Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker

I did a fair amount of research in Kent while working on the book and the place names came to me without much trouble. In a camper van with my wife and our small sons I explored the Wye valley and the Crundale (Bundel) Downs and visited the towns in Fools Circel 9wys. Horny Boy is Herne Bay; Widders Bel is Whitstable; Father’s Ham is Faversham; Bernt Arse is Ashford; Fork Stoan is Folkestone; Do It Over is Dover; Good Shoar is Deal, where I paid a boatman to take me out to the Goodwin Sands; Sams Itch is Sandwich; and of course Cambry is Canterbury. Sometimes special trips were required, as when I rode on the pillion seat of Richard Holt’s motorbike to a forest near Canterbury to ascertain whether I could see my hand in front of my face on a moonless night. I couldn’t. Frank Streich flew me over the South Downs in his Cessna. I drove to Reculver (Reakys Over) where I saw the Roman wall and the ruin of the Victorian church and listened to the lapping of the sea. Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps were my constant companions; nautical charts also. Drop John the Foller Man got his name after I found the part of the Thames Estuary called Knock John.

I had a lot of fun letting words wear themselves down into new words and new meanings. I did this with people’s names also; apart from the obvious ones there are Belnot Phist (Nobel physicist) and his father 1 stoan (Einstein) Phist; Straiter Empy would in our time be a morally upright M.P.; Erny Orfing, unlike Pry Mincer Abel Goodparley, who is a capable smoothtalker, is an earnest political orphan. If words aren’t working for you they’re working against you, so I tried to get as much story action into my words as possible: “I had to voat no kynd of fents” for example, as an expression of no confidence.

After two years I had five hundred pages in which too many people were running around over too much geography; the story wanted to be lean and spare, very concentrated; so I went back to Page One, started over, soldiered on for three and a half more years, and in 1979 on Guy Fawkes Day (auspicious, I thought) Riddley Walker declared itself done and began to let go of me. I was a good speller before I wrote that book; I no longer am but I can live with that.

A final word about my friend with the hooked nose and the hunch: Mr Punch has appeared at my house twice in shows performed by the great Percy Press, now dead, and Percy Press Jr. The look of Punch and the sound of his swazzle [2] A device held on the puppeteer’s tongue. voice, the whole rampant idea of him stayed with me through five and a half years of revisions and rewrites; it is with me still. “He’s so old he can’t die,” Percy told me. “He’s a law unto himself.” He’s certainly a reliable performer, and Riddley Walker would be a poor show without him.

I found that I needed to write a lot of notes in order to get my head around Riddley’s world. Here are a few of them. I did some drawings of Punch too, for the same reason. I’ve reprinted the one that worked best for me.

[ Riddley when he was still thinking and speaking in standard English. ]

They sing it now the same as I did when I was a child, hopping slowly and chalking the pavement: the stag and the cross and the ship, the river, the wolf and the lion and the rest of it. The Garble Time is long past, everything goes by its straight name now but the children still sing it the old way. The straight rhyme is:

Rumpa by now has come to mean any kind of vigorous noisemaking. Zanting is not only dancing but running, jumping, fooling and larking about in general. Children are sifters and shapers, the words they keep are mostly useful ones.

Eusa wants to make and he wants to unmake. He wants to live and he wants to die. He wants to ‘win’ and he wants to ‘lose.’ He wants to stay and he wants to go.

A long time after the devastation the Eustace pictures and the sparse text of the legends are found. In time the name of Jesus stops being used. He is just a man with outstretched arms. The idea of a man being pulled apart develops, and with it the idea of the coming together of what has been pulled apart, the dynamic blending of opposing forces.

Eusa as a space voyager. At the same time of the book people are living at a primitive level. There is in them a collective memory of a time when man could do anything, go to the stars even. Collectively they are like the individual who blots out what is too painful in his memory. Their minds turn away in fear from man’s past accomplishments and the disaster that came from them.

The race of man haunted by the thought of what it used to be, ashamed of what they are, afraid of what they were.

The myth:

Eusa works for Mr Devvil. He destroys the world, looks for a new one with his wife and sons. Sees little man pulled apart. He tries to get away on an airship. The Captain says money is no good any more, takes Eusa’s wife and leaves Eusa behind.

Eusa wanders with his two sons. The action of the play:

Eusa with Mr Devvil. War and bursting fire.

Eusa leaves Mr Devvil, looks for new place, sees little man pulled apart by dogs, doesn’t help him. Little man says, ‘My turn now, your turn later.’

Sometimes I just sit and bang my head with my fist. My head is harder than my fist. I know there’s more to being human than what we have. I know there was a time when people could think better. I’m a stronger thinker than most of them here. I think in pictures that change faster and I think in words as well, often for long stretches without pictures. A lot of my thoughts are on things that there aren’t any pictures for. Most of the people here, most of their thoughts you could draw a picture of. Most of mine you couldn’t. I have that. Sometimes that’s what I have to do, think of what I do have. Another thing I have more than others, I can think how things would be that haven’t been that way yet. Like the overwater thing. The river was too wide, we didn’t have anything we could put across it that was long enough. There wasn’t any tree that we could cut down that would be long enough. It came into my mind how you could do it with ropes. Two ropes across the river and other short ropes slung between them, hanging down in a belly. Then we laid short pieces of wood tied together all the way across the river in those belly-ropes. Everybody laughed when they saw it, nobody had ever thought of hanging an overwater thing. Everybody said, ‘How did it come into your mind?’ Well, it just did. I’ve never looked at any pictures of what was before. Maybe I will sometime.

There was more, there was more, I know there was more. Sometimes you find bits and pieces of things, mostly you throw them away. Bad luck. Pieces of paper with words and pictures that crumble into ash and blow away. Paper, what about that? There’s a paper mill in Cambry. I haven’t seen it but that’s where the rizlas come from. Well, they say you have to have something for trading, you can’t always carry everything with you. So they have rizlas and matches and tobacco as the trading things mostly. But how come they know how to make paper and matches? All that kind of thing is bad luck. What was I thinking, yes, the more . Starboats, you hear about that. Sometimes someone will draw a picture in the dirt to show what they looked like. The boats we use on the river are made of skins stretched on bent wood frames. People say what if there were starboats, that doesn’t mean they were more or better long ago. They were just different. But if you look up at the sky, look at the stars, what a load of cobblers that is. Just different! To think out a boat to go to the stars! To make one, to actually go in it!