A Mirror Darkly; Riddley Walker

The September, 2012, issue of Shambala Sun has an article in which Michael Stusser discusses the wildly over-stimulated brain. Here’s my favorite quote, “Today’s tweeting, Yelping, Flickring, Foresquaring, TripAdvising mentality generates such a carnivorous hunger for stimulation that no matter how much storytelling, love, humor, philosophy, music, contemplative content, 3-D, imagery or wisdom we shove into our systems, it still leaves us wanting.”

This resonated with a posting on Chad Hull’s blog, Fiction is so Over-Rated. Chad wondered if reading 100 books in a year was too many. How do you savor? How you do reflect? How do you even remember what you’ve read?

I just finished re-reading Russell Hoban’s 1981 science fiction novel Riddley Walker. Here’s a book that forced me to read it slowly, and reflect. I don’t have to tell you why. I can show you:
There we wer then in amongst the broakin stoans the grean rot and the number creeper with the rain all drenching down and pelting on them dead stoan stumps an stannings. Spattering on crumbelt conkreat and bustit birk and dundling in the puddls gurgling down the runnels of the dead town. A kind of greenish lite to that day and the rain the grean rot and the number creeper and the dead town pong were going up all grean smelling in the greenish lite.

Riddley has just come to manhood in his society. He’s 12. He can write because his father was the connexion man of their clan of foragers, who survive by digging through the ruins of the previous civilization for scrap iron and other valuables. His father dies in Widder’s Dump  when a large rusted machine falls on him. This event thrusts Riddley out of his clan and onto the road, where he will walk out of history and into myth. Along the way he learns the truth about the Hart of the Wud and the Hart of the Stoan, the Little Shynin Man whose name is Addom, and the terrible truths that are hidden in Eusa puppet shows and children’s rhymes:

Seed of the Littl/Seed of the wyld

Seed of the berning/Hart of the Chyld

In Riddley’s small world (he lives in a valley in Inland), there are basically three or four kinds of people; the foragers, the formers who grow crops and raise goats and sheep, the chard coal burners and the folks from the Ram, the closest thing to government. The men from Ram, the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer, travel among the forms and the clans, passing along government propaganda via puppet shows, much like the classic English Punch puppet shows. They are called Eusa shows. “Eusa” is a powerful, baffling character. He is the personification of the people, “time back way back,” who split the Littl Shynin Man, who “… had thay Nos uv thay Master Chaynjis. He run them through the Power Ring he mayd the 1Big1. Eusa put the 1Big1 into the barms then him & Mr. Clevver droppit so much barms thay kilt as menne uv thear oan as they kilt enemes. Thay wun the Warr but the lan wuz poyzen from it the ayr & water as wel.”

It is never clear for how many hundreds of years the land was poison, and the air and water as well, blighted by the global thermonuclear war, but Riddley’s people are only up to bow and arrow technology. Dogs are no longer domesticated. They are hunters, hunters and killers of humans. “Dog et” is a common cause of death.

Eusa is more than just a metaphor for the Power Leat and the Puter Leat who started the war. He is also St Eustace, a Catholic saint depicted in a wall painting from the 1400s, painted on the wall of the Cathedral of Canterbury – or, in Riddley’s language, Cambry. The Power Ring exists in Cambry, and when Riddley describes it from where he is standing in its center, it is clearly a particle accelerator.

Riddley Walker demands reflection. Part of it reads best out loud – not only to help sound out the words, but for the heartbeat rhythm of it, the poetry of it. Riddley’s world is riddled with mysticism and mystery. For instance, we will never learn from Riddley what happened to cause the war, because Riddley doesn’t know. He can’t know. He is as different from us as we are from a twelfth-century European farmer.

My friend and teacher Marta thinks that linguistically, Riddley Walker is a greater achievement than Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. Ironically, A Clockwork Orange is more accessible.

Riddley Walker made me reflect on language and how we fold our values, our history, our story, into language. Riddley is a character poised at a moment of change in history. It is no coincidence that he finds an old Punch puppet, just as gunpowder is being re-created… again. Riddley will not be a Eusa man. He will tell new stories, and he will become the heart of those stories. The story of Riddley’s world is in his language.

Riddley Walker requires – and rewards – reflection.