I heard about the book a couple weeks ago on a British podcast called Backlisted. On the face of it this isn’t the kind of thing I usually go for. A future dystopia. Basically sci-fi. But then they read excerpts and I wanted to hear more. Because the book is written in a kind of mangled Middle English. The idea is that these apocalypse survivors have lost their literacy and regressed to a new Dark Age. Their speech is a phonetic approximation of the language we know. The current situation with emoji etc makes this feel of the moment.

I stopped into a couple stores looking for it, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, with no luck but it was sitting waiting for me Tangible in the Fiction section all along.

Here’s an excerpt I read aloud. A fairytale inside a fairytale but it’s about now too somehow.

I stop and start with this one. Partly because I’m still working on The Jungle, partly because I have four or five books started and having trouble committing to just one of them. It used to be that I’d stay faithful to one and either finish or abandon it before going on to another. Now these rules no longer feel that important.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe because I’m getting closer to wanting to write something book-shaped again.

Whether I end up finishing Riddley Walker or set it aside and return it to Tangible’s Fiction shelves I’m grateful to’ve spent time in its strange futureworld. I don’t expend much effort on looking forward in general. Not past what I’m working on or a movie or show coming up or a trip to see family. The news, which slips through despite my best efforts, is bleaker than ever, as you probably know. Maybe wandering around the wreckage is just around the corner.

I couldn’t say. I just read about it.