Riddley Walker - Hoban, Russell
Summary: After the death of his father, twelve-year-old Riddley Walker is given his father’s role of “connexion man”. As “connexion man,” he is responsible for giving prophetic interpretations for traveling puppet shows. These shows not only serve as a religious ceremony, but also as a government propaganda tool. After some unexpected turn of events Riddley is soon “running with the wild dogs who have inexplicably befriended him, heading down darkened roads into an explosive mixture of danger, intrigue, and forbidden knowledge”.
Reviews
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and—this matters most—intensely ponderable." —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
"This is what literature is meant to be." —Anthony Burgess
"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." —Anthony Thwaite, Observer
"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." —John Leonard, The New York Times
"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." —Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan
"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' —Paul Gray, Time
Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.
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