#riddleywalker

[hortushorrei]

This book can make you fall asleep, have nightmares, and pull you back to reading after you wake yourself up from fear. It's like really good wasabi for me. I exaggerate and then regret it and then add more. #riddleywalker #russelhoban #winterreading #becareful #notsureifilikeit #wasabi #dontstoptillyougetenough #nightmarefuel (presso La Macchina Fissa) https://www.instagram.com/lamacchinafissa/p/CY7-LNZosRn/?utm_medium=tumblr

[robinallender]

A book for our times. I couldn’t help thinking while reading it that this, or something like this, will happen. Either by nuclear or environmental catastrophe, civilisation as we know it will end and, if we're lucky, we may get a chance to rebuild it. 

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is set in an England thousands of years after the ‘Bad Time’ in a society that has fallen out of knowledge. Its inhabitants are in the process of rebuilding – ideas, religion, meaning – with what they can salvage from their collective memory. Rebuilding language too. It takes a long time to read Riddley Walker because it’s written entirely in ‘Riddleyspeak’, a cockney-derived dialect. Look at the map of Kent above and see how the place names have transformed (it was fun to cross-reference this): Dover has become Do It Over, Wye has become How(!), Monks Horton has become Monkeys Whoar Town, Molash has become Moal Arse. 

It reminded me of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a novel set at the other end of history, which is also about a society trying to understand its identity but not having the tools to do so. 

If you cud even jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it you cud see every thing clear. But you never wil get to see the woal of any thing youre all ways in the middl of it living it or moving thru it. Never mynd.

Riddley Walker stays with you for its terrifying power, but also for its spirituality: Riddley is looking for truth and a higher meaning, as we all are. 

Too many things coming in at 1ce. Like all ways. Mixt up I wer. Like all ways. Yet some thing happent there in Cambry. It happent where the dogs run them shyning colours on the wite stoans agenst the black sky. It happent in the Eusa hoal amongst them stoan trees. It happent in my head when I seen the changing stilness of the far a way waves and the face with the grean vines and leaves.

[georgialyle]

If you think puppets don't have the potential to be both awesome and a bit scary, you clearly haven't seen a Trouble Puppet show. My review of their latest production, based on a science fiction novel.