HOBAN, Russell. Riddley Walker. London: Jonathan Cape. 1980.
8vo. Publisher's black cloth, lettered in gilt to spine, in the dust-jacket designed by Mon Mohan, priced £5.95 to front flap, grey endpapers; pp. [10], 220, [2]; a couple of small marks to page block, minor wear to wrapper extremities, red lettering on spine faded (as usual); near fine, in very good wrapper; from the library of the literary scholar Catherine Peters with her pencilled ownership inscription to front free endpaper.
A bright first printing of Hoban's dystopian masterpiece.
A dystopian fable of great vividness and sustained imaginative energy, and one of the stand-out post-war novels in the language, Riddley Walker – or rather Riddley Walker – speaks, as the jacket has it, ‘in a language we don't speak but all know’. Hoban, like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange before him, invented an idiolect and, with it, a world. The voice buttonholes the reader from the very first sentence: ‘On my naming day when I come 12 I to 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.’ Burgess himself wrote of Riddley that ‘This is what literature is meant to be’.
SKU: 2123118