Riddley Walker Time

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Phoebe 1038No Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2012%2F01%2F25%2Friddley-walker-time%2FRiddley+Walker+Time2012-01-26+04%3A37%3A27Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D1038

It’s strange how a book can irrevocably change one’s world.

I was a year out of college when I read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker . I was working in a college library, and I’d gone through a long, unhappy spat of reading “the classics,” then a moderately less unhappy period of reading Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates and then, abruptly, I decided to read some sci-fi. I picked up A Canticle for Leibowitz first. Dusty and strange, I enjoyed the narrative–who doesn’t love post-apocalyptic monks?–but it didn’t touch me any more deeply than had, say, The Robber Bride. Moderately deeply, perhaps.

But I hadn’t expected the wild beauty of Riddley Walker. I started it in the cafeteria on a dark winter night. My brain bucked up against the prose at first, but after stumbling over it, stuttering over it, and finally just reading it aloud, I began to get it. It’s a simple story, plotwise. But the strong dialect gave it a versimillitude that I haven’t really seen in any novel since.

That winter, during the weeks that I savored Riddley Walker, I walked on the brick track during my breaks. Everything smelled fresh and alive, even in winter. There were seeds and green shoots hibernating in the grey dunes of snow. Apocalypse seemed likely. No, imminent. And in that year when I drove a broken down Chevy, worked in a library, wrote bad poetry and worse novels–in that year, it felt okay.

Hoban’s words changed winter for me. The scent of melting snow on the air will always say something about the constancy of the human experience–the mythology of the past, the possibility of the future. Late January will always, always be Riddley Walker time.