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 allows him to tackle a problem which most futuristic writers evade. This is the recognition that total change, whether it be to post-holocaust desolation, as here, or to Utopian socialism, must involve a modification of consciousness which will be reflected in, and then structured by, our use of language. His solution is to imagine how language would evolve—or rather decay—in a disrupted society. Only the showmen and their interpreters are...