 31, 2010 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-sci-fi

I picked up this book because my friend Matt talked about it on the drive back from the February Quest game, and it sounded interesting. I'm wicked glad I read it, because it was one of the most unique and fascinating reading experiences I've ever had.
Riddley Walker is set in the post-apocalyptic remnants of England, where human civilization is at approximately Iron-Age levels of knowledge and technology. It is so far past the nuclear apocalypse, however, that not only the events of the disaster...more

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May 04, 2010 Adam Armstrong rated it 4 of 5 stars

Post-apocalyptic novel that is right up your alley if you can get comfortable with the invented English dialect that is similar to Middle English, but even more similar to the students essays I tutor at the local community college. This novel touches on all the basic biblical allusions found in many other novels--free will, violence as human condition, martyrdom, mob mentality, dangers of knowledge and progression, etc--but what makes it so interesting is that we, as readers, get to experience t...more

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Jan 20, 2010 Phoebe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sciffy, loved-it, wishlist

I discovered Riddley Walker by attempting, and totally failing, to finish a book that I'd heard rip-roaringly good things about, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

To be fair, I was only attracted to Cloud Atlas because I'd heard it featured a dystopia. I was fresh out of college, working in a library, and all I'd been interested in reading about was the end of the world. I happily picked my way through wikipedia's lists of dystopic works,until I got to Cloud Atlas. It became a slog: I only reached th...more

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Sep 30, 2009 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Oh, wow. This book took so much work that I nearly quit. But I didn't quit. And I still gave it 4 stars. I might change my mind later....

Riddley Walker isn't science fiction any more than Cormac MccCarthy's The Road is science fiction. What is so scientific about a civilization kicked back to the iron age? Where does the science part come in?

I'm really interested in post-apocalyptic lit, and this novel paints an accurate picture of what I think humanity would be like. Not in Brave New World dys...more

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Apr 14, 2009 Hotspur rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, folklore, science-fiction

When Anthony Burgess published 99 Novels: the best in English since 1939, I was surprised and delighted to discover RIDDLEY WALKER as a result. Burgess was effusive in his praise, and I can see why, having reread it not so long ago.

Hoban's post-apocalyptic story takes a while to unfold from its foundation. This is necessary because the reader has to absorb the culture, history and especially the language of Riddley's INLAND (England) before the plot can develop. And a wonderful crafting of word...more

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May 09, 2012 Kathleen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Riddley Walker tells the story of a twelve year old boy living in Kent two thousand years after nuclear war has destroyed human civilisation, leaving people sparse, stuttering and groping in the remains of what used to be back way back. The book is a staggering achievement - it's beautiful and terrifying, creative and puzzling.

As many of the reviews here say what's really special about Hoban's book is the language. Written in 'Riddleyspeak', we have to read it slow, and our language comes apart...more Riddley Walker tells the story of a twelve year old boy living in Kent two thousand years after nuclear war has destroyed human civilisation, leaving people sparse, stuttering and groping in the remains of what used to be back way back. The book is a staggering achievement - it's beautiful and terrifying, creative and puzzling.

As many of the reviews here say what's really special about Hoban's book is the language. Written in 'Riddleyspeak', we have to read it slow, and our language comes apart in front of our eyes. I think Hoban can really convey what it might mean for society to collapse because we feel it directly in the language - it's fragmented and all wrong. So many of the phrases are full of misunderstandings of the words' meanings as we know them and then there's the way the words are drawn from twentieth-century science but have lost all connection with science. A few examples: some poasyum, from symposium, is where a group of characters get together in a kind of naked orgy of memory sharing, programmit used for planned, the Littyl Shyning Man the Addom is a figure in their mythology who combines Jesus, Adam and the Atom - he's pulled apart in a way that leads to the creation of the 1 Big 1, i.e. nukes. I was fascinated by the way the language of science was pulled back into myth and religion and yet didn't quite work - it left the people speaking it always feeling that they didn't understand, there was a truth that had once been clear but no longer was and they weren't good enough to know it. In other words, as a language of myth in a post-science world it fails.

The world Riddley lives in is pretty coherent and full of its own stories and conflicts but what really had me wondering about this book is what Hoban is trying to say about the world we live in. Everyone in the book is trying to understand their world and themselves, they try to make connections between events, to figure out fragments of old texts and things they dig up out of the earth, to piece back together the innovations of past civilisations (like gunpowder). There's no real hope for the 'survivors'; even if Riddley is very much alive, his world is wasted. Sometimes I thought their connections and stories were beautiful, suggestive and haunting, but at other times they're close to insanity. If a story is powerful it's because it talks to us in some way. I actually grew up very close to where the story takes place and loved the uncanny sense of home/not-home Hoban conjured up. In some ways Riddley's world is ours already, as his language is in ours, if we could just figure it out...(less)

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Feb 09, 2012 Philip rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: post-apocalypse

Told in an invented, "de-evolved" form of English, this first-person, post-apocalypse novel is one of the most difficult books I've ever read -- but also one of the most worthwhile. There are a number of accompanying websites (such as http://www.errorbar.net/rw/) which annotate the book and provide explanations for many of the places, historical references and other details, making the book even more rewarding. Definitely a challenge, but one well worth the effort.

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Quotes from Riddley Walker

“O yes youwl want to think on that you dont want your mouf to walk you where your feet dont want to go.” — 4 people liked it

“The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.” — 3 people liked it

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