Self referencing Hoban
John Mullan [JM] opens the discussion with a funny remark: Will Self [WS] “must have got somebody to write his Wikipedia entry”, he says, because it begins with the words “highly articulate” rather than the usual biographical details. Self denies it and, in any case, Mullan is wrong: Self’s entry begins with place and date of birth, as most entries do (unless it was edited following this podcast).
Mullan then talks to Self about his latest novel, The Book of Dave, about which Mullan says, “Its 16 chapters alternate between two time zones”, the recent past in London, and a far-distant, post-apocalyptic future. Self is always compelling listening, in my opinion (even when he’s ranting on something as daft as Grumpy Old Men on the telly), but here he’s in particularly good form. Of note is his assertion that he was approached by some supposed Riddley fans, complaining about his treatment of the broken-down ‘Mockni’ he uses in his book, as though Russ’s ‘Riddleyspeak’ were somehow sacrosanct (see below). I find it hard to believe that the complainants can have been hard-core Hoban fans; we’re much too polite. Plus we contacted Self to see if he’d like to contribute to our Hoban ‘80!’ commemorative booklet [Self offered the new introduction he wrote for the Bloomsbury Twentieth Anniversary edition of Riddley, which we didn’t have enough space for, and besides, most of us had already read it].
I find it especially sobering that Self doubts Riddley would find a publisher today. He describes it as an “extremely tough read” and again I find myself shocked that someone as intelligent as Self found it such heavy going. At least he persevered, since it’s startlingly clear from his remarks that a lot of people wouldn’t. Joe, our 12-year-old is reading it at the moment and hasn’t mentioned it being an especially difficult read. But I digress…
As you’d expect, Self is also hugely complimentary about Riddley. Mullan goes on to talk about The Book of Dave’s post-apocalyptic theme and mentions how it recalls other post-apocalyptic novels, Riddley included.
JM: “I wanted to start with a question about the idea of remaking a world after sort of imagined catastrophic event which has almost ended civilisation… since writing the first column on your book [in the Guardian], some of the readers have written in to the website with comparisons with it and other post-catastrophe novels. I don’t know if you know Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker?” [Mullan must have known the answer to this question, so perhaps it was for audience benefit.]
WS: “Yeah.”
[…]
JM: “Something that it has in common with that Russell Hoban novel is that the denizens of this future world, or most of them, speak in a kind of remade language. And, however grim the thought of an apocalypse might be, it looks like you had a lot of pleasure in remaking that language. Is that wrong?”
WS: “Up to a point. It’s not an invented language; it’s certainly not like Burgess’s Nasdat in A Clockwork Orange, which is really a sort of argot of Russian and some neologisms. It’s not, to my mind — and I’m not indulging in false modesty because it’s not really my style — it’s not as impressive an invented language as Hoban’s in Riddley Walker. I mean, I wrote the introduction to the reissue of Riddley Walker a few years ago and it was interesting how many people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘Oh, this is an amazing, amazing book,’ and when I published Dave said, ‘How dare you tread the same hallowed ground as Russell Hoban,’ and, in fact, Riddley Walker had been out of print for over a decade, so I don’t know who these great Riddley Walker fans were; they certainly weren’t buying Russell’s books, that’s for sure.”
“But I think that what he did in Riddley Walker is to create a kind of… and actually, his afterword to that book is a masterful excursus on the whole idea of invented languages. What he did was to almost take English as a kind of nuclear isotope and look at what would happen when it deteriorated, when it had a kind of half-life, and as Riddley Walker is a post-nuclear apocalypse novel, that was rather amazing. I may say, I don’t think I’m a slouch when it comes to reading, but it’s an extremely tough book to read, if you do try to read it.
JM: “Yeah.”
WS: “…And I’m not sure it would find a publisher today and I really don’t know that it necessarily would. I rather wimped out on going as far as Hoban did — his book is entirely written in this deteriorated English, which is really quite tricky to get to terms with. I considered writing all the future sections in a kind of version of that of my own, and I kind of slightly wimped out on it. I mean, I couldn’t… for a start, it would be technically difficult to express the kind of philosophical and satiric ideas that I wanted to get across in the novel, but also I’m not sure that the contemporary reader who, after all, is largely fed on, kind of ‘tit’, rather facile English a lot of the time, would stomach it. I mean, the amount of kind of comment — some from yourself, John — on what people presume is recondite vocabulary, it’s really quite astonishing nowadays, and if you look at something like Riddley Walker, what would you say about that? It’s a fantastically difficult book, far more difficult than my invented language, which is only a phoneticised Cockney. That’s all there is to it...”
Mullan then talks to Self about his latest novel, The Book of Dave, about which Mullan says, “Its 16 chapters alternate between two time zones”, the recent past in London, and a far-distant, post-apocalyptic future. Self is always compelling listening, in my opinion (even when he’s ranting on something as daft as Grumpy Old Men on the telly), but here he’s in particularly good form. Of note is his assertion that he was approached by some supposed Riddley fans, complaining about his treatment of the broken-down ‘Mockni’ he uses in his book, as though Russ’s ‘Riddleyspeak’ were somehow sacrosanct (see below). I find it hard to believe that the complainants can have been hard-core Hoban fans; we’re much too polite. Plus we contacted Self to see if he’d like to contribute to our Hoban ‘80!’ commemorative booklet [Self offered the new introduction he wrote for the Bloomsbury Twentieth Anniversary edition of Riddley, which we didn’t have enough space for, and besides, most of us had already read it].
I find it especially sobering that Self doubts Riddley would find a publisher today. He describes it as an “extremely tough read” and again I find myself shocked that someone as intelligent as Self found it such heavy going. At least he persevered, since it’s startlingly clear from his remarks that a lot of people wouldn’t. Joe, our 12-year-old is reading it at the moment and hasn’t mentioned it being an especially difficult read. But I digress…
As you’d expect, Self is also hugely complimentary about Riddley. Mullan goes on to talk about The Book of Dave’s post-apocalyptic theme and mentions how it recalls other post-apocalyptic novels, Riddley included.
JM: “I wanted to start with a question about the idea of remaking a world after sort of imagined catastrophic event which has almost ended civilisation… since writing the first column on your book [in the Guardian], some of the readers have written in to the website with comparisons with it and other post-catastrophe novels. I don’t know if you know Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker?” [Mullan must have known the answer to this question, so perhaps it was for audience benefit.]
WS: “Yeah.”
[…]
JM: “Something that it has in common with that Russell Hoban novel is that the denizens of this future world, or most of them, speak in a kind of remade language. And, however grim the thought of an apocalypse might be, it looks like you had a lot of pleasure in remaking that language. Is that wrong?”
WS: “Up to a point. It’s not an invented language; it’s certainly not like Burgess’s Nasdat in A Clockwork Orange, which is really a sort of argot of Russian and some neologisms. It’s not, to my mind — and I’m not indulging in false modesty because it’s not really my style — it’s not as impressive an invented language as Hoban’s in Riddley Walker. I mean, I wrote the introduction to the reissue of Riddley Walker a few years ago and it was interesting how many people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘Oh, this is an amazing, amazing book,’ and when I published Dave said, ‘How dare you tread the same hallowed ground as Russell Hoban,’ and, in fact, Riddley Walker had been out of print for over a decade, so I don’t know who these great Riddley Walker fans were; they certainly weren’t buying Russell’s books, that’s for sure.”
“But I think that what he did in Riddley Walker is to create a kind of… and actually, his afterword to that book is a masterful excursus on the whole idea of invented languages. What he did was to almost take English as a kind of nuclear isotope and look at what would happen when it deteriorated, when it had a kind of half-life, and as Riddley Walker is a post-nuclear apocalypse novel, that was rather amazing. I may say, I don’t think I’m a slouch when it comes to reading, but it’s an extremely tough book to read, if you do try to read it.
JM: “Yeah.”
WS: “…And I’m not sure it would find a publisher today and I really don’t know that it necessarily would. I rather wimped out on going as far as Hoban did — his book is entirely written in this deteriorated English, which is really quite tricky to get to terms with. I considered writing all the future sections in a kind of version of that of my own, and I kind of slightly wimped out on it. I mean, I couldn’t… for a start, it would be technically difficult to express the kind of philosophical and satiric ideas that I wanted to get across in the novel, but also I’m not sure that the contemporary reader who, after all, is largely fed on, kind of ‘tit’, rather facile English a lot of the time, would stomach it. I mean, the amount of kind of comment — some from yourself, John — on what people presume is recondite vocabulary, it’s really quite astonishing nowadays, and if you look at something like Riddley Walker, what would you say about that? It’s a fantastically difficult book, far more difficult than my invented language, which is only a phoneticised Cockney. That’s all there is to it...”
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