Subject: REVIEW: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Expanded Edition)

From: [email-masked] (Eli Bishop)
Date: 14 May 1999 13:02:23 -0400

RIDDLEY WALKER: EXPANDED EDITION by Russell Hoban
	(RIDDLEY WALKER was originally published in 1980.)
	Review Copyright 1999 Eli Bishop.

Since I'm reviewing a new edition of a novel that's been out of print for
quite a while, this article is in two parts.  The first is a rambling
review of the novel proper, with some thoughts on why it's remained both
cherished and obscure.  Those who are familiar with it may want to skip to
the second part, which describes the differences between this edition and
the RIDDLEY WALKER of 1980.

There is a very good essay on RW (the only good one I've seen, and there
are many bad ones) by David Cowart which can be found on the "Head of
Orpheus" pages at http://www.suba.com/~dayvoll/rh/cowart1.html.  I'm also
sorry for being so wordy, but if you've ever talked to someone who really
likes this book, you know that they will not shut up.

1. What It Is

The story takes place in England, or the little scrap that's left of it
thousands of years after a nuclear war.  A shoestring government, the
Mincery, uses travelling puppet shows to promote its policies; the puppet
hero, Eusa, is also the central figure of the dominant religion, a martyr
who was once a nuclear scientist and now represents the suffering of
mankind in search of knowledge and security.

The Mincery and the population in general have understandably mixed
feelings about knowledge; but inevitably, as scraps of old technology are
rediscovered, a haphazard Iron Age arms race begins.  But the violence and
intrigue happen mostly around the edges of the story as it is told to us
by Riddley, a twelve-year-old man who flees his provincial job (part
preacher, part government go-between) and ends up travelling the
circumference of his small country on foot in just a few days.

Riddley becomes one of a select few to learn the official remnants of
history from Abel Goodparley, the Pry Mincer; from Lorna the shaman and
from Lissener the mutant scapegoat, he learns a different, mythic point of
view, one in which the line between the physical holocaust and the
spiritual condition of mankind is unclear.  The knowledge and motives of
all of them are suspect; the only sure thing is that synchronicity puts
Riddley where he needs to be, to see and reject several competing notions
of what humanity is about.

There are obvious parallels between RIDDLEY WALKER and Walter M. Miller
Jr.'s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, another post-holocaust novel and one that
in my opinion falls more comfortably within science-fiction traditions (or
maybe I should say that it helped to create some traditions which have
been too slavishly followed since then).  In LEIBOWITZ, Catholic
monasteries have preserved scraps of knowledge, a long-dead nuclear
scientist is now a religious figure, and as civilization rises from the
ashes, war quickly escalates again; the only hope for humanity to break
the cycle is an escape to space.

There's a device usually not found outside SF, which should probably have
a name of its own: deriving irony from the far-future characters' limited
knowledge of our present reality.  We know, for instance, that Goodparley
is wrong to think that mankind went from nothing to nuclear power in only
2000 years (he just doesn't understand what A.D. means).  Similarly in
LEIBOWITZ, we know that "R.U.R." is a play about robots, but Thon Taddeo
thinks it's evidence that the human race was created in the 20th century.
In less capable hands, this device degenerates into the kind of thing
where a barbarian sings a garbled pop song to fill us with the fear of
history; but Hoban and Miller both apply it to things that matter to the
characters and to us.

More often, though, Hoban doesn't give us this ironic privilege.  We don't
know what left a "Ring Ditch" around Canterbury -- a weapon? a particle
accelerator? a monorail gone bad?  We don't know what the mysterious Green
Man figure and fertility totems really mean to Riddley's society, and more
importantly, Riddley isn't sure either.  We know much less about Eusa than
we know about Leibowitz, and we don't need to know any more.  The monks of
Miller's novel are lost in a rote-learned past that has the trappings of
mythology; in Riddley's world, the past has really become a myth, by being
distilled into metaphors and archetypes that have an ongoing function.
History in RW evolves the same way language does: mistakes and false
etymologies not only become the new standard usage, but suggest new
meaning.  By misreading nearly every word of the legend of St. Eustace,
Goodparley ends up inventing a new weapon -- so who are we to say he's
wrong?  In Hoban's world, insight comes not from discovering miraculously
preserved documents in an underground vault, but from a mystical process
of opening oneself to contradictions.  Shortcuts -- either political or
psychic -- lead to repeating the mistakes of others.

