Newspell

By Paul Gray

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

Summit Books; 220 pages; $12.95

Those whose attention spans have shrunk to the length of a station break are going to find Riddley Walker easy to bypass. The novel's first sentence, for example, is not exactly a conventional grabber: "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen." Even patient readers are likely to riffle pages at this point, trying to find out how long such odd English continues. Answer: all the way to the end. And getting there is well worth the effort.

Patchwork language is an essential part of Author Russell Hoban's story. Hoban, 55, who has written children's books and three previous novels, sets Riddley Walker in the southeast corner of England, some 2,500 years into a badly damaged and degraded future. A nuclear holocaust, which occurred near the end of the 20th century, has forced civilization to start over again at ground zero. Progress has been slow. People huddle together in small enclaves, fighting off the elements, packs of killer dogs and occasionally, one another. A semblance of central government exists in the person of a "Pry Mincer" and "Wes Mincer," two itinerants who travel from village to village giving repeated performances of the same puppet show. Its subject is a simplified myth of the splitting of the atom.

When his father dies, young Riddley Walker becomes his village's "new connexion man," the one who interprets the shows and reality in general. Some of his colleagues think that Riddley may also possess "the follerme," a mystical ability lead others and to make things happen. Indeed, destiny tugs the boy toward the ancient holy center of Cambry (Canterbury), where an odd pilgrimage of people and elements has arrived. This combination, if successful, will result in the rediscovery of gunpowder.

There is never much doubt that this worst will happen, that these bedraggled survivors will regain some of the "cleverness" that almost destroyed them before. Riddley's narrative generates a different kind of suspense: the fascination of watching a strange world evolve out of unfamiliar words. Impoverished as it is Riddley's language can still generate unexpected riches. People in trouble are "living on burrow time." Two of the sciences that the nuclear "barms" wiped out are "chemistery and fizzics." When a person is trying to think amid too much noise he complains of "inner fearents." Riddley sometimes rises to alliterative poetry. He describes the rain "spattering on crumbelt conkreat and bustit birk and durdling in the puddls gurgling down the runnels of the dead town."

Such passages give the novel an imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction. Seldom are such eerie, dreamed-up landscapes made so accessible. Thanks to the Bomb, all people are now entitled to their very own apocalyptic visions, whether they want them or not. Russell Hoban's nightmare is one that deserves to be passed along --ByPaulGray

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