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Nathan Ariss - Rowena MacDonald on Russell Hoban

Too Much Clevverness

For a brief time in 2003 I knew the writer Daren King, whose first novel, Boxy an Star, was shortlisted for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award. Boxy an Star is set in the near future and tells the story of two teenage ‘sieveheads’ who have fried their brains on so many ‘spangles’ that even simple things such as a duvet fill them with awed confusion.

We me an Star are under the pill bag. The pill bag is a jumbo big bag an is massive an full up of pills. We like it loads. It feels nice on us. On me an my girl she is called Star an we are in love. I love her. She is mine an we are called Star an me.

The novel is entirely written in this broken language which has echoes of Estuary English, Cockney rhyming slang, Peter and Jane Ladybird books and Nineties rave culture.

When I asked Daren what had inspired Boxy an Star, he said he had read the first few pages of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. That he hadn’t bothered to read the whole novel seemed impressively casual. In my typically uncool, autodidactic way, I bought Riddley Walker and was transfixed.

To give you a flavour of the novel, here are the opening lines:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt been none for a long time befor
him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

Hoban started writing Riddley Walker in 1974 and finished it five years later. It is a masterpiece. Those who know it love it, and whole websites are devoted to it, with chapter-by-chapter annotations deciphering the language, and online chat rooms discussing its themes. In 2005 a Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum (a symposium in Riddleyspeak) was held in London, with readings, quizzes and a pilgrimage to Kent to visit locations in the novel. Every 4 February, Russell Hoban’s birthday, die-hard fans leave typed quotations from his novels in random places for strangers to find.

Riddley Walker is set several thousand years in the future following a nuclear apocalypse referred to as the Bad Time. The future, instead of being more sophisticated, has reverted to Iron Age simplicity. Riddley’s people are hunter-gatherers and live in a fenced encampment near Bernt Arse (known to us as Ashford in Kent). Beyond the ‘fents’ are dark forests where packs of vicious black dogs roam. Most of England – ‘Inland’ – is now, for all Riddley and we know, a radioactive wasteland. Only Kent exists on the Swallows and Amazons style map drawn by Riddley at the start of the book. The head of Government is at the Ram (Ramsgate), now a small island cut off from the rest of Kent. Government policies are disseminated through E

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For a brief time in 2003 I knew the writer Daren King, whose first novel, Boxy an Star, was shortlisted for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award. Boxy an Star is set in the near future and tells the story of two teenage ‘sieveheads’ who have fried their brains on so many ‘spangles’ that even simple things such as a duvet fill them with awed confusion.

We me an Star are under the pill bag. The pill bag is a jumbo big bag an is massive an full up of pills. We like it loads. It feels nice on us. On me an my girl she is called Star an we are in love. I love her. She is mine an we are called Star an me.

The novel is entirely written in this broken language which has echoes of Estuary English, Cockney rhyming slang, Peter and Jane Ladybird books and Nineties rave culture. When I asked Daren what had inspired Boxy an Star, he said he had read the first few pages of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. That he hadn’t bothered to read the whole novel seemed impressively casual. In my typically uncool, autodidactic way, I bought Riddley Walker and was transfixed. To give you a flavour of the novel, here are the opening lines:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt been none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

