Backlisted - Riddley Waker by Russel Hoban - Rerun

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Classic literary sci-fi novel set in a post-apocalyptic Kent – this is a rerun of 2019 episode recorded live at the Port Eliot Festival.  Riddley Walker is widely considered to be a post-war masterpiece. Anthony Burgess included it in his list of the 99 best novels published in the English language since 1939 saying ‘this is what literature is meant to be.’ Harold Bloom included it in his book The Western Canon, an examination of the work of 26 writers central to the development of Western literature. Hugh Kenner called it a book ‘where at first sight all the words are wrong, and at a second sight not a sentence is to be missed.’ To discuss it we were joined by the novelist Max Porter and the writer and critic Una McCormack.  Max is the author of four novels. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He has appeared on episodes of Backlisted dedicated to Joyce Cary and Tarjei Vesaas.  Una is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling science fiction writer who has written more than twenty novels based on TV shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. She has appeared on ten Backlisted episodes as well as this one, those dedicated to Georgette Heyer, Anita Brookner, William Golding, Tolkien, Terrance Dicks, Noel Streatfield, Winifred Holtby, Octavia Butler and our Sci-Fi special. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Backlisted, a podcast that gives new life to old books. This episode is another of our reruns. I'm going to take you back in time to the summer of 2019. It seems like a long time ago now, at that stage when we recorded this podcast on the remarkable novel Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban. None of us had any inkling of the cataclysmic events that were to happen in less than six months time, the COVID pandemic. And it feels because the book is a work on one level, at least of perhaps dystopian science fiction, it's set in a distant future after the planet has been mostly destroyed and human beings

are living kind of a sort of hunter gatherer existence living in kind of small villages surrounded by fences terrified of the wild dogs outside that if they venture outside will rip them to pieces, which makes it sound like a very bleak and kind of difficult book. It is certainly bleak. It is certainly difficult, but it is also one of the, I think one of the great novels of the last I think, one of the great novels of the last 40 years. And we recorded it live at the Port Elliot Festival. So you get a sense of, you get a sense of people sitting in a tent in the middle of summer, which given that this is being

recorded in a very drake cold, first of February in 2025, that has its own pleasures. It was, I think, a backlist of doing what I like to think when we get it right, we do best, which is to take something that is perhaps a little bit obscure and a little bit difficult and make it accessible and interesting. And that's largely because the amazing guests, Una McCormack and Max Porter, really, as well as being fascinating about the book itself, read from the book. I think everybody in that tent felt the hairs rise on the back of the neck of their necks when this, when the two readings, you're going to hear that.

But also, I suppose for Andy and I, it's, it's this book has a sort of, that's the kind of special place in our affections as former booksellers. You kind of saw Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker long before you read it as a bookseller because it was a staple on the Picador Stinnas that stood like pillars of self-improvement in the corners of 1980s bookshops. And I just remember that the original Picador jacket was very, very kind of singular in that all it had on it was words, masterpiece, cult, remarkable, stunning, intensity, dizzying.

It is all of those things and you are about to find out why. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You find us once again in the sunny, well it wasn't sunny last year, but you find us once again at the Port Elliott Festival. Or should I say, lay off your grueling and smiling, you be at the Good Show, pot tell you it. And this be the watcher, for the Governor's Symposium, call it Backway Bat-List. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the website where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, I'm the author of the year of reading dangerously.

And joining us today, we have Max Porter. APPLAUSE Max is a writer, editor and former bookseller whose first novel, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, was a bestseller and winner of several prizes. It has been translated into 27 languages. 29, but... Oh, wow.

Sorry, sorry, Max. His new novel, Lanny, has just appeared on the long list for this year's Booker Prize. Woo! And Max is a novelist and poet with interests in language and landscape, and that's related to the book that we're going to talk about today. We're also joined today by Una McCormack. Una is a New York Times best-selling author of more than a dozen science fiction novels. She also teaches and mentors writing students and has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and her

specialism is science fiction and that's why we've asked her to join us today to talk about this particular book. And we should also say that Max and Una are both returning guests to Backlisted. Max joined us to talk about the novelist Joyce Carey, and Una has been on a few times to talk about variously Anita Bruckner, Georgette Heye, and JRR Tolkien. And if that's not range, I don't know what is.

So the book we're here to discuss is Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban, first published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 1980. A book that Anthony Burgess said, this is what literature is meant to be. The American critic Hugh Kenner said, a book where at first sight all the words are wrong and at second sight not a sentence is to be missed. It failed to get onto the long list or the short list of the Booker Prize, but it did

get included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon of the Greatest Works of Literature and English. I should ask you, the audience here at Port Elliot, how many people here have read Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban? Absolutely everyone. That is amazing. But for the few lightweights who haven't tried it yet, it's quite a difficult, challenging book. John introduced us to... I think they should keep their hands up, actually, so we know who to direct. Yeah, yeah. We'll aim like pure businessmen.

