But it turns out that Riddley is writing his story. This looks at first as if the narrator were speaking aloud in an extreme regional vernacular. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. 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. 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. Canterbury has become “Cambry,” Ashford is “Bernt Arse,” Dover is now “Do It Over.” And the English that greets us on the first page of text is not our English. The Kent shown on the map that heads Riddley Walker (see below) is not our Kent. Literacy being both rare and restricted in this England, the larval government communicates through propagandistic puppet shows that are interpreted by each settlement’s “connexion man.” Riddley, 12 when the story begins, is one such connexion man, just come of age.įour decades on, the book’s unique language-fans call it “Riddleyspeak”-is what separates Hoban’s novel from the rising tide of dystopian coming-of-age books. That it sprang from the same pen as the Frances books, though, is far from the most remarkable thing about Riddley Walker, whose New Iron Age characters huddle in small fenced settlements near Canterbury, surviving by hunting and farming and salvaging metal from the remains of their ancestors’ self-immolation.

Surely the author couldn’t be that Russell Hoban, the one who wrote the egg song in Bread and Jam for Frances? Years later, I came across a 1980 experimental novel called Riddley Walker, a post-apocalyptic bildungsroman set three millennia after a nuclear war has leveled the earth’s cities, irradiated the environment, and decimated the living. Somewhere in our copy of the Hobans’ A Bargain for Frances the sentence “Paul is stuped” is furiously graffitied in Renée’s handwriting. My sister and I read them- The Mole Family’s Christmas, The Sorely Trying Day, The Stone Doll of Sister Brute-to tatters, often quarreling over who got to go first. Growing up, I knew and loved a string of books written by Russell and illustrated by Lillian Hoban.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban