Riddley Walker was published by Jonathan Cape in 1980, and it is one of the most extraordinary novels in the English language — a work whose method (the invention of a future dialect) is inseparable from its meaning. The novel is set in Kent, England, approximately two thousand years after a nuclear holocaust has reduced civilization to scattered communities surviving at a level roughly equivalent to the Iron Age.
The entire novel is narrated by Riddley Walker, a twelve-year-old boy, in a degraded descendant of English that Hoban constructed with extraordinary linguistic precision. Words have mutated, meanings have shifted, and the language itself encodes the novel’s themes: knowledge has been corrupted by transmission, truth has become myth, and the reader’s experience of decoding Riddley’s prose mirrors the characters’ attempts to decode the fragmentary knowledge surviving from the “time back way back.”
The central myth of Riddley’s world is the “Eusa Story” — a puppet-show narrative performed by traveling Connections (traveling showmen who serve as both entertainers and priests). The Eusa Story is a garbled account of the nuclear physicist who created the bomb (whose name has become “Eusa” — a corruption of “USA” or perhaps “Oppenheimer” transformed beyond recognition). The quest to understand this story — to recover the “1 Big 1” (the bomb) — drives the novel’s plot toward a repetition of the original catastrophe.
Hoban’s achievement is unique: no other novelist has created a complete linguistic world this convincingly, or used language itself so completely as the medium of meaning.
Collecting Riddley Walker
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1980): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- US first (Summit Books, 1980): $25–$60
- Without jacket: $10–$20