Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was born in Pennsylvania in the US, and died in London after living there from 1969. He spent no time in Kent, apart from visiting it, in particular on one very important occasion (see below). But the way in which the landscape of the country figures in his great dystopian novel, `Riddley Walker’ (Jonathan Cape, London, 1980) means that, purely through imaginative engagement, Kent figures importantly in this, perhaps his most celebrated work.
As Hoban himself was to recall, his first visit to Canterbury was to give a lecture at the Teachers’ Centre there on March 14th 1974. The day following this, he was to go into the cathedral. `I’m writing this now, in the Oprah Winfrey era when millions are bursting to share their most private experiences with other millions,’ he wrote years later in 1978, `but I find the Canterbury in me, having worded its way into Riddley Walker, wants to stay mostly unworded now’ (`Riddley Walker’, Bloomsbury edition 1998, Afterword, p 224). Hoban’s attention was caught by the wall painting, `The Legend of St Eustace’ from around 1480 which sits slightly in shadows on the North Quire wall of the cathedral. The fresco shows the somewhat horrifying procession of the second century saint Eustace from his encounter with a stag that has an image of Christ between its horns, to the death of himself and his own family roasted to death years later. Eustace himself was a martyr, possibly from central Asia, whose defiance of the Roman Emperor Hadrian had caused him to be executed around 118AD.
The image Hoban saw in 1974 clearly had great appeal to him. He married it with the surreal, and often very violent, summertime entertainment of the Punch and Judy show, and over the next few years created a uniquely fragmented, phonetically spelt new language, with which he wrote his novel. He was later to say that the demands of producing this kind of sub-dialect had ruined what had previously been an excellent spelling ability he once had had.
`Riddley Walker’, because of the nature of the work, and the fact that it is set 2000 years in the future after a catastrophic nuclear attack, does not record a landscape that is physically recognizable through the descriptions given. It is distorted too by the fact that the language Hoban devises changes not just the nature of what is talked about, but the way it is talked about, making it broken, and fragmented. Places that Hoban may well have never visited, nor even known apart from on a map, do figure in his great imaginative work. Thanet becomes an island once more, called `The Ram’. Dover becomes `Do It Over’. Folkestone is rendered as `Fork Stone.’ Ashford carries the sharp name `Bernt Arse’. The Isle of Sheppey is `Harts Ease’ and Canterbury the somewhat more recognizable `Cambry.’ Riddley Walker explains all this on his childishly scrawled map as `This here is the mostly just places Ive tol of in this writing. I dont have no room for the woal of every thing there is in inland.’ A playful rhyme at the very start of the novel maps out these places:
`Horny Boy [Herne Bay] rung Widers Bel [Whitstable]
Stoal his Fathers Ham [Faversham] as wel
Bernt his Arse [Ashford] and Forkt a Stoan [Folkestone]
Done It Over [Dover] broak a boan
Out of Good Shoar [Goodwin Sands] vacky his wayt
Scratcht Sams [Sandwich] Itch for No 8
Gone to senter nex to see
Cambry [Canterbury] coming 3 times 3
Sharna pax and get the poal
When the Ardship of Cambry [Archbishop of Canterbury] comes out of the hoal.’ (RW, 5)
The eponymous narrator of the novel wanders around a landscape either populated by dangerous, hostile wild dogs, or by ominous gangs ready to waylay anyone who crosses their path, seeking a weapon they want to recreate from the old world – the era of Cleverness before `the Cleverness was forgotten’.
The haunting quality of the new language, and the ways it has an almost primitive simplicity and sharpness, are still informed by at least some tangible links with the routes, places and landmarks of the old world that had been blasted apart. `Out thru the Norf part of Fork Stoan outers we gone,’ Riddley Walker says of one of his journeys, `we gone and Norfing on the A260 track by the Frogs Legs. Going thru the outers and the 2 nexters dogs forkt off to the lef and by the time we come to Stickit Flat they wer back and the others with them we had the woal pack with us agen.’ `Peopl talk about the Cambry Pul theywl say any part of Inland you myt be in youwl feal they pul to Cambry in the senter.’ (Ibid 106) A quick reference to a map shows that the A260 does indeed run north from the suburbs of Folkestone towards Canterbury. Just as the ancient Roman roads like Watling Street and Ermine Street now still carry forms of their original titles, perhaps in 2000 years time remnants of the current numbered motorway system will remain, if not physically then in names scattered around the landscape. That’s if humans are still around then!
`Riddley Walker’ is a demanding but tremendous work of the imagination – and one that simply through the surface features of its language, the fragmented, clipped, broken quality, suggests a whole universe of violence, distrust, and civilisational collapse. That Kent should have been the place that figured in this book, albeit in such a shadowy and mysterious way, is both a privilege, but also perhaps tribute to the impact the very unique human and natural landscape of the county has. As Riddley himself says when someone asks him `Is there a connexion?’, `There’s always a connexion.’(p 55).