I myself would say I’m dedicated to strangeness. I find myself wondering what it is that looks out through my eyeholes, and I really don’t know. It’s this strangeness that I’m always pursuing in my writing, and it’s this sorrow in each of us that I’m trying to get to and depict as accurately as I can.
– Russell Hoban
Russell Hoban, who died two days ago, was a prolific writer of fantastical stories – for children, and for adults. I have only read three of his novels (as well as reading his post popular kid’s book aloud to a small daughter) but one of those novels was one of the best I have ever read – a book whose landscape, language and ideas persists in your mind indelibly.
That book is, of course, Riddley Walker, his highly-acclaimed novel that I have written about more extensively here. Published in 1980, the novel is set thousands of years in the future, in a blasted terrain that slowly becomes recognisable as Kent. A nuclear holocaust has long ago decimated human civilization, and now isolated communities of farmers and charcoal-burners live a fearful and primitive new iron age existence in fenced settlements. Virtually all industrial and technological knowledge has been lost; instead, there is a re-telling of myths that seek to explain and draw lessons about the ‘Bad Time’.
The book’s narrator, Riddley, tells his story in what many reviewers regard as the novel’s greatest achievement – the invention of a language, ‘a worn-down, broken-apart kind of English, as Hoban himself described it, that represents the withered remnants of the lexicon of our times.
‘Set in a remote future and composed in an English nobody ever spoke or wrote, this short, swiftly paced tale juxtaposes preliterate fable and Beckettian wit, Boschian monstrosities and a hero with Huck Finn’s heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy’, Benjamin DeMott wrote in a front page review for The New York Times Book Review:
Still more valuable, I think, is Russell Hoban’s oblique but commanding summons to the reader to dwell anew on that within civilization which is separate from, opposite to, power and its appurtances, ravages, triumphs. Riddley Walker is in part a book about voids and absences – about, that is, the character of experience minus the sedimentation of values, minus all those patterns of meaning incised upon life over the centuries as a consequence of the human vision of standards, the human enthrallment with ideals. Whether one is watching the pointless, exhausting disinterment of the dead engine, or listening to a pseudo-learned contemporary of Riddley Walker’s explaining, with heartbreaking ignorance and absurd confidence, the meaning of the phrase ”the figure of the crucified Saviour,” one’s mind repeatedly focuses on the nature and meaning of the vanished human achievement. Half the activity of reading the book is identifying the qualities lost. What’s missing here, the sense of history? Yes – but also the idea of justice -and the ideal of peace – and the notion of esthetic pleasure -and the distinction between slavery and freedom – and … […]
‘People crave to be kinder,’ said Brecht correctly. But the consequence of craving for a kinder world can be blindness to – contempt for – our existing moral and intellectual capital. Quietly and tellingly ”Riddley Walker” chides such contempt, contradicting those voices of the extreme right and left whose response to talk of the death of civilization has become a defiant shout: ”What civilization?” Its striking accomplishment is that, in the act of damning the madness of the power-obsessed, it brilliantly revivifies consciousness of the resources in our midst that comprise our real hope at the brink. ”Riddley Walker” is haunting and fiercely imagined and – this matters most – intensely ponderable.
Tim Martin in an appreciation of Hoban for The Telegraph writes of Riddley Walker:
Riddley is the very definition of a cult book, and has been showered with praise — Harold Bloom and Anthony Burgess, early advocates, have been recently backed up by writers such as David Mitchell and Will Self — but its greatest successes came not just from its unique brand of chipped and mangled English, a twisted instrument on which Hoban played punning harmonics of his own creation, but from the grave sense of loss that radiated from its pages. “O what we ben!” cries Riddley, looking at “the shynin of them broakin machines” half-buried in earth. “And what we come to!” These are truly the Last Days.
What makes the book so memorable is the sense of what it is like to live in a polytheistic world, full of conflicting and often implacable powers. It is a portrait of a world which was destroyed by science and is now trying to reconstruct itself on the basis of superstition. The nature of the great catastrophe is unclear, as it would be in any succeeding age of barbarism; but the characters remember the legend that it involved:
the littl shynin man, the Addom he runs in the wud.
Russell Hoban was born inPennsylvania, the son of Ukranian Jews, and trained as an illlustrator. After serving in the US Army, he worked as a commercial illustrator, storyboard artist and television art director from the late 1940s until 1957, and for the next decade as a freelance illustrator for various New York advertising agencies, as well as several magazines in the Time-Life empire.
He began writing children’s books in the late 1950s, and wrote more than 50 books for children of various ages, the most highly-regarded of which was The Mouse and His Child. John Clute writes of The Mouse and His Child in The Guardian obituary:
The climax [of his career as a children’s writer] was The Mouse and His Child, a full-length novel that may be the most resonant and haunting book for children published in the past half century. It is a tale to be read when grown. A clockwork mouse, for sale in a toyshop, holds hands with his child. When his mainspring is wound, he spins and bounds into a dance that ends only when he runs down. He lifts his child above the table as he turns, but sets him down again. This is family. This is life. But it is also a fable of escape: having been sold and broken, the mice find that – because of the damage that living has cost them – they can now move in ellipses towards the mythical dolls’ house that spells freedom, of a sort. Christmas comes. We do not know how long they will survive into the new year.
In 1969 he sttled in London, where he lived until his death aged 86. There, in the 1970s, he turned his attention to writing adult fiction. One of his early novels was Turtle Diary (1975) about two lonely middle-aged people obsessed with freeing sea turtles from the zoo and returning them to the ocean.
In The Moment Under the Moment, a 1992 collection of his writings, Mr. Hoban discussed his literary motivation:
The most that a writer can do – and this is only rarely achieved – is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page. Most of the time it doesn’t happen but trying for it is part of being the hunting-and-finding animal one is. This process is what I care about.
Also on this blog:
See also
- Guardian obituary
- Guardian Book Club: Riddley Walker
- Who Is Russell Hoban,and What’s His Deal, Anyway?: An Introduction of Sorts (The Head of Orpheus)
- The Head of Orpheus: website dedicated to Russell Hoban
That's How The Light Gets In 