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David's Reviews > Riddley Walker
Riddley Walker
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AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
I imagine most people would like to be thought of as open-minded, willing to branch out and try something different. I know that my own self-image is that of someone with catholic taste in reading, not so easily pinned down. Sometimes you have to walk the walk so, based on some excellent book group recommendations, I ended up reading three books in the last month that were distinctly out of my "comfort zone". Though the three are quite different, they share a common feature, the exploration of human behavior under extreme circumstances. The first two were Jose Saramago's "Blindness" (response to a mysterious, frightening epidemic of blindness) and Maria Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" (the fate of an exploratory mission to a newly discovered planet in the Alpha Centauri system. I would recommend both books unreservedly, "The Sparrow" in particular.
The last book of the three was Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker", a dystopic vision set in a future, post-apocalyptic England. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, society has reverted to a level of Iron-Age sophistication; wild dogs roam the countryside. Most problematically for the reader, Hoban's view involves language and communication reverting to an imagined pre-civilized patois, and the entire book is written as a first-person narrative by the main protagonist, Riddley Walker, in this invented "proto-language". Think of the Russian-based slang of 'A Clockwork Orange" and multiply the degree of unintelligibility tenfold. Here is an example:
"The Ardship he begun to gether with the Eusa folk they all took off ther cloes and tangelt ther selfs to gether all nekkit and twining like a nes of snakes which they callit that some poasyum. Which they done trantsing with it and hy telling. Doing it in that old Power Station in Fork Stoan where the out poast is. Which that place its so big and eckowing it wer realy some thing to hear them telling of the many cools of Addom and the party cools of stoan and all the diffrent colourt seeds and that. It put you hy your oan self even tho you mytnt know nothing of it yet you cud get jus the fayntes glimmer of what it musve ben to be the Puter Leat. To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas. Not just singing it you know."
(review continues in the comments section)
I imagine most people would like to be thought of as open-minded, willing to branch out and try something different. I know that my own self-image is that of someone with catholic taste in reading, not so easily pinned down. Sometimes you have to walk the walk so, based on some excellent book group recommendations, I ended up reading three books in the last month that were distinctly out of my "comfort zone". Though the three are quite different, they share a common feature, the exploration of human behavior under extreme circumstances. The first two were Jose Saramago's "Blindness" (response to a mysterious, frightening epidemic of blindness) and Maria Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" (the fate of an exploratory mission to a newly discovered planet in the Alpha Centauri system. I would recommend both books unreservedly, "The Sparrow" in particular.
The last book of the three was Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker", a dystopic vision set in a future, post-apocalyptic England. In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, society has reverted to a level of Iron-Age sophistication; wild dogs roam the countryside. Most problematically for the reader, Hoban's view involves language and communication reverting to an imagined pre-civilized patois, and the entire book is written as a first-person narrative by the main protagonist, Riddley Walker, in this invented "proto-language". Think of the Russian-based slang of 'A Clockwork Orange" and multiply the degree of unintelligibility tenfold. Here is an example:
"The Ardship he begun to gether with the Eusa folk they all took off ther cloes and tangelt ther selfs to gether all nekkit and twining like a nes of snakes which they callit that some poasyum. Which they done trantsing with it and hy telling. Doing it in that old Power Station in Fork Stoan where the out poast is. Which that place its so big and eckowing it wer realy some thing to hear them telling of the many cools of Addom and the party cools of stoan and all the diffrent colourt seeds and that. It put you hy your oan self even tho you mytnt know nothing of it yet you cud get jus the fayntes glimmer of what it musve ben to be the Puter Leat. To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas. Not just singing it you know."
(review continues in the comments section)
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
November 1, 2007
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Finished Reading
November 5, 2007
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In the paragraph you quoted, the syntax caused me to stop reading. Then I thought, David made it through 200 pages, so I should at least have a paragraph of patience.I have not read the book, but I have read sagas and narratives from a lot of cultures,. Across the cultures, from Icelandic sagas, Homer,the Bible, 1001 Nights, I find the language and narrative tend to sweep me along. (Okay, Lrviticus and Numbers are definite bores-but they're designed as legal text.) Sometimes. in the classic works, I'll read such a text not knowing its meaning, but not wanting to lose the flow of the text.I can always go back later and work at deciphering the meaning I'd never do that if this bookin its entirety clunked along.
The paragraph you showed suffers from clunky language. The clunkiness is a barrier to the author's world. If the point of the book is storytelling is essential to humans and our community, then the language needs to have something poetic about it, in my opinion. I believe that no one retells a story in an oral culture if there is no poetic heart, sbstrate, or defined form in the story
MK:The more I think about the whole language thing, the more problematic it seems to me. Sure, I understand how, in the aftermath of nuclear catastrophe, technology could be "bombed back" to Iron Age levels. Hoban would have us believe that communication and language development would undergo a similar deterioration. But is this consistent with what we know about language development?
We can assume that there is a (potentially small) cohort that survived the triggering apocalyptic event. Why would this cohort not maintain their original degree of linguistic sophistication? They may well be traumatized, but that doesn't mean they are going to be thrown back to some level of neanderthal communication.
Furthermore, it's pretty well established by now that the capacity for language development is innate and sophisticated (for instance, children of pidgin-speakers will naturally impose grammatical structures, and end up speaking creole, rather than pidgin). My point being that a society's language sophistication increases, rather than decreases, over time. So, under the assumptions of the book, I don't understand when and why a huge leap backward in language mastery would be plausible.
