Riddley Walker Read online

  To Wieland

  Jesus has said:

  Blessed is the lion that

  the man will devour, and the lion

  will become man. And loathsome is the

  man that the lion will devour,

  and the lion will become man.

  Gospel of Thomas, Logion 7

  Translated by George Ogg

  The quotation is from New Testament Apocrypha by E. Hennecke, edited by

  W. Schneemelcher, S.C.M. Press Ltd, 1963. English translation copyright

  © Lutterworth Press, 1963.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Map

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  Footnotes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  This book breaks the alleged rules of literary composition. Of course, there aren’t really any such rules, or if there are, they’re there for deadheads who want to be taught naturalism by a berk in the Fens. But suchlike types say, ‘Oh no, you can’t set a book in the distant future’ (or the near future for that matter), and, ‘Oh no, you can’t write a book in an entirely constructed dialect, complete with its own idiom’. I tell you it’s lucky that these types are all gone and blown out the window while Riddley Walker is still alive and kicking. I don’t think I could stand to be in a world with them while this book was dead.

  One of the objections these tosspots have to books like this one is that it name-checks stuff from the time it was written in and dares to believe that it might endure, not just through ordinary suburban time, but even after a major Fall. So, in Riddley Walker, the residents of a post-nuclear holocaust Kent, where technology has regressed to the level of the Iron Age, smoke hash and roll it in rizlas. But I don’t think this is an anachronism, because hash-ingesting seems to me to be an obviously Iron Age sort of a thing to do. I’m not even talking about getting stoned, I mean the way the stuff gunges up your fingernails and its elemental feel, as if it were the earth itself.

  Anyway, that’s the only thing or product that’s mentioned by its right name in Riddley Walker. If you’re going to extract others you have to read the text with full attention. I’ve done that and I couldn’t. The presence of hash makes sense also because of its role in the world described by the book. It’s the travelling show men and their local interpreters who get paid in ‘cuts’ of hash, and this seems appropriate. Hash is a reverie-producing substance and these men are in the business of promoting a government through collective access to narratives of dreams and dreams of narrative, the fragments of a collective consciousness that has been shattered like a glass bowl dropped on a tile floor. Leastways – that’s what I think.

  More serious objections will focus on the nuclear holocaust angle. Surely that was a post-World War Two thing, and all gone now with the end of the Cold War? Every generation gets the end-of-the-world anxiety it deserves; it used to be transcendental, then it became elemental, and now it’s environmental. It’s one of the inherent problems of futuristic fiction that it’s more likely to become dated than writing about the present, and certainly historical fiction. (Although with the benefit of hindsight we can definitely discern how one era’s depiction of another is a portrait of itself.) I think that’s why so many contemporary writers only set their novels in the past: they imagine that in the torque that lies between now and then lies a profound force, that can power their work into posterity. They feel that, because they’re so uncertain about what’s happening to the world under their very eyes, they best retreat to an adamant Arcadia of real – and fictional – values.

  But Riddley Walker isn’t out of date at all. On the contrary, it reads as fresh and vivid today as it has since it was first published twenty-two years ago. My hunch is that given the book’s particular (and near-unique) attributes, this extent of survival indicates that it will stride on further into the future and become that most unfashionable of things, a classic.

  The post-nuclear holocaust setting of the book is not essential to Riddley Walkers meaning or effects, because this is not a book about the past masquerading as one about the future. On the contrary, this is a book about the delusion of progress, a book about the confused collective dream that humanity terms ‘history’, a book about what consciousness might be. It is a grand book, a demanding book, a destabilising book. Even though the furniture of the postlapsarian world described in its pages comes from our technological era of television broadcasts, air travel and nuclear energy, Riddley Walker could be set in the ashes of any civilisation, that of the Romans or the Sumerians, the Mayans or the Harappans. Indeed, it’s all too easy to envisage a film or a theatrical production of Riddley Walker taking place at the feet of the megalithic statues of Easter Island. All that’s central to the book can be summed up by our hero’s lament as he stands beneath the ‘girt shyning weals’ of Fork Stoan: ‘O what we ben! And what we come to . . . How cud any 1 not want to get that shyning Power back from time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals terning?’

  It’s Hoban’s great insight to have understood that the opposite of hubris is shame (or rather, shame is its aftermath, its hangover, its swollen head in the grey dawn of cultural capitulation). By seeding the Judeo-Christian shame myth with the hubris of Promethean humanitarianism, Hoban has engendered a timeless portrayal of the human condition. We are doomed ever to feel shameful about our detachment from nature, consciousness depends on dualism, and yet the destruction of that consciousness (both symbolised and potentially actualised by nuclear fission) will result only in still more shame.