Not you, madam! But the experience of Ridley Walker, as John suggests, is written in its own particular Yeah, yeah, we'll... our thoughts are... We'll aim like pure... Not you, madam! But the experience of Ridley Walker, as John suggests, is written in its own particular language, and I wanted to find a way of illustrating to those of you who hadn't read it, what that initial experience of reading Ridley Walker is like. So, Nicky, at some high volume, please, would you cue clip one. and slicked on his wooden fish head. The mouth worked and snapped all the bees back to the bungalow.

Famos Splattman Lard was a red enameled rolling pin. When the fish head broke the window. You've been dying to play that on every Bat List of Weekends. Yeah. You were going to sell a lot of copies of Trial Mask Replica this afternoon. So it's quite a challenging book. And so my first question to you, Max,

is when did you first encounter Ridley Walker and what did you think of it the first time you read it? We read it in my early twenties, I think. And I had heard about it. You know, you hear tell of it, don't you? I think before you read it, you know, like a prophecy. And weirdly, I read it at the same time as I read my other favorite book. It's silly to talk about favorite books, but two of my very favorite books is Ridley Walker and In Parenthesis by David Jones. And I read them around about

the same time and they have a lot in common and they're both hard work, deemed to be hard work for different reasons. And they're not hard work once you crack them, they're both hard work, deemed to be hard work, for different reasons. And they're not hard work once you crack them, they're both reward, they both teach you how to read them. So my earliest memory of reading Ridley was to phone my brother up, who had read it, I think, at that time, and say, do you get used to it? Does it get easier as you go along?

And he said, by page 14 was what he said. You won't think about the dialect anymore, you'll be in that world. I think it's about page 24 for me, because I'm a bit slow, but that's about that long before you're absolutely sucked into its linguistic world and you no longer see it as a challenge. It's taught you. It's a bit like that. Very appropriate.

That was actually from the back of my throat. Projecting. A short reading. They said in the New York Times, those quotes that John was just reading, they said in the New York Times, John Leonard said, This book is delicious and is designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid. They're pretty harsh. Tough love from Brumas to you.

Una, we're going to talk about the different ways this book, this novel could be defined. Let me ask you, do you see this as a science fiction novel? Well, I do. I think people didn't at the time. I think that when science fiction readers sort of coming to it are kind of pulling away from the language. Science fiction readers, of course, or fantasy readers as well, are used to kind of having to interpret bits of Elvish and all sorts of nonsense.

Usually what we do is skip those bits. You can't do that with Ridley Walker. You've got to stick there. You've got to follow the words. Let him take you into this world. It did okay in Science Fiction Prize. I think it picked up a Nebula nomination. It won a Campbell Award.

But on the whole, people were a bit snooty about it in the science fiction prize, I think it picked up a Nebula nomination, it won a Campbell Award. But on the whole, people were a bit snooty about it in science fiction. Well, they kind of went, oh, the world building's not this, the world building's not that. I think why I would call it science fiction, it's post Holocaust novel. It's a quest for lost knowledge. People are pursuing information, bits and blips. They're trying to find out something about the world and they are in a sort of haphazard way constructing the scientific method. That's why it's science fiction for me. And it's been massively influential. You see it on Chris Beckett's books, you see it in Cloud Atlas. Absolutely a science fiction novel for me. Max, Una was talking about the influence of the book there. Where do you see Hoban's language in Ridley Walker

manifesting itself in other places? Oh, well, there are loads, aren't there, of people that have tried to write novels in invented dialects. Yeah, Ridley speak. Yeah. In Banks' Fierce Mention. Yeah. Owe's it a debt.

There's a section in Cloud Atlas. Yeah, there's that. And Will Self did the Book of Dave, which is written in a, there's various things, aren't there? Kings North, the Wake. Kings North, yeah. Very nice. That sort of constructed language.

Well, to just give you a true picture, I think everyone's going to try and read a little bit for you, but we thought we'd start with, this is a recording from 1990. We've got a few clips of Russell Hoban talking about the book and reading from the book. And here is a clip of Russell Hoban reading the opening of Ridley Walker. And this will give you a fair idea of what's going on, I think. And then we'll tell you a bit about what the book is about. On my naming day, when I come 12, I gone front spear and kill to wild boar. He probably been the last wild pig on the bundle downs anyhow. There hadn't been none for a long time before him, though I ain't looking to see none again.

He didn't make the ground shake nor nothing like that when he come onto my spear. He weren't all that big, plus he look it poorly. He done the required, he turned and stood and clattered his teeth and made his rush. And there we were then, him on one end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him die. I said, your turn now, my turn later. The other spears gone in then and he were dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all dead, and the steam coming up off him in the rain, and

we all yelled, Offer! The wool thing felt just that little bit stupid, us running that boar through that last little scrump of woodland with the forms all round, cows mooing, sheep baaing, cocks crowing, and us foraging our last boar in a thin grey gersal on the day I come a man. The burnt arse pack been following just out of bow shot. When the shout gone up their ears all pricked up. Their leader, he were a big black and red spotted dog. He come forward a little like he been going to make a speech or something to one or two

blokes up at bow. Then he slumped back again and kept his farness following us back. I took notice of that leader though. He weren't close enough for me to see his eyes, but I thought his eye been on me. Great. That's incredible.

