Riddley Walker

''This is what Literature is meant to be.''

--Anthony Burgess

Indiana University Press Web Site, December, 2000

Riddley Walker, first published in 1980, is a brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state--and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture, change agent, rebel, and artist. ''Walker is my name and I am the same, Riddley Walker. Walking my riddles where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.''

The language has intimidated some readers, though it is easily decipherable with attentive reading. As an aid to readers, Hoban has now added an afterword, samples of his original working notes, and a glossary.

Like all masterworks in which style and subject are one, Riddley Walker resists easy plot summary. This is a book that expands as you read it and then reverberates in memory. Here is how it begins:

''On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint nlooking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor no thing like that when he come on to my spear he werntall that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said,'Your tern now my tern later.' The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming off him in the rain and we all yelt,'Offert!'

''The whole thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid.''