[Riddley Walker] is extraordinary. It is not 'like' anything, though John Gardner in Grendel and William Golding in The Inheritors ventured tentatively down Riddley Walker's road—but backwards. For this story is about the distant future, several centuries after England has suffered a major nuclear attack. Reading and writing skills have been lost for hundreds of years and are only now beginning again; the story is written by Riddley, who is only 12 but a 'connection man', a seer who interprets the government puppet show. Language survived only orally and has mutated in strange ways; the new English in which the book is written is a shock….

At first, one seems to be reading gibberish, but having suddenly grasped that the 'Ardship of Cambry' is the Archbishop of Canterbury, one goes on to deduce the derivation of 'Pry Mincer', and of those long-ago technocrats, the 'Puter Leat' [computer elite...