It sounds more hillbilly than I was expecting it with him reading it. I said your turn now, my turn later. Yeah, right. So who wants to have a stab at describing the plot of Ridley Walker? It's a quest. It's a...

That hard? That answer could take us the next four weeks or else you say, yeah, it's a quest story. It's people hunting for stuff, isn't it? Across a blasted landscape of misery, nasty dogs, angry people. Two and a half thousand years. God, I think I've read the wrong book.

I'm so sorry. I've come to the wrong thing. No, go on, go on. No, that was it. Paul McCarthy, The Road is Next Door, yeah? Two and a half thousand years in the future. So it's like a sort of new post-technological stone age. So what's happening is there has been a hunter-gatherer society

and that's breaking down as people are beginning now to farm and to gather together into communities that I think are all behind fences. Yeah, fences. They're all fenced off because the dogs have gone feral. And if you're out, unless you're dog-friendly, if you're dog-friendly, which is a bit of a gift, you can get along with the dogs. If not, they rip out your throat and your genitals.

Your cocks and your balls. Your cocks and your balls. So it's a fearful, difficult, dark, lot of rain in the book. And Ridley, shall we tell them what Ridley is? Ridley's a connection man, and his dad was a connection man, and his dad dies early on in the book, get trapped underneath this huge piece of iron. They mine for iron, salvage iron, old bits of the industrial world, and his dad dies

with really, Ridley's just like, I'm fucked by that. How old is Ridley? This is an interesting question. Twelve. He starts with his naming day when he's twelve. The fact that Ridley's twelve is just an astonishing thing to consider when you've read this whole book. Anyway, so Ridley then jumps over the fence

in one of the most moving passages of the book and goes off. We're the only one with spoilers, but that's the basic set-up. We should also say it's set in Kent, or what was left of Kent. Yeah, well, I live in Kent. The book is set in dystopian Kent, or as I call it, Kent. (*Laughter*) And there's a little map here at the beginning of the book,

and Hoban has renamed the towns of northeast Kent and Fannet. So Whitstable has become Widders Bell, Hermbe has become Horny Boy, Ramsgate has become the Ram. What's Ashford become appropriately enough? Burnt Arse. Burnt Arse, that's right. Which one is Bollockstones? I don't know.

Do you know what I don't know? Dover, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And Canterbury is Cambry. Now, how long did it take Russell Hoban to write this book? Um, it, well, he started, he started, Colin Midsom. He used to do Problemistic. Now, how long did it take Russell Hoban to write this book? Well, he started. Colin Midson, who used to do probabilistic.

I think it was longer than four years, Colin. He had the idea in 74 and he probabilistic in 1980. He was just banging out tea and jam with Francis in the gap. He started out as a 500-page manuscript and he felt that he hadn't captured. And he wrote it originally in modern English I think. Yeah, yeah, it's quite straightforward isn't it? And he whittles it down and whittles it down. And then he kind of whittles it down and whittles it down and whittles it down.

I think it's important to say also that there's a, the background to it, it's a book about, it's a philosophical book as well about what it means to know anything, to understand anything. And the religion is a religion called Eustace that is grown up, that is based on this legend of St Eustace, which is, there is a wall painting in Canterbury Cathedral. And I saw it last week. I went into Canterbury Cathedral just to go and look at it. On your own some. On my own some, yeah. And it takes up nearly a whole wall in the North Coral Nave of Canterbury Cathedral. And in fact, we have, I hope, we have a clip here of Russell Hoban talking about the process of writing Ridley Walker and where it came from.

This is dated 14th of May 1974, which is when I first had a go at a first chapter of what became Ridley Walker. It took me five and a half years to get it done. And the five and a half years were mainly spent in getting rid of what didn't belong there. Because after the first two years, I had 500 pages and they weren't it, so I discarded them. And when, I mean, the 500 pages were not just written straight ahead. I'd get to page 37, go back to page one, get to page 43, go back to page 15, so forth and so on, back and forth. After five years, I discarded the 500 pages, yeah, I lost 500 pages, and started again. And this time, I realized that what it wanted to be

was pretty spare and pretty bare, and not too many people, not covering not too much ground, but doing it in a concentrated way. Una, you were saying to me earlier that you would love to have written this book. What is it about the way he has honed it and sanded it? What he's done there is what any really, really good writer does, which is that he has consistently imagined this world. Now, it's okay if you're writing about Hamster Dinner Party, kind of getting on a running start, but he's gone, no, I'm just going to invent a kind of futuristic iron age civilization

that talks in a rubbed down English, and then they're about to go on this sort of journey to discover new technology. That's going to take me a bit of time to fully imagine myself into that space. And that's why the draft gets more and more and more condensed. And at the same time, as well as doing all that, because you know, you'd be happy just juggling those plates, he goes, and I'm going to remix a load of mythology. I'm going to talk about the legend of St. Eustace. I'm going to mix it up with images of the crucified Christ or the tree of knowledge

or I don't know, whatever's there. I'm