“Riddley Walker just is difficult to read,” says Will Self in his introduction to the novel. “There’s no point in denying it.” I wouldn’t dream of it. I can also attest that there’s no point trying to understand the book’s unique English after a couple of glasses of wine and an episode of Stranger Things. I’ve had to read Riddley Walker wakefully and slowly. It demands concentration and dedication – and even then it can be confusing and bewildering.
But if you’re struggling to make headway, spare a thought for the author. It might be tricky to read – but imagine writing it. When Russell Hoban spoke to the Literary Review in 1984, he revealed that Riddley Walker took five-and-a-half years to complete. Two years into the process, after he’d written 500 pages, he says, he started again: “Then I went back to page one 14 times, or something like that. And every page was rewritten many times.”
This was mainly to condense the narrative and trim fat: “I could feel the whole thing wanting to get very lean and spare and concentrated and dense, and not be all spread out.” But something else also happened as he got deeper into the process; the English began to “drift”, his characters moving away from “BBC English” and towards words that didn’t exist, with their own vernacular. And so it is that you have to be a “clevver bloak” to get the “knowing” of this book, and to understand sentences like: “Theyre mor blip dogs nor real 1s tho.”
In that interview, Hoban gives the impression that he discovered the strange English in his book as much as he consciously created it. But while plenty of Riddley Walker’s linguistic quirks may have come to Hoban intuitively, he still had to systematise and regularise them in a consistent language with its own rules of spelling and grammar. So far as I can tell, the novel isn’t like the old manuscripts of – say – Mandeville’s Tales, with variant spellings of the same words and haphazard grammar. There’s a system here – and so it’s reasonable to assume there must be a guiding philosophy behind it.
On last week’s reading group post, barnaclegoose raised the interesting question of whether this philosophy makes sense:
I wonder about the status of the text we are reading. It purports to be a narrative penned by Riddley himself, thousands of years in our future. That is, however, clearly impossible, given that the ‘English’ spoken that far in the future and after a nuclear catastrophe would diverge to a far greater extent from the language we speak today than Riddley’s text. (Compare Old English texts from a mere 1,000 years ago, which, but for the odd word, are utterly incomprehensible to modern readers.) It’s also unlikely that someone with Riddley’s rudimentary literacy would make systematic use of punctuation such as inverted commas in his writing. So what exactly is the conceit? Is this the ‘author’s’ partial translation of Riddley’s original or did Mr Hoban just mistakenly think that English would be so little changed so far in the future?
Several people responded that Hoban had taken “acceptable licence”. We can’t know how the language of a post-apocalyptic future would sound; maybe this approximation is reasonable enough. Commenter theupsetappletart pointed out that without the Great Vowel Shift, English would have remained much more consistent over the past 1,000 years, so it was reasonable to keep the language in Riddley Walker comprehensible. Equally, you can flip the argument around and say that Hoban’s predictions about the way English could change are as good as any, because there can be no hard and fast rules. Only last week, the Guardian reported that a new study has shown that chance plays a huge role in linguistic evolution. Who’s to say that Hoban shouldn’t have taken a punt on that basis?
Such arguments are fascinating – but, in that same Literary Review interview, Hoban also said that he just decided to wing it: “I thought, ‘Here, I’ll just rely on my ear.’ Otherwise I could have stalled endlessly on the research.”
It didn’t matter whether or not the language was authentic. What mattered was how it sounded, and how it felt. And it really works. Grappling with the language in Riddley Walker creates a powerful sense that this book comes from a different time and place, that Riddley’s experiences are different to our own and we are seeing his world through his eyes. It all adds to the force and urgency of what he is telling us – and, just as importantly, it adds to the entertainment. Puzzling and feeling your way through his strange constructions is enjoyable in itself. It’s worth all the trubba.