Readers of Hoban's earlier novels will recognize many themes and images
that have followed (or obsessed) him in the past.  Lions, the frightening
eyes of a seagull, words that "fetch" people to enact them, and the
severed head of Orpheus -- these are all part of Hoban's territory
although, like the language, they behave differently in this book.

I saved for last something that's usually mentioned first when people talk
about this novel: the language.  Hoban never did anything quite like it
before or since.  To describe it in the simplest terms: there's very
little punctuation; the spelling is phonetic, but in a peculiarly English
way; many words are broken up into phrases with different meanings, and
the puns are both beautiful and functional.  This is not at all a gimmick;
I don't think the book could have been written without it.  But it's easy
to miss the point.

First, the language has been described as "degenerated," "semi-literate,"
or "post-apocalyptic" -- all assuming that Hoban meant to show what
English might really be like in the future.  I think that's an overly
literal way of thinking which unfortunately is common in science fiction:
if you're describing an unfamiliar time or place, make up some words and
customs for it, and it's more real.  Too many writers also think that
capitalizing words makes them more sociologically convincing; fortunately,
Hoban mostly stays away from that.  Given that the story is set at least
2300 years in the future, it's very unlikely that people would be speaking
anything we could possibly understand.

Neither is it the kind of awkward spelling and diction that some writers
wrongly think of as "childlike" and use to suggest ignorance -- the
classic SF story "Flowers for Algernon" suffers from this, in my opinion.
Riddley is a very literate young man, in his culture's terms, and has a
way with words reminiscent of, say, Russell Hoban.  But the unpunctuated
flow of his words does suggest, very convincingly, an oral tradition --
one in which pieces of myths are more like household tools than like
sacred objects -- and a desperate need for communication.

Unlike the slang of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, or the half-hearted neologisms of
many SF writers who just compress a few technical terms, Hoban's word-play
runs entirely on the love of English, and has a strong sense of place,
although England is not his native country.  Meanings merge and split
like electron clouds: for instance, "terpitation" means interpretation,
but you can't avoid hearing "trepidation" and possibly "turpitude."  This
book can't and shouldn't be translated; losing the ambiguous words, in
this case, would be like losing entire characters from the story.  But the
double meanings aren't just for the reader; recombining language is
something the characters do for themselves and each other.

Finally, I think the novelty of how the words look is a clever distraction
from the brilliance of how they're arranged.  Riddley talks like
Huckleberry Finn (I know the book jacket says so, but it's true) rewritten
by Faulkner; the images are intensely sensual, while the narrator is
entirely practical in his desire to tell us just how it is. Here's Riddley
eavesdropping downwind of a conversation:
    Its very qwyet and small thru the hisper of the rain its like
    it ben pickt up ever so delkit by the wind the way you myt lif
    a keepaways egg from a ledge on a clif and clym down with it
    only this here wind egg it hatches in my ear and littl qwyet
    words come out of it. 

And here's an old man preparing charcoal:
    Them chard coal harts kep him on the hop he wer all ways
    hanging over them doing 1 thing and a nother hewd be
    shovveling earf on them or hewd be shiffing his wind screans
    a bout.  He wer all ways scortching his self and his cloes his
    red jumper wer bernt ful of hoals and the sleaves of it all 
    blackent.  He wer looking at it 1 time and he said, 'Im about
    due for the new red.'

It makes sense that Riddley doesn't see much need for commas; the rhythm
jumps right out of the text.  Reading this book out loud was a unique
experience for me and literally changed the way I talked to people for
months afterward.  I think in the end this is the best explanation for why
Hoban wrote it the way he did: because it works, and engages the reader on
every level.  Only the most bloodless academic could read it and think
strictly of how it comments on history and myth and technology and art.
It can't be read from a distance.

