The novel is entirely written in this broken language which has echoes of Estuary English, Cockney rhyming slang, Peter and Jane Ladybird books and Nineties rave culture. On me an my girl she is called Star an we are in love. The pill bag is a jumbo big bag an is massive an full up of pills. Government policies are disseminated through Eusa shows, rather like Punch and Judy shows, performed by the Pry Mincer himself, Abel Goodparley, and his The head of Government is at the Ram (Ramsgate), now a small island cut off from the rest of Kent.
Only Kent exists on the Swallows and Amazons style map drawn by Riddley at the start of the book. Most of England – ‘Inland’ – is now, for all Riddley and we know, a radioactive wasteland. Beyond the ‘fents’ are dark forests where packs of vicious black dogs roam. Riddley’s people are hunter-gatherers and live in a fenced encampment near Bernt Arse (known to us as Ashford in Kent). The future, instead of being more sophisticated, has reverted to Iron Age simplicity. Riddley Walker is set several thousand years in the future following a nuclear apocalypse referred to as the Bad Time. Every 4 February, Russell Hoban’s birthday, die-hard fans leave typed quotations from his novels in random places for strangers to find. In 2005 a Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum (a symposium in Riddleyspeak) was held in London, with readings, quizzes and a pilgrimage to Kent to visit locations in the novel. Those who know it love it, and whole websites are devoted to it, with chapter-by-chapter annotations deciphering the language, and online chat rooms discussing its themes. Hoban started writing Riddley Walker in 1974 and finished it five years later. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt been none for a long time befor To give you a flavour of the novel, here are the opening lines: In my typically uncool, autodidactic way, I bought Riddley Walker and was transfixed.
That he hadn’t bothered to read the whole novel seemed impressively casual. When I asked Daren what had inspired Boxy an Star, he said he had read the first few pages of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Boxy an Star is set in the near future and tells the story of two teenage ‘sieveheads’ who have fried their brains on so many ‘spangles’ that even simple things such as a duvet fill them with awed confusion.
For a brief time in 2003 I knew the writer Daren King, whose first novel, Boxy an Star, was shortlisted for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award.
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