I mentioned this on the weekend and it reminded me to mention it here.

Ridley Walker is a story told through the eyes of a young boy (I think he’s 13) who finds himself at odds with the authorities in a post apocalyptic Kent, or as it’s known in Ridley’s time Inland. The whole thing is written in a slightly obscure pigin which allows the author to slowly reveal the nature of the world in which Ridley lives whilst also conveying the confusion in the way he experiences it, we’re never 100% sure if we understand him in the same way that he never 100% understands the world. Technological objects and concepts are rendered as mysterious to us as they are to him. The map of the world reflects this degradation, the edges are worn off and the boundaries are imprecise.

Ridley’s job is that of ‘connexion man’ a kind of bard/ seer, he interprets and performs puppet shows which combine, traditional English folklore, Punch and Judy, the bible and 20th century geopolitics into a web of allusion and layered meaning. Anyway, if you like sinister folklore and post apocalyptic fiction then you should check this out, I don’t want to say any more as the revelatory quality of the book is its strongest point and it would be to easy to spoil that. In may ways it’s the opposite of Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home which I’m reading at the moment (more on that at some later point maybe). In Ridley’s world humanity has been crushed by the apocalypse, shame has kept it down in the mud whereas, deep in the future, Le Guin’s Kesh seem blissfully unaware of whatever tragedy has befallen our current civilization (though they do still have to deal with our plastic occasionally).