  It is this shame that emotionally animates Riddley Walker, that provides – as it were – the book’s special affects. Riddley himself is both a seer in the waiting and a man of action. He does things – and then he writes them up. For the post-apocalyptic world of Inland, crawling its way back to self-consciousness (both individual and collective), he is the first writer. Steeped in shame and driven to recover the knowledge of a past he has only the most scant idea of, he sets off on a nightmarish series of treks across an indistinct and terrifying landscape.

  Riddley’s awareness of a race of superheroes who lived before is at once specific to his situation, and general (in so far as we can comprehend it) to the mental topography of many people at this stage in their evolution. Riddley may walk the grassed-over thoroughfares of late twentieth-century Kent, but he is also traversing mythological paths, which in their straights and turns contain the encoding of existence itself. Riddley is an Australian Aboriginal youth on walkabout, he is a Homeric hero on a quest, or any other individual human being who seeks through a picaresque to discover the nature of his world.

  A word about Riddleyspeak. I don’t want to anticipate Hoban’s own note on this in his afterword – but I can’t avoid it. Riddley Walker just is difficult to read – there’s no point in denying it. By forcing the reader to slow down, Hoban does his text no favours, while bestowing upon it the greatest of respect. We don’t want slow, we don’t want considered, we don’t even want profound. The cod-naturalism that infects so many texts is not an arbitrary convention, it’s the very essence of what modern identity is. The idea that what I say to you will be immediately and lucidly comprehended is one of the most pr
osaic delusions of this most neurotic age. Everyone wants to be understood as if the world were in a position to provide unconditional love. This is balls. Riddley write-cum-speaks to us from the cusp of literate culture, and, in the very phonetic crudeness (from our angle) of his orthography, lies the vigour of his coming-into-being. Riddley wrestles sense out of the inchoate written language, and in so doing demands that we do the same. Hoban tells us that the novel took him five years to write and that by the end of it he’d become a bad speller. I guarantee that one reading – however long it takes you – will leave you unable to shake Riddleyspeak, and with it Riddleyvision. Yet once you are able to read Riddley Walker fluently, you have gone beyond the world that Riddley himself experiences. The sensation of groping in the dark that you’ll have while deciphering this text is exactly what it is all about. True fictional praxis.

  Hoban is of the generation that witnessed the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like his near-ish contemporaries, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, he sought to create a text that conveys a sense of the re-evaluation of all values implied by this doomsday weapon. Burroughs gave embodiment to fictional worlds that were connected up out of the disjointed dreamscapes of aberrant experience, while Burgess trafficked in dystopia – a most dangerous drug. As for Ballard, his terminal moraines and vermilion sands and timeless fugues are closest in spirit to the world of Riddley Walker, but they are aeons away in terms of its sense of time. Ballard’s work renders surreal the connection between the individual and the collective, between psyche and culture, but he remains in thrall to the particular course of the twentieth century. In Riddley Walker, Hoban’s mind-forged linkages between the remote past and the remote future join with his sense of a language eroded into being, to create a text that is frightening and uncanny.

  At the very end of the original Planet of the Apes movie, the astronaut played by Charlton Heston escapes from the ape-dominated society and rides off along the deserted shoreline. He hasn’t got too far when he encounters the Statue of Liberty buried up to its neck in the sand, and realises (as do the film’s audience) that what he thought was an alien planet is in fact our own earth in the distant future. In my view this shocking image, coming as it did at the end of that most Promethean of decades, the 1960s, was a kind of tocsin, alerting humanity to the folly of its quest for immortality and the stars. Riddley Walker presents the reader with the opportunity to experience this uncanniness for page after page. Feel free to marvel.

  Will Self, London 2002

  1

  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 clattert 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 other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’

  The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.

  The Bernt Arse pack ben follering jus out of bow shot. When the shout gone up ther ears all prickt up. Ther leader he wer a big black and red spottit dog he come forit a littl like he ben going to make a speach or some thing til 1 or 2 bloaks uppit bow then he slumpt back agen and kep his farness follering us back. I took noatis of that leader tho. He wernt close a nuff for me to see his eyes but I thot his eye ben on me.

  Coming back with the boar on a poal we come a long by the rivver it wer hevvyer woodit in there. Thru the girzel you cud see blue smoak hanging in be twean the black trees and the stumps pink and red where they ben loppt off. Aulder trees in there and chard coal berners in amongst them working ther harts. You cud see 1 of them in there with his red jumper what they all ways wear. Making chard coal for the iron reddy at Widders Dump. Every 1 made the Bad Luck go a way syn when we past him. Theres a story callit Hart of the Wood this is it:

  Hart of the Wood

  There is the Hart of the Wud in the Eusa Story1 that wer a stag every 1 knows that. There is the hart of the wood meaning the veryes deap of it thats a nother thing. There is the hart of the wood where they bern the chard coal thats a nother thing agen innit. Thats a nother thing. Berning the chard coal in the hart of the wood. Thats what they call the stack of wood you see. The stack of wood in the shape they do it for chard coal berning. Why do they call it the hart tho? Thats what this here story tels of.