Ultimately, as you suggest, a writer who chooses clunky language for pages on end is defeating his own purpose.
you're review requires a long thought out reply but in brief...did you read the same book i've been reading at least once year for the past 20 years?clunky language? the author has contempt for his readers? when i read it as a teenager i found riddleyspeak incredibly natural.
why should riddley have to be consistent in his spelling. he's only 12 years old.
i'm sorry you don't get it. by the way, I couldn't agree more with you regarding 'The Sparrow'.
just an additional thought:this is my first time on this site and immediately after posting my comment i looked up reviews for The Road by Cormac McCarthy & Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I just realised that ungrammatic language is a feature of these books as well.
I loved these two books immensely (I cried after finishing both the first time - ditto Riddley Walker).
Maybe I should start on Finnegans Wake!
I'm sorry you were unable to get past the spelling and grammar in Riddley Walker. I have read the book several times and given away every copy I ever owned. Most memorably, I gave it to a young man I picked up hitch-hiking on a cold, dark, rainy night. I took him home, fed him, and gave him a bed for the night. He told me he failed in school because he couldn't read or write well enough to get passing grades. He seemed pretty intelligent and coherent, so I told him I had a book that I thought he'd like written in a way he could understand. I gave him Riddley Walker. He read most of it that night and took it with him in the morning.
I know it's a long time since you read the book and wrote your review, but do you have any feeling as to whether he wrote the whole book in normal English and then went back and proto-languaged it?
Ian:Sorry for the delay in answering your question, but I've been off the site for a while. I think it's very clear that he conceived the whole narrative in regular English and then "translated it", not in a convincing way, as illustrated by examples such as
symposium -- some poasyum
computer elite -- Puter Leat
thanks Ian for alerting me to this rather mean spirited review. David, I am surprised that, with your tenacity, you failed to get the peak experience at the end. Worse, your actual review of the book opens with a complete spoiler. I had no idea what was going on until deep into it, near the end in fact. It was a huge struggle to get to that point you alluded to, about 20 pages in, and my concious choice actually, unaware that Hobans design was to slow the reader down, was not to get bogged down in the strangeness, so I speeded up, let myself go with the flow skimming along the frothy stream of consciousness of one of the most endearing heroes I have loved. Hoban lazy? Arbitrary? Crafty is more like it. This is one of my ultimate most delightful favorite books written before apocolyptic fiction became common.I am sorry David that you chose to struggle but you did not have fun
Magdelanye: thanks for your comment. As you are someone whose opinions I respect, I am sorry you found my review "rather mean spirited". There was a certain frustration in my reaction to the book, obvious in the review, but I was actually trying to be open-minded in my assessment. That said, when one finds that a book fails on every possible level, it's hard to sugar-coat that in a review.Also, I'm not entirely sure what you mean about the "complete spoiler" -- is it that I mentioned in the review how the post-apocalyptic state of affairs came into being? If so, it's not entirely clear to me how that "spoils" things? But them, I obviously failed to get the message others apparently see in this confusing text.
I am reading this as a member of a book club, and that is the only reason. This may be a work of genius, but its lost on me
The Sparrow was a great book, agreed.
The Sparrow was a great book, agreed.
Sparrow was brilliant. Also agree with your assessment of Riddley Walker - try as I might I just couldn't come to enjoy it. I just couldn't wait to complete it so I could read something else.
John Updike has written some excellent rules that any reviewer should follow, set out in detail at this link:
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com...
Of particular relevance to "Riddley Walker" are his admonition to:
"try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt".
and, later in the piece, in similar vein:
"Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast".
In other words, Updike is telling us that we should keep an open mind when reviewing, to bear with the author and give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Advice that is particularly germane to "Riddley Walker" because, guaranteed, there will come a point (probably about 20 pages or so into the book) when the bizarreness of the language, and the resulting difficulty in reading, force you to make a conscious choice: "Am I really going to take the trouble to keep plowing through this, or should I cut my losses now?" Mindful of Updike's advice, I chose to read the book all the way through. But it seems fair to ask: "Is the extra investment of effort that the author asks of the reader worth it?"
For me, the answer to that question is a fairly unequivocal "No". In the end, it was not at all clear what the author is trying to say in this muddle of a book. Reading other people's reviews here on goodreads suggests that others have been able to discern some kind of deeper meaning through the fog of the mangled language. To which I can only say, good for them, but personally I just don't get it. There's an obvious quest motif, and some fairly banal stuff about the difficulty of communication, but any kind of deeper meaning eludes me. It doesn't help that the author uses the traditional Punch and Judy show as central to his story. It obviously holds deep significance for the author, and possibly for English readers, but its specificity to English culture precludes any broader resonance. As best as I could figure, some statement is being made about the importance of storytelling even in primitive cultures. To which my reaction, unfortunately, can be summed up as " that's it? I ploughed through over 200 pages of your idiosyncratic, incoherent maundering prose for this?"
I use the word "incoherent" quite consciously here, because there's a kind of laziness to Hoban's invented patois which is ultimately deeply irritating. He goes to great lengths to ensure that it will be difficult to read (by his own admission he wants to slow the reader down, as a device to make people think), but there is a lack of internal coherence which seems lazy and damages the overall plausibility. Why is "telling" spelled correctly, but not "really"? Sometimes it's "which", sometimes it's "which that". "Stone" is spelled as "stoan", yet "know", "twining" and "folk" retain their correct spellings. These seem like completely arbitrary inventions of the author that are in no way consistent with how orthography might be expected to develop. There are similar inconsistencies in the liberties taken with syntax and vocabulary. When Tolkien invents language in LOTR, he takes the trouble to make it linguistically and etymologically coherent. Hoban can't be bothered, an attitude which betrays an implicit contempt for the reader.
Well, two out of three ain't bad, I suppose. By all means read "Blindness" and "The Sparrow". But spare yourself the trouble - give "Riddley Walker" a miss.