Russell Hoban is a writer whose genius is expressed with equal brilliance in books both for children and for adults. Since the late 1950s, Hoban has created some of the best-known characters in postwar children's literature: Frances the Badger, Charlie t...

Russell Hoban. Riddley Walker. Expanded Edition with Afterword, Notes, Glossary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 235 pp. $25.00 (cloth), $12.95 (paper). KNOWN PRINCIPALLY as the author of children's books (among them such classics as The Mouse and His Child and Charlie the Tramp),...

Riddley Walker, as the name suggests, is a novel which courts obscurity. Perhaps twenty years as a successful children's writer has taught Russell Hoban that our capacity to respond to the bizarre does not atrophy with age. Here he tells the story of a twelve-year-old "connexion man" interpreting puppet shows in the year 2347 o.c. ("Our Count") while the topography remains (just) recognizably that of East Kent. Hoban's confidence in our ability to accept the strange...

Intermittently "Riddley Walker" brings to mind books by several contemporary authors—Anthony Burgess's "The Clockwork Orange," John Gardner's "Grendel," the complete works of William Golding. But in vision and execution this is an exceptionally original work, and Russell Hoban is actually his own best source…. [He] has earned his living principally as an author of children's books (among them such classics as "Charlie the Tr...

The first thing to be said about Russell Hoban's apocalyptic fable [Riddley Walker] is that it is compulsive reading. From the first words … you are immersed in a world that is total, maverick and disturbing—so much so that at times I was obliged to set the book aside and turn to some tried familiar favourite for assurance both literary and otherwise. It is strong stuff—and ambitious stuff, too: Russell Hoban is considering human nature, no less, and is not optimistic, to put it ...