What has happened to the English language? Begin Russell Hoban'sRiddley Walker and you are in a struggle with words. "I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly benn the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs." The story is narrated by Riddley Walker, and begins with "my naming day when I come 12" (we will soon find that a 12-year-old is not a child in his world). Language has mutated. Spelling is phoneticised, hampering the process of recognition that usually speeds us through sentences. "Thayr ar tu menne agenst us this tym we mus du betteren that." Only three words out of these 13 are spelt "normally". Yet these are all words that we "know". Even as you get the habit of Riddley's vocabulary and his lack of punctuation, you still have to read more slowly than you are used to doing. It is an extraordinary risk for a novelist to take: to write in so rebarbative a fashion.
We piece together what must have happened. This is England long after some nuclear holocaust. With a brilliant observation of incongruity, Hoban has shards of scientific vocabulary survive in the neo-primitive idioms of this post-nuclear time: "program" for plan; "gallack seas" for the heavens. The rulers of former times were the "Puter Leat" (computer elite). In search of the lost power of "clevverness", some now excavate for "Salt 4" (sulphur), the key "gready mint" (ingredient) of gunpowder, which is to be reinvented by the end of the novel.
Riddley's world is minutely imagined. Semi-nomadic groups scratch survival from the boggy ground, often disinterring the remains of a destroyed civilisation. The territory Riddley knows, which he calls "Inland", is crudely sketched in the map that prefaces his narrative: "THIS HERE IS MOSLY JUS PLACES IVE TOL OF IN THIS WRITING." We recognise it as East Kent, its former place names brutally transformed (Herne Bay is "Horny Boy"; Dover is "Do It Over"; Sandwich is "Sams Itch"). Such transformations of names are grimly humorous, like the phrases derived from words split open by catastrophe: survivors has become "soar vivers",experiment "spare the mending", excited "all as cited". The representative of the group that commands authority in this little world is the "Pry Mincer".
Riddley's neocolloquialisms are comically reductive. His commands are "do its". The mound where the dead are cremated is "the bye bye hump". Survivals from demotic English are also half-humorous, as when we hear of the "hevvys" who guard each group, or find subordinates addressing those in authority as "Guvner".
Sometimes the reader must say something aloud in order to recognise it. "Phists face is even witern userel" will become "Phist's face is even whiter than usual." Individual words preserve a Kent accent: probably is "parbly";orange is "arnge". Riddley knows dimly of the "barms" (bombs) that once devastated the land. He is literate. His father was a "connexion man" – a kind of priest to his group – and taught him to read and write in a fashion. But he is one of the few and does not have books. In all the novel there is just one piece of script from the "clevver" times: a short account of a 15th-century wall painting in Canterbury ("Cambry") cathedral depicting The Legend of St Eustace. It is a shock for the reader suddenly to come across a passage in standard English. Riddley uses writing to mimic the words he hears and his narration asks you to be aware that it is being written down, hastily and awkwardly recording events. "Wel Im telling Truth here aint I. That's the woal idear of this writing."
We discover more than halfway through the novel that we are some two-and-a-half millennia in the future. Abel Goodparley, representative of the "Mincery" (ministry), tells Riddley that "After Bad Time dint no 1 write down no year count for a long time." Since counting began again, "its come to 2347 o.c. which means Our Count". (AD on surviving inscriptions, he gravely informs the narrator, "means All Done".) But these "facs" have been held back from us. We have had to feel our way through Riddley's narration, inferring the events that have formed his primitive world – but a primitive world patched up from the world we know. "O what we ben! And what we come to!" exclaims Riddley in uncertain dismay.
Language naturalises the shattered world that Hoban imagines. Indeed, we hardly sense the author imagining it at all. It is Riddley's story and his survivor English, roughly reconstructed from our own language, carries all that he knows. He explains in great detail what preoccupies him – the behaviour of the savage dogs that roam in packs, for instance – but merely takes for granted the features of his world that we would need explaining. All that he assumes is in his language. The struggle with Riddley's language is what makes reading the book so absorbing, so completely possessing.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.
It's me again now .... wasn't that a terrific account of the atmosphere of the book ?
ANYHOW .... one of the people on the radio who had read it for the program complained bitterly that the odd language was far too much of an obstacle to overcome and spoiled the book !! Wait for it ... this was a person with a degree in English. I think they must be giving degrees away with packets of bloody crisps these days.Huh! I expect he was one of those types who, rather than read Jane Eyre, reads a book about it instead.. " Student notes on Jane Eyre". Dickheads. When I read it for the first time many years ago, after the first 5 or 6 pages I was away .... you soon get into the hang of the way the words are distorted, if you've got any sort of gumption at all.
Now this graduate's "struggle" with what is little more than a slightly distorted bunch of English words is surely something that cheers us students of the Welsh language up .. and feel like bloody full-blown geniuses . Talk about Reasons To Be Cheerful !
Let's make this quite clear, as politician's might say ... here's the opening passages of Riddley Walker ...
At least, on our way to the "bye-bye hump" we language learners can feel we have done something special... and if that isn't a Reason to be Cheerful, then I don't know what is.
Reit ... dyma Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog gan " Ceffylau ar D'rannau " yn byw ....