Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition

Hoban first made his name with books for children, such as the wonderful The Mouse and His Child. When he turned to writing novels for adults, although they seemed to take place in our normal world, there was always something off-kilter about them: the mystical lion in The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz or the talking street furniture in Kleinzeit. Even so, nothing hinted at what was to come in Riddley Walker, one of the most brilliant and original post-apocalyptic novels ever written. Like all of his books, it is precisely located in place, in this instance a small area of Kent between Canterbury and Folkestone. Here, some 2,000 years after the nuclear apocalypse, survivors live an essentially hunter-gatherer existence in small tribes. Language has been debased, memories of nuclear war have transmuted into myth (Saint Eusa, the legend of the LittlShynin Man the Addom), and the Gummint exerts its control through the medium of a touring Punch and Judy show. But gunpowder has been rediscovered, and with it the danger of a return to the old ways.   At first the look of the words on the page can seem off-putting – "On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the laswyld pig on the Bundel Downs" – but read it aloud and it makes perfect sense, a rich and vigorous language that really encapsulates the nature of this society. The whole novel is a tour-de-force, a breathtaking and entirely captivating work. No wonder it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.