Hoban started writing Riddley Walker in 1974 and finished it five years later. It is a masterpiece. Those who know it love it, and whole websites are devoted to it, with chapter-by-chapter annotations deciphering the language, and online chat rooms discussing its themes. In 2005 a Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum (a symposium in Riddleyspeak) was held in London, with readings, quizzes and a pilgrimage to Kent to visit locations in the novel. Every 4 February, Russell Hoban’s birthday, die-hard fans leave typed quotations from his novels in random places for strangers to find. Riddley Walker is set several thousand years in the future following a nuclear apocalypse referred to as the Bad Time. The future, instead of being more sophisticated, has reverted to Iron Age simplicity. Riddley’s people are hunter-gatherers and live in a fenced encampment near Bernt Arse (known to us as Ashford in Kent). Beyond the ‘fents’ are dark forests where packs of vicious black dogs roam. Most of England – ‘Inland’ – is now, for all Riddley and we know, a radioactive wasteland. Only Kent exists on the Swallows and Amazons style map drawn by Riddley at the start of the book. The head of Government is at the Ram (Ramsgate), now a small island cut off from the rest of Kent. Government policies are disseminated through Eusa shows, rather like Punch and Judy shows, performed by the Pry Mincer himself, Abel Goodparley, and his sidekick, the Wes Mincer, Erny Orfing. Riddley’s father is a ‘connexion man’, responsible for interpreting the cryptic messages of the Eusa shows. The day after Riddley turns 12 his father is crushed to death by a piece of machinery from before the Bad Time that the men from his crowd try to dig up. Life in this distant future is nasty, brutal and short. Riddley is living after a fall. Too much ‘clevverness’ – the technology that developed nuclear bombs – has destroyed civilization. Language – which is, of course, a mark of civilization – has broken down too, doing away with such niceties as grammar and correct spelling. It looks and sounds like Anglo-Saxon mixed with scrambled technological and political phrases from the twentieth century (‘pirntowt’, printout; ‘fissional seakerts of the act’, a pun on Official Secrets Act/nuclear fission). Many of the misspelled and fragmented words have double or even triple meanings, which give Riddleyspeak, along with its gutturalness, an amazing poetry and energy. The reader’s experience of muddling through the text mirrors Riddley’s struggle to understand what has happened to the world. The difficulty of the prose is also partly responsible for the book’s cult status, for it confers an exclusive ‘clevverness’ on its readers. Two days after his father’s death, Riddley unearths an ancient Mr Punch puppet and refuses to surrender it to a government official. Feeling increasingly persecuted by the authorities and his people, who view him with suspicion because he is ‘dog frendy’ (in other words, the wild dogs don’t attempt to kill him), he jumps over the fents into the forest. There he comes across blind Lissener, whose face looks like ‘it ben shapit qwick and rough out of clay’. Lissener is one of the Eusa folk, a race of people deformed by radiation, who are both tormented and courted by the authorities since they know how to make the ‘1 Big 1’ – the atomic bomb. Riddley frees Lissener from the underground cave where he has been imprisoned by Abel Goodparley and sets off with him towards Cambry (Canterbury), specifically the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral, the centre of the ‘Power Ring’, where Lissener plans to meet up with other Eusa folk and create the ‘1 Big 1’. The novel then becomes a nightmarish quest along grassed-over A roads and through the dead towns of Fork Stoan (Folkestone), Good Shoar (Deal), Horny Boy (Herne Bay) and Widders Bel (Whitstable). Along the way Riddley and Lissener are both followed and intimidated by Goodparley and his ‘hevvys’, who are desperate to know the secret of the ‘1 Big 1’. The book is, among other things, a metaphor for the race between the Allies and the Nazis to create the atomic bomb. Underpinning the novel is a legend. On 14 March 1974 Russell Hoban visited Canterbury Cathedral and saw the reconstruction of a fifteenth-century wall painting depicting St Eustace, a secondcentury Christian martyr who, while out hunting, had a vision of the crucified Jesus between the horns of a stag. The legend of the saint provided the inspiration for Riddley Walker, in which the Crucifixion, the tearing apart of Jesus, becomes the ‘Littl Shynin Man’ or the ‘Addom’ – the atom they are trying to split and the central point of the story. Other, older myths also recur: the Green Man, a pagan symbol of rebirth depicting a man’s face with vegetation sprouting from his mouth, a carving of which Riddley finds in the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral; Aunty, a rapacious Lilith-like angel of death, who has teeth in her vagina, and kills men through sexual intercourse; the erotic and grotesque carvings of female figures, thought to be of pagan origin and known as Sheela-na-Gigs. In fact the book is brimming with allusions; these are but a few. Hoban has created an astonishingly complex and believable collective consciousness of the future, of the fragments of history that have survived and been eroded into new meaning: ‘What ben makes tracks for what wil be. Words in the air pirnt foot steps on the groun for us to put our feet in to.’ Besides these deeper messages, Riddley Walker is also a gripping adventure story with compelling characters. Goodparley, the Pry Mincer, ‘all ways smyling with his big sqware teef ’, sounds not dissimilar to our perma-grinning former Prime Minister. The relationship Riddley has with Lorna Elswint, the ‘tel woman’ who is the ‘oldes’ in their crowd, is drawn with a light-fingered matter-of-factness that makes it all the more intriguing. Riddley is an Everyman but he has a very particular curiosity, turn of phrase and motivation. Perhaps Riddley Walker speaks to me because I was a child in the early Eighties when the threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed very real. My parents were active members of CND and I was taken on rallies to Greenham Common where we joined hands around the missile base, tied babies’ booties to the barbed-wire fence and sang ‘We shall overcome’. My dad made a fifteen-foot replica of a cruise missile out of wood and painted canvas, and we carried it on a march around Westminster, chanting, ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ My dad was dressed in a white radiation suit and a Hallowe’en skull mask. By bedtime that evening I was hysterical with fear that Ronald Reagan was going to press the big red button any minute. Riddley Walker, published in 1980, tapped into the nuclear anxieties of the era. Though Riddley and his people smoke hash rolled in Rizlas and live in a muddy, back-to-the-land, Seventies-style commune (reminiscent of the Greenham Common camps), the book doesn’t feel dated. It has a grandness of vision which makes it feel paradoxically both ancient and futuristic: timeless, in fact. Its world is huge and bleak: the endless rain, the dark forests where the black dogs and mysterious charcoal-burners lurk, the ruins of twentiethcentury civilization that Riddley stumbles upon. A deep sadness blankets the book like a radioactive cloud, and Riddley feels shame at how far mankind has fallen – ‘O what we ben! And what we come to!’ Once upon a time there were ‘boats in the air and picters on the wind’ and now they are grubbing about in the dirt. It seems though, as Riddley and his people try to piece together the destructive ‘clevverness’ of the past, that humanity is doomed to repeat its mistakes. The myth of progress really is a myth. Human beings are extraordinarily clever but we are always, like Riddley, dealing in fragments, never seeing the whole picture: ‘If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre always in the middl of it living it or moving thru it. Never mynd.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © Rowena Macdonald 2009


About the contributor

Rowena Macdonald works at the House of Commons but writes the rest of the time. She has recently completed a novel entitled Swoon and her next will be set in the Palace of Westminster.

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