Word: hoban
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...Hoban's newest book, about a 12-year-old boy named Riddley Walker, is filled with rhymes and stories that have all the unaffected charm and ring of the Frances stories...
...Riddley Walker is no children's story. From bread and jam and bedtime, Hoban has gone to create a remarkable novel about the most terrifying issue of the grownup world: the abuse of power...
...world that remains is dark, damp, and overgrown, peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and horrible mutants. The language, too, has undergone a mutation: in Hoban's version of English reinvented from scratch, spelling, sentence-structure, and vocabulary have all taken on a childlike spontaniety and simplicity...
...resulting dialect has considerable appeal. Often, Hoban merges two words into one, with fascinating results. A woman is a "wooman," says Riddley, because "she's the 1 with the woom." The leader of the mutant survivors of the great flash is known as "the Ardship of Cambry," one who suffers many an "ardship." The most chilling pun has to do with the central myth of Riddley's time, an adaptation of the only document left from before the flash, the Christian legend of St. Eustace. In "the Eusa story," Eusa tampers with "the Littl Shyning Man" and creates the cataclysm...
...rediscovery of the Eustace legend becomes the book's most comical scene, in which Hoban deftly deflates all interpreters of ancient texts. The political leader of Riddley's people--a character named Abel Goodparley, known as Pry Mincer--translates this passage to Riddley...