That may be why it's been out of print for years and is now being
published by a university press, and why Hoban is still portrayed as
"dabbling" in science fiction when he writes a book like FREMDER.  By
moving into territory staked out by Miller and others, he has set off a
special nerve in SF readers that produces an ambiguous reaction -- "oh
good / oh no, another post-apocalyptic journey" -- and leads us to expect
one of several familiar themes: (a) technology is bad; (b) technology is
good if only we would use it correctly; (c) humanity is on the way out;
(d) humanity will survive anything; (e) there is nothing new under the
sun.  Hoban touches on all of these, but isn't interested in satisfying
our appetite for any of them; he doesn't even leave the semi-comfort of an
ironic lament for human nature, because he suggests that we don't and
won't understand human nature at all.

2. What's New

Sooner or later, it seems, every film that a reasonable number of people
liked will be re-released on video in a "Collector's Edition," with 30
minutes of interviews, outtakes, and commentary to tell you why you like
the film so much.  If there was disagreement between the director and the
studio, or if the director had a change of heart 20 years later about
cutting a scene, then we'll get a "Director's Cut" and can argue ad
nauseam about the merits of each version (Usenet seems particularly well
suited to this).  What we have here is the former; Hoban has not pulled a
Stephen King.

This "expanded edition" consists of RIDDLEY WALKER plus a new author's
note, excerpts from early drafts and journals, a very brief glossary of
"Riddleyspeak," and a reproduction of "The Legend of St. Eustace" (the
painting that plays a key role in the story's mythology) -- only 14 new
pages in all.  Although I always like to read words I haven't read before
from Hoban -- even his grocery list probably has some vivid turns of
phrase -- if I had to decide whether these apocrypha are worthy of a new
edition, I'd have to say no.  But I don't have to decide, because the
choice isn't between plain and expanded, but between expanded and nothing
at all.  Indiana U.P. and/or the author may have thought the extra bits
were important, or may just have wanted to make the reprint seem like more
of an event; either way, more people will now be exposed to this book, and
Hoban fans will not have to worry about their worn-out copies being
permanently borrowed by unscrupulous friends.

Anyway, in an ideal world, there would be a plain edition of RW for people
who just want to read it, and a much more densely annotated edition for
people who want to know everything Hoban was thinking.  But the glossary
in this edition feels mostly like an afterthought, and a way of coaxing
along a reader who might be tempted to give up after the first few pages
-- most of the words defined are from the first two chapters.  Hoban calls
it "a sampling to help the reader" but the choices seem very arbitrary
("pirntowt" is here, but not the trickier and funnier "vack your wayt"?).
I may be wrong, but I'd guess this part was not the author's idea; there
is a sort of crashing obviousness to the way he explains some of the jokes
and allusions, a feeling of "Do I really have to do this?"

While the glossary may be helpful to some readers, under no circumstances
should anyone read the Afterword and Notes sections before reading the
novel.  Hoban's comments about how he came to write it are fascinating
(coming from Pennsylvania too, I appreciated his remark that Riddley's
grammar has roots in Philly), but the excerpts from his early drafts (when
Riddley spoke modern English, and thought a lot about the past for no good
reason) are painfully wrong, and you don't want to have them in your head
while you read the real thing.

The visual material consists of the map from the original edition, two
sketches of Mr. Punch by Hoban, and "The Legend of St. Eustace."
Unfortunately, the small black-and-white reproduction of this painting is
very hard to decipher -- although this is not inappropriate, since the
characters in the novel never get to see it either.

Again, I feel bad for complaining about anything, especially since Indiana
U.P. are also planning to reprint several of Hoban's earlier novels.  Just
to have RIDDLEY WALKER and TURTLE DIARY back in the light of day is a good
thing for everyone.

[email-masked]    http://www.concentric.net/~Elib

%A   Russell Hoban
%C   601 N. Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404-3797
%D   1998
%G   0-253-21234-0
%I   Indiana University Press
%O   U$12.95  1-800-842-6796
%P   235 pp.
%T   "Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition"

-- 
Eli Bishop / www.concentric.net/~Elib
"I been tryin' to put a chicken in the window,
to chase away the wolf from the door" - John Prine