OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

By: Mark Kingwell
April 2, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Eighties (1984–93) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

RIDDLEY WALKER | RUSSELL HOBAN | 1980

Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic linguistic-puzzle novel, a first-person narration at once primitive and futuristic, was published to some consternation in the fall of 1980. As an example of nuclear anxiety fiction, it took its place with On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz, some scattered episodes of TV and film franchises, and a few minor-league SF efforts (Damnation Alley, A Boy and His Dog). Also, of course, the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes movie: Damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Indeed. But Hoban’s vision was even starker, of a stunted stone-age society in the southeast of what once was England, still struggling centuries later to parse the scraps of knowledge and “cleverness” that reduced them to scrabbling in the mud and rain. The book took daring leaps of language, acting out the play of orality and literacy as its young protagonist, Riddley, tries to make sense of existence.

Hoban’s collapsed English is full of corrupted 1980s slang and jokes that only a Thatcher-era speaker would get: rizlas (name-brand of cigarette rolling papers), anrack (the hooded anorak ponchos sported by trainspotters and lefties), and, my favourite, helping the qwirys — a riff on the euphemistic British phrase “helping the police with their enquires” which, in the novel, simply means torture. (Fun fact: a version of this lingo informs the goofy final scenes of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.)

It’s a violent landscape, with parliamentary power struggles and ideological division over what to do with the scraps of remaining technology, now wreathed in quasi-religious aura. Gunpowder plays a special role, as do visions of “air boats out beyont the sarvering gallack seas” that once populated the sky. Riddley, newly orphaned, is a “connexion man,” a kind of community seer and storyteller. But he is itinerant, as his name suggests, and the book’s plot maps a brutal peregrination around County Kent.

Some of it is funny. Where else would you meet a character called Fister Crunchman, a “hevvy” of his clan? Or watch two hapless knowledge-seekers, one a blinded Lear figure, blow themselves to bits while whacked on hash? The main thing is to feel the phonemes, the scattered pull of sense-making that beckons and ever evades young Riddley. He’s like Joe Turner in Three Days of the Condor or Roger Thornhill of North By Northwest — slick masters of narrative who suddenly can’t figure out what story they’re in.

Like them, resourceful Riddley adapts. A key feature of the novel is the use of travelling puppet shows as a means of propaganda and meaning-transmission. The anarchic clown Punch remains in play, subversive counterpoint to official narratives of power and technology, a trickster and sly truth-teller who becomes Riddley’s pocket ally.

In the mid 1980s, having moved to Britain to study the literature of apocalypse, I witnessed in the ancient Scottish town of Stirling a rare old-timey street-fair Punch and Judy show. The form’s casual misogyny — spouse abuse as a main lever of plot — can make it hard to like. But watching with my niece Natalie that day, I was transfixed by this meeting of life and fiction, the endless squawking perversity of Mr. Punch.

Like the power-hungry forebears of Riddley, who “pul datter” of “vansit theary” in learned “some poasyums,” desperate to understand “the Littl Shyning Man the Addom,” Punch can resist everything except temptation. We keep making the same fire-stealing mistake over and over again. “Why is Mr. Punch a bad boy?” Natalie asked me that day. Hoban’s book ends with the same eternal query: “Why is Punch crookit?” he wonders. “Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.” On him, and on us.

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OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

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