Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban Q4: The Punch

Apocryphal

What, would you say, are the major and minor themes of the book, and how are these related to the events?

NeilNjae

One thing I think is that Riddley is someone who sees the symbolic meaning in everything. Everything that happened to him was, in his mind, connected to and an echo of something from a story or tradition. His whole world is suffused in symbolism.

As for the themes of the book, it's far from clear. There's a lot about and changes in the world and the effects they have on the people. There's perhaps an anticipation that violence will always be with us, and that people will seek out better ways of doing it to gain power. And also, there's a lot about stories and symbols, and memory, and the connection of people to their history and how they keep it and reinterpret it.

Apocryphal

Since there was some effort to develop gunpowder and as soon as it was, the mixer blew himself up. So I figured there was a comment here about the perennial nature destruction - as if today ‘it will happen again’. Canticle for Liebowitz had the same theme, with the novel ending with a nuclear war and a case of parthenogenesis, suggesting the cyclical nature of civilization.

I’m less sure about secondary themes,but my guess is Punch is somehow involved in one.

RichardAbbott

Riddley's society is, I think, driven strongly by symbol and multiple meanings in words (as presumably is Russell Hoban). So most of the RW-speak coined words are puns blending several possible meanings. We learn (as readers rather than characters, I think) that much of the philosophical basis of society comes from a very old picture whose original meaning has been lost - it is now fused with some half-remembered bits of practical chemistry into what seems to them to be a coherent whole, but to us to be a mishmash of superstition and ignorance.

I think this approach to meaning emerges in RW's father's activity as someone who "makes connexions" - something that RW tries to take on, with limited success, and Lorna Elswint does rather more convincingly. The whole business reminded me of some preachers, especially in non-Conformist traditions, who will take a story (typically a biblical one in that case) and blend it with contemporary events to fashion something that listeners feel has direct personal relevance. So in some ways what we are reading - I think - is RW's attempt to make connexions out of the events of these seminal few days of his life. To that end he uses words, actions, explanations of varying levels of detail, puppetry, and a pack of dogs to get over his insights into the world.

I'm not sure there is a "theme" beyond that - I agree that there is a "violence is without end" message, but RW himself seems repelled by this. It's perhaps important that we leave him equipped with a non-standard puppetry outfit ready to deliver a non-standard message to whoever will listen.

NeilNjae

Yes, Riddley's worldview is one of symbols upon symbols. He's an "unreliable" narrator, I think, in that what he narrates isn't direct physical reality, but what it should be like in a neat folktale. For instance, when Granser mixes the gunpowder, were either of Granser and Goodparley really killed outright? Did Granser's head just fly off and land on top of a pole? The events that Riddley narrates are all suspiciously neatly symbolic.