Foragers and Mutants

RUSSELL HOBAN'S most celebrated creation is a badger named Frances. Few American children make it through kindergarten without reading Bread and Jam for Frances, Bedtime for Frances, or Hoban's four other stories about literature's most appealing marsupial.

Hoban's newest book, about a 12-year-old boy named Riddley Walker, is filled with rhymes and stories that have all the unaffected charm and ring of the Frances stories:

Ful of the Moon Ful of the Moon

Ful of the Moon nor dont look back

Follereee Follerooo on your track

Oo hoo hoo Yoop yaroo

Folleree Folleroo follering you

If they catch you in the darga

Arga warga

But Riddley Walker is no children's story. From bread and jam and bedtime, Hoban has gone to create a remarkable novel about the most terrifying issue of the grownup world: the abuse of power.

From the first sentence, it is clear that Riddley Walker is not an ordinary story:

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 looking to see none agen.

The entire novel is written in this language--mystifying but intelligible--and soon we learn why: the story takes place thousands of years in the future. The planet has been transformed, legend has it by a "flash of lite bigger nor the woal worl and it ternt the nite to day." The legend takes on an unsettling reality when we read that the "flash" was brought on by one "Littl Shynin Man the Addom."

The world that remains is dark, damp, and overgrown, peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and horrible mutants. The language, too, has undergone a mutation: in Hoban's version of English reinvented from scratch, spelling, sentence-structure, and vocabulary have all taken on a childlike spontaniety and simplicity.

The resulting dialect has considerable appeal. Often, Hoban merges two words into one, with fascinating results. A woman is a "wooman," says Riddley, because "she's the 1 with the woom." The leader of the mutant survivors of the great flash is known as "the Ardship of Cambry," one who suffers many an "ardship." The most chilling pun has to do with the central myth of Riddley's time, an adaptation of the only document left from before the flash, the Christian legend of St. Eustace. In "the Eusa story," Eusa tampers with "the Littl Shyning Man" and creates the cataclysm. Eusa: remind you of any country in a pre-cataclysmic relationship with the atom?

The rediscovery of the Eustace legend becomes the book's most comical scene, in which Hoban deftly deflates all interpreters of ancient texts. The political leader of Riddley's people--a character named Abel Goodparley, known as Pry Mincer--translates this passage to Riddley:

The legend of St. Eustace dates from the year A.D. 120 and this XVth-century wall painting depicts with fidelity the several episodes in his life. The setting is a wooded landscape with many small hamlets....

The Pry Mincer explains:

A Legend thats a picter whats depicted which is to say pictert on a wall its done with some kynd of paint callit fidelity. St is short for sent. Meaning this bloak Eustace he dint jus tern up he wer sent...XVth century parbly thats old spel for some kynd of senter where they done this thing theyre telling of.... "Wooded landscape with many small hamlets." Well thats littl pigs innit....

Beyond its wit, the language of Riddley Walker haunts and challenges in a way that English cannot. Where English is insufficient, Hoban simply invents penetrating new words. The gnawing sensation of terror inside the stomach is the "fearbelly"; both the sight and sound of an angry dog are expressed by "grooling and smarling."

And even where he does not specifically create new vocabulary, Hoban creates wild new tones and moods. When has twilight ever been described like this?

Twean lite it wer the 1st dark coming on. Bat lite it wer and dimminy the pink and red stumps glimmering in the coppises like loppt off arms and legs and the rivver hy and hymmering. The dogs wer howling nor it wernt like no other howling I ever heard it wer a kynd of wyld hoapless soun it wer a lorn and oansome yoop yaroo...

But though the language of Riddley Walker is unfamiliar, the story it tells rings with unmistakable urgency. Riddley runs away from his "crowd"--his community of foragers--and becomes unwittingly drawn in to Goodparley's obsessive quest to regain the technology of explosives. Tantalized by the legendary ability of man before the flash to build "boats in the air and picters on the wind," Goodparley determines to recreate the power that created these mysteries; when he meets Riddley, he thinks he has found the first breakthrough: the ingredients of gunpowder.

Riddley mistrusts Goodparley's discovery--all the more when Goodparley lets on that his real goal is to harness the power that caused the great flash. Riddley's grounds for skepticism--expressed most succinctly by a fellow traveller--sound authentic not only in a land of foragers and howling dogs but in a world of bureaucrats and soaring weaponry:

You can get just as dead from a kick in the head as you can from (gunpowder) but its the natur of it gets people as cited. I mean your foot is all ways on the end of your leg innit. So if youre going to kick some 1 to death it aint all that thrilling is it.

This is Hoban's greatest accomplishment--that the mystical tale of a 12-year-old boy, told in an unknown language, resonates with an urgent, timeless message: in Riddley's words "the onlyes power is no power." Perhaps Hoban's gift as a children's writer gives Riddley Walker this sense of universality; perhaps you have to know how to speak to children in order to speak to their parents.