Riddley Walker

"I read this book when I was around 15 years old. It is set in a Kentish area after a nuclear war and it is as if the world has regressed. There is an element of religious totalitarianism going on. And everyone is speaking in a kind of eccentric, quasi-Chaucerian idiom. That is what I really liked about it – the unfamiliarity of the language because it is set in this post-apocalyptic world, and he goes one stage further than most sci-fi writers. I always have this slight love/hate relationship with sci-fi writers in that they can imagine a very wonderful kind of world but the language that they use to describe this world is often conventional and pedestrian. But, what Hoban does is show that it is not only a world that has been made strange by an apocalypse but a world in which the language itself has been re-invented. This is so is clever because the very fact that you struggle with the words to understand what is happening dramatises the level of language itself. I had never encountered a writer doing that with words before. I embarked on it thinking, post-apocalyptic novel – quite exciting, and then, a little bit like with A Clockwork Orange , you think, hang on a minute, this is something quite different, something I hadn’t thought of before."

"This is an absolutely amazing book. Actually, I have a slight personal connection to it. When I lived in London and was working as a jobbing journalist, trying to get internships, I did get an evening job as the archivist for Russell Hoban’s estate. This was a remarkable period of my life. I was working in central London nine-to-five, then taking the District line to Fulham three nights a week where I would sit in the room where Hoban had died a year or two earlier. This room was full of his presence, full of all of his obsessions—like the Assyrian lions and Punch & Judy puppets that appear as motifs throughout his work. There was a huge relief map where he had clearly mapped out exactly how the sea level rise in Riddley Walker would have affected England. See, the book is set in this futuristic version of Kent, which has turned into an archipelago. As you mentioned, it’s written in a kind of English that has gone through a process of ruination similar to the environment he describes. Everywhere, people are like the scavengers of Roman Britain. They are picking through the ruins of a past civilisation—picking part train carriages and things for the metal to reuse. In this world of rusted metal and deteriorated landscape, language itself is also coming apart. Sometimes it is barely recognisable. It takes a little while to get used to. Yes, that’s the fear, isn’t it? That we live in a world where the future isn’t going to be brighter and more prosperous. We do live in a time where it feels like things are coming apart, where the processes by which our society gained affluence and prosperity have now become liabilities and are beginning to work against us. But we are unable to change. The fear is not only that we don’t have the will to change direction but that it might not actually be possible. That nobody is holding the levers that can make environmental disruption stop, that will reduce inequality, or any of the things we really need when we imagine a future that is better than today. It’s an interesting commonality you see in a lot of these stories, but it’s good to introduce a note of caution. There’s a famous observation that every generation has seen its own fall of Rome. I shared a list on Twitter recently made by German historian Alexander Demandt, of all the hundreds of causes that, over the centuries, have been attributed to the fall of Rome. From despotism and plutocracy to vegan diets, moral decay, feminism, all kinds of nonsensical things. So it’s good to avoid over-emphasizing the role of climate in these societies, just because it’s our preoccupation at the moment. But it’s undeniable that in so many of these situations, whether it’s the Sumerians—who, in the second millennium BC, saw a rapid desertification of their environment and salt build-up in the soil—or the Assyrians—who also saw a brief period of climate change that set them at a disadvantage to their neighbours at a crucial moment—or the Maya—who went through what has been termed a ‘mega-drought’ right before their society dissolved and dozens of cities were abandoned – many of them underwent some kind of climate shock. In my view, societies are a kind of machine. They are a system that is designed to solve the problem of survival, to produce the necessities of life that enable populations to flourish and expand. But they are also machines that have been tailored very specifically to a certain environment. When that environment shifts too drastically, the machine stalls and begins to break down, and you see a cascading collapse as different parts of the system collapse in turn. This is how you end up not just with a gradual decline but a sudden thunderclap, where entire urban centres are abandoned. I think so. But it also has a kind of cheeky sense of humour. The entire society has devolved to the extent that the greatest artistic production is Punch & Judy shows, where stories of the nuclear war are played out with puppets. Because the narrator is so matter of fact about what has happened, we do get a sense that life will go on no matter what happens."

