But he is one of the few and does not have books. His father was a "connexion man" – a kind of priest to his group – and taught him to read and write in a fashion. Riddley knows dimly of the "barms" (bombs) that once devastated the land. "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". Sometimes the reader must say something aloud in order to recognise it. 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". The mound where the dead are cremated is "the bye bye hump". Riddley's neocolloquialisms are comically reductive. The representative of the group that commands authority in this little world is the "Pry Mincer". 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 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").
Semi-nomadic groups scratch survival from the boggy ground, often disinterring the remains of a destroyed civilisation. 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. The rulers of former times were the "Puter Leat" (computer elite). 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. This is England long after some nuclear holocaust.
We piece together what must have happened. It is an extraordinary risk for a novelist to take: to write in so rebarbative a fashion. 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. "Thayr ar tu menne agenst us this tym we mus du betteren that." Only three words out of these 13 are spelt "normally". Spelling is phoneticised, hampering the process of recognition that usually speeds us through sentences. "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). W hat has happened to the English language? Begin Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and you are in a struggle with words.
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