Word: riddley
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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...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...
Beyond its wit, the language of Riddley Walker haunts and challenges in a way that English cannot. Where English is insufficient, Hoban simply invents penetrating new words. The gnawing sensation of terror inside the stomach is the "fearbelly"; both the sight and sound of an angry dog are expressed by "grooling and smarling...
...though the language of Riddley Walker is unfamiliar, the story it tells rings with unmistakable urgency. Riddley runs away from his "crowd"--his community of foragers--and becomes unwittingly drawn in to Goodparley's obsessive quest to regain the technology of explosives. Tantalized by the legendary ability of man before the flash to build "boats in the air and picters on the wind," Goodparley determines to recreate the power that created these mysteries; when he meets Riddley, he thinks he has found the first breakthrough: the ingredients of gunpowder...
...Riddley mistrusts Goodparley's discovery--all the more when Goodparley lets on that his real goal is to harness the power that caused the great flash. Riddley's grounds for skepticism--expressed most succinctly by a fellow traveller--sound authentic not only in a land of foragers and howling dogs but in a world of bureaucrats and soaring weaponry...
This is Hoban's greatest accomplishment--that the mystical tale of a 12-year-old boy, told in an unknown language, resonates with an urgent, timeless message: in Riddley's words "the onlyes power is no power." Perhaps Hoban's gift as a children's writer gives Riddley Walker this sense of universality; perhaps you have to know how to speak to children in order to speak to their parents...