"Ah, I’m delighted to hear that Max Porter loved this too. Riddley Walker is one of those books that awoke in me a total fascination with dystopian and post-apocalyptic titles. It is set a couple of thousand years in the future, following a nuclear war, and is written in an imagined dialect that has evolved after the collapse of civilisation. The main character, Riddley, is the narrator and his account of discovering and trying to make sense of an attempt to recreate a powerful weapon from an earlier time makes for a riveting read. That’s the concept from which Hoban starts and strangely it became a literary pivot for me, linking to the genres I enjoy the most, and to other authors and books in completely alternate styles which have marked important points in my career. I grew up in North Yorkshire in the 1980s, vaguely obsessed with preparing for a post-nuclear event after mistakenly using a birthday book token as a child to buy what I thought was a sequel to The Snowman , but which turned out to be When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs—whose very first, and very different, children’s books we’ll be publishing this summer. I was hooked. Subsequently I was drawn to books like Stephen King ’s The Stand , and later, the 1984 BBC film Threads , cementing my fascination with this genre. Each of these is in my eyes a classic as well and paved the way for my future devouring of books like Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Dreamland , which in itself is a connection to Manderley Press: Rosa also wrote the staggeringly good introduction to our wartime adventure about a cow-napping in the Channel Islands, inspired by a true story. There’s also Appointment with Venus by Jerrard Tickell, not to mention works by Margaret Atwood, David Nicholls, Kazuo Ishiguro and my new favourite, Oana Aristide. Her novel Under the Blue is surely a classic in the making. I’ve certainly never read anything before or since this novel that could be placed in the same category. So yes, I would agree it is entirely unique – a gritty classic which marks its own territory within the boundaries of other dystopian and post-apocalyptic classics, such as 1984 , Brave New World , A Clockwork Orange or even The Road . We, as readers, peer into a future where societal collapse is marked by linguistic decay, and just as the characters carve a new, hard life in a sort of post-nuclear Iron Age Britain, we are made to grapple and toil with a new vernacular. Luckily Hoban offers us hints to locate ourselves – or at least hold on to aspects of a familiar aspects of human existence – in recreated lost myths, religious experiences, cultural references and that age-old favourite: storytelling. The result is an immersive literary experience. A friend’s mum gave me this book as a teenager, and I read it on holiday on the beach in the south of France. I would look up from the horror and chaos of the pages every now and again, shocked by the carefree splashing of nearby kids, and their joyous sandcastles. And even now, whenever I reread it, I find something else to ponder and then research or connect to in another book – it is as though Hoban set out to future-proof this novel and the result is such an enduring introspective classic, one cannot help but think he must have actually time-travelled in order to conjure up Riddley and his world so convincingly. Coming up this spring we are publishing a brand-new collection of Mary Shelley’s work, all written during, and inspired by the short yet influential time she spent living in the historic literary city of Bath. We commissioned Fiona Sampson, an acclaimed biographer of Mary Shelley to introduce the book, which features Mary’s journals and letters, as well as the chapter of Frankenstein which she penned in Bath, and three short stories written much later, but informed by her lived experiences there in 1816 and 1817. This is the first time we’ve created a book from scratch rather than republishing a classic, so it’s been thrilling to see everything come together so beautifully. It has a wonderfully powerful front cover by Eleanor Macnair, who lives close to Bath and created a unique portrait of Mary set against a backdrop of the city, rendered entirely in play-doh and inspired by more demure paintings of the author in the National Portrait Gallery. The result is quite dramatic, but also strikingly modern too: there is no doubt that Mary Shelley’s work was ground-breaking in her own lifetime, so to discover that it is just as relevant, page-turning and inspirational over two hundred years later is rather motivating. We can’t wait to release this one into the wild. Later in April we are releasing a new edition of Washington Square by Henry James, this time with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. It’s a great time to be involved in heritage publishing, and I’m not alone in discovering some truly fabulous gems to polish up and pop back on shelves. But this feels like a very special classic to revive, and we were rather starstruck when Colm agreed to write a new essay to showcase the book. He is an expert in the life and works of Henry James, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James’s life, The Master , so was perfectly placed to take a fresh look at this already well-loved classic. After that we have Summer releases scheduled for a new edition of Rosemary Sutcliff’s YA book Sun Horse, Moon Horse and a children’s book which was written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs, and inspired by his own childhood adventures in Wimbledon. Following this in the Autumn, we will republish a classic ghost story for adults by Joan Aiken. The Haunting of Lamb House will be ready right in time for Halloween so prepare to be chilled—and thrilled."

"That Susannah York quote I found in a book called In A Dark Time , published by Faber in the late 1980s, edited by Robert Jay Lifton and Nicholas Humphrey. It’s about nuclear war and it’s got all these incredible things in it. It’s completely un-curated – it’s full of speeches and things from the Bible and essays from that time, like Ian McEwan ’s extraordinary libretto, “In a Dark Time”, the epigram and refrain to which is “May we live in womanly times”. I grew up knowing that I had been born just after this extraordinary confluence of feminism and pacifism and I’m now, effectively, watching that disappear – my generation seems completely uninterested in the nuclear threat, even though it’s greater than it has ever been. And it seems to be taken for granted that we need to be armed to the teeth but nobody can tell you why and so you can only conclude that it’s all down to this irrational terror of not being special anymore. Men will get angry and they will break the world in half. Every phenomenon that we’re looking at now – Brexit, Trump, etc – is directly related to male terror, male fear. And so I guess I’m just disappointed that it’s all become so literal; my golden age as teenager was steeped in this theory – of the sort in the Faber book – and now it’s all just slipping away and I realize that I just wasn’t paranoid enough . Yes, and Hoban was American, too. He was an expatriate. Those images – of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were incredibly prevalent at that time, they were unforgettable. I think people were writing in a context of ‘never again,’ which has now been lost. I think that’s all true, but Riddley Walker is one of those books I don’t remember those sorts of things about – all I remember is the horror. The horror of the language and the fires and the lost-ness and the violence. They run through it the whole time. It opened a door for me, it showed that you can do whatever you want; if you do it well, you can go anywhere. For the first ten pages of reading Riddley Walker you think, “Oh Christ, I don’t know if I can do this”. It makes you work very hard for quite a long time – it’s very difficult to crack, even after a good 50 or 60 pages. I think your brain undergoes a change and you shed certain lazinesses about language. It’s a bit like, with visual art, when you fully immerse yourself in an exhibition of abstract paintings, you leave representative thinking at the door. That takes longer with literature because the process of imbibing is slower. That’s why I slightly resent some of the gimmicks that come with the Russell Hoban fan club – I mean, lots of people have tried to do what he did but they’re still only using it as a trick to try to push through quite traditional narrative forms. The joy of Riddley Walker is that it’s a fully realized universe and it never lets up. It’s very, very difficult all the way through, and all of its vocabulary is difficult – the literal vocabulary on the page, but also its catalogue of imagery, its symbolism, is as complex and as unexpected. “There’s no performance of an experimental text, it’s the real thing – like it’s just poured out” Because Hoban is chucking bits of church and myth and English fables at you the whole time, with this slightly outsider horror vision, I think it’s the real thing. It’s a book that I could read every day forever and still be finding things. It’s so dense. It reminds me a bit of the 19th century painter Richard Dadd , who killed his dad and went to Bedlam; it has the authentic tangled complexity of a disturbed mind. There’s no performance of an experimental text, it’s the real thing – like it’s just poured out. I read the book around the same time as seeing things like Spitting Image , and my dad showed us Rambo: First Blood when I was six, and then there was Street Fighter , Nightmare on Elm Street , and hip hop, with everybody wearing masks – it was all about the horror behind the mask. Riddley Walker became something I would pass around my friends like a sacred text; it was something that you just had to discover. I know a novelist who wallpapered his home with pages of Riddley Walker and Lanark by Alasdair Gray. I met Russell Hoban a few years ago and found him to be a gorgeous ‘other’ type of man – he had this extraordinary belief in the old stories. He was sitting in his kitchen and he had all this costume jewellery around, bagged up. He used to go to car boot sales and collect and sell costume jewellery. And there was something in the ‘hoarder’ that I was so attracted to. It made so much sense. He was a collector of other people’s junk, and this turned into a bit of an obsession with crows for me, because they were all the time hopping around and picking up things and turning them over and seeing in someone else’s rubbish something peculiar and maybe beautiful. And there’s a cackle to it, a kind of mad humour behind it all, that I find immensely attractive and don’t see much. I got it from my mad Quaker Welsh grandmother, and from that whole generation of wonderful, drunk artists and playwrights. I think we’re all becoming very conservative now. If I were to go home and open Riddley Walker now it would feel like I was luxuriating in this kind of stuff that just isn’t really made anymore."