Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban Q3: The Chayjis

Apocryphal

Many futuristic setting elements are introduced, but are at best explained in local vernacular and without much in the way of context for the reader of today. We are largely left to figure these things out on own. Since finishing the book, I've read a few reviews that explained what some of these were - Oh, how I wish I'd had a foreward in the book do that for me!

What's your take on The Chaynjis, Punch and Pooty, Mr Clevver, Mr. On The Level, The 1 Big 1, Eusa, the Other Voyce Owl, The Lissener, Littl Shynin Man, or any of the other mystifying elements that you can think of?

NeilNjae

I found most of them pretty clear. It may help that the book seems well-situated in the South East England of the 1970s, which were my formative years. The anticipation of nuclear holocaust, and the ongoing effects of it, were just part of the everyday fabric of life. I've been to a few Punch and Judy shows, so the Eusa show and then Punch were familiar elements.

It'll be interesting to hear what the non-Brits think of it all!

RichardAbbott

In my kindle edition there's a postscript which describes the Canterbury artwork on which much of the future "thinking about the world" is based - this gives away the identity of Eusa and the Littl Shynin Man, for example.

Of the others, I took some to be based on scientific thought eg The Chayngis = transmutation of elements in nuclear decay, some military slang eg The 1 Big 1 as a doomsday weapon, some to be cultural eg Punch and Judy -> Punch and Pooty.

Like Neil, I look forward to comments from over the water!

Apocryphal

When I started the novel, I figured the 1Big1 and the Littl shyning Man were the two bombs dropped on Japan by USA (Eusa). I only later realized Eusa was Eustace, and I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about St Eustace. I never knew about the painting, and even when the text described it I didn’t know we were talking about a real painting. So it’s really only now I’m realizing the Littl Shyning Man and the Hart of the Wood are referring to figures in the painting. That might have been helpful to know earlier.

So maybe the 1Big1 ISA bomb? Or maybe it’s the Big War? Punch and Judy I also struggled with the meaning of. What’s the significance of Punch? Does he stand in for the Devil? (Or is that Mr Clevver?).I read somewhere that news was spread in Inland via these Punch and Judy shows, like a sort of town crier, but if that was the case, why didn’t Riddley know what the puppet was when he found it? So I still don’t really know.

The Lissener seems to be a kind of scapegoat character who gets punished for community sins?

The Chaynjis are maybe societal collapse following the war? Or maybe we’re talking about mutations? Or both? But the setting never mentions mutants, and besides that concept seems too pulpy for this setting.

NeilNjae

My interpretations:

I thought the painting was inspiration for Hoban, more than something directly in the book. I didn't make the connection to the WW2 bombs: I thought 1 Big 1 was the nuclear war ("the big one") and Little Syning Man was the anthropmorphised force of nuclear explosions.

The Hart of the Wud is, I think, a general idea of woodland being a wild, dangerous place, the charcoal burners being outsiders, and the mysterious core of things.

Eusa was the USA, and referenced the US military people stationed in the UK. (The Greenham Common protest camp started in 1981, so the book was too early for a Greenham - Green Man connection.)

The Eusa show isn't Punch and Judy, but uses the same equipment and format. The Eusa Man puppet does different things from Punch and looks different. Mr Clevver is the Devil (clever scientists made the nuclear bombs, and were "too clever by half").

The Lissener is a combination of mystic and scapegoat.

The closest we get to mutants are the deformed Eusa men, like the Ardship.

RichardAbbott

All: here is a picture of the St Eustace mural...

There's also some detailed images at https://castlesandcoffeehouses.com/2016/04/29/st-eustace-in-canterbury-cathedral/

RichardAbbott

Having read a few of Hoban's books now, my impression is that his first step in writing a novel is to find what becomes the conceptual core. In a few cases this is a piece of artwork (the St Eustace mural here), in others it is a place or building. Having found that, his imagination starts building out a world from that core. So here the imaginative leap is something like "what if this mural became the source of truth?"

Now I agree that we can find resonances with other things - so Eusa is not just Eustace but also Jesus and The USA and no doubt other things too. But I don't think we can reduce it to a straightforward "this means that" set of correspondences.

Apocryphal

Well, that's two recent novels that hinged around a painting - this one, and the painting of Icarus in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In both cases, it really seems to help to have an idea of the image as you read, or as you later think about, the novel in order to appreciate it at it's fullest.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think it's a clever bit of conceptualization.

But on the other hand, is it really fair on the reader? I mean, both of these novels were written before the internet age, and it wouldn't have been that easy to look up the artworks. No doubt the authors considered this, and maybe thought it wasn't that important to the reader. (Heck, they might both have thought they were writing a throw-away piece of fiction that was never going to amount to anything, so it didn't matter anyway).