The remarkable originality of Riddley Walker will be no surprise to readers of Russell Hoban's earlier novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, and Turtle Diary. In Riddley Walker we find Russell Hoban's most extraordinary hero.
Long after the end of our time, when killer dogs roam England and green rot grows on the rubble of Canterbury, Riddley Walker's people dig for old iron and talk of lost cleverness, of boats in the air and pictures on the wind.
Riddley Walker has just gone …
The remarkable originality of Riddley Walker will be no surprise to readers of Russell Hoban's earlier novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, and Turtle Diary. In Riddley Walker we find Russell Hoban's most extraordinary hero.
Long after the end of our time, when killer dogs roam England and green rot grows on the rubble of Canterbury, Riddley Walker's people dig for old iron and talk of lost cleverness, of boats in the air and pictures on the wind.
Riddley Walker has just gone through his initiation ceremony as a connection man, a priest ordained with a scar on his belly, who Interprets the puppet shows performed by the government's traveling showmen. In a time of mystery and change, he walks his riddles through the end of a hunting-gathering culture to the rediscovery of gunpowder and the future it will bring.
In Riddley Walker, his world, and his language, Russell Hoban has redrawn the defining lines of fiction. Riddley speaks in a language we don't speak but all know, he walks riddles we want answered though we may not ask the questions. It is a book transfixing in its newness and strange familiarity. To read it once opens for the reader an experience to which he will long to return.