  Every 1 knows about Bad Time and what come after. Bad Time 1st and bad times after. Not many come thru it a live.

  There come a man and a woman and a chyld out of a berning town they sheltert in the woodlings and foraging the bes they cud. Starveling wer what they wer doing. Dint have no weapons nor dint know how to make a snare nor nothing. Snow on the groun and a grey sky overing and the black trees rubbing ther branches in the wind. Crows calling 1 to a nother waiting for the 3 of them to drop. The man the woman and the chyld digging thru the snow they wer eating maws and dead leaves which they vomitit them up agen. Freazing col they wer nor dint have nothing to make a fire with to get warm. Starveling they wer and near come to the end of ther strenth.

  The chyld said, ‘O Im so col Im afeart Im going to dy. If only we had a littl fire to get warm at.’

  The man dint have no way of making a fire he dint have no flint and steal nor nothing. Wood all roun them only there wernt no way he knowit of getting warm from it.

  The 3 of them ready for Aunty they wer ready to total and done when there come thru the woodlings a clevver looking bloak and singing a littl song to his self:

  My roadings ben so hungry

  Ive groan so very thin

  Ive got a littl cook pot

  But nothing to put in

  The man and the woman said to the clevver looking bloak, ‘Do you know how to make fire?’

  The clevver looking bloak said, ‘O yes if I know any thing I know that right a nuff. Fires my middl name you myt say.’

  The man and the woman said, ‘Wud you make a littl fire then weare freazing of the col.’

  The clevver looking bloak said, ‘That for you and what for me?’

  The man and the woman said, ‘What do we have for whatfers?’ They lookit 1 to the other and boath at the chyld.

  The clevver looking bloak said, ‘Iwl tel you what Iwl do Iwl share you my fire and my cook pot if youwl share me what to put in the pot.’ He wer looking at the chyld.

  The man and the woman thot: 2 out of 3 a live is bettern 3 dead. They said, ‘Done.’

  They kilt the chyld and drunk its blood and cut up the meat for cooking.

  The clevver looking bloak said, ‘Iwl show you how to make fire plus Iwl give you flint and steal and makings nor you dont have to share me nothing of the meat only the hart.’

  Which he made the fire then and give them flint and steal and makings then he cookt the hart of the chyld and et it.

  The clevver looking bloak said, ‘Clevverness is gone now but littl by littl itwl come back. The iron wil come back agen 1 day and when the iron comes back they wil bern chard coal in the hart of the wood. And when they bern the chard coal ther stack wil be the shape of the hart of the chyld.’ Off he gone then singing:

  Seed of the littl

  Seed of the wyld

  Seed of the berning is

  Hart of the chyld

  The man and the woman then eating ther chyld it wer black nite all roun them they made ther fire bigger and bigger trying to keap the black from moving in on them. They fel a sleap by ther fire and the fire biggering on it et them up they bernt to death. They ben the old 1s or you my
t say the auld 1s and be come chard coal. Thats why theywl tel you the aulder tree is bes for charring coal. Some times youwl hear of a aulder kincher he carrys off childer.

  Out goes the candl

  Out goes the lite

  Out goes my story

  And so Good Nite

  Coming pas that aulder wood that girzly morning I fealt my stummick go col. Like the aulder kincher ben putting eye on me. No 1 never had nothing much to do with the chard coal berners only the dyers on the forms. Ice a year the chard coal berners they come in to the forms for ther new red clof but in be twean they kep to the woodlings.

  It wer Ful of the Moon that nite. The rain littlt off the sky cleart and the moon come out. We put the boars head on the poal up on top of the gate house. His tusks glimmert and you cud see a dryd up trickl from the corners of his eyes like 1 las tear from each. Old Lorna Elswint our tel woman up there getting the tel of the head. Littl kids down be low playing Fools Circel 9wys. Singing:

  Horny Boy rung Widders Bel

  Stoal his Fathers Ham as wel

  Bernt his Arse and Forkt a Stoan

  Done It Over broak a boan

  Out of Good Shoar vackt his wayt

  Scratcht Sams Itch for No. 8

  Gone to senter nex to see

  Cambry coming 3 times 3

  Sharna pax and get the poal

  When the Ardship of Cambry comes out of the hoal

  Littl 2way Digman being the Ardship going roun the circel til it come chopping time. He bustit out after the 3rd chop. I use to be good at that I all ways rathert be the Ardship nor 1 of the circel I liket the busting out part.

  I gone up to the platform I took Lorna a nice tender line of the boar. She wer sitting up there in her doss bag she ben smoaking she wer hy. I give her the meat and I said, ‘Lorna wil you tel for me?’

  She said, ‘Riddley Riddley theres mor to life nor asking and telling. Whynt you be the Big Boar and Iwl be the Moon Sow.’