Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I always have this slight love/hate relationship with sci-fi writers in that they can imagine a very wonderful kind of world but the language that they use to describe this world is often conventional and pedestrian. But what Hoban does is show that it is not only a world that has been made strange by an apocalypse but a world in which the language itself has been re-invented and regressed.
What about Ridley Walker, by Russell Hoban?
I read this book when I was around 15 years old. It is set in a Kentish area after a nuclear war and it is as if the world has regressed. There is an element of religious totalitarianism going on. And everyone is speaking in a kind of eccentric, quasi-Chaucerian idiom. That is what I really liked about it – the unfamiliarity of the language because it is set in this post-apocalyptic world, and he goes one stage further than most sci-fi writers. I always have this slight love/hate relationship with sci-fi writers in that they can imagine a very wonderful kind of world but the language that they use to describe this world is often conventional and pedestrian. But, what Hoban does is show that it is not only a world that has been made strange by an apocalypse but a world in which the language itself has been re-invented. This is so is clever because the very fact that you struggle with the words to understand what is happening dramatises the level of language itself. I had never encountered a writer doing that with words before. I embarked on it thinking, post-apocalyptic novel – quite exciting, and then, a little bit like with A Clockwork Orange, you think, hang on a minute, this is something quite different, something I hadn’t thought of before.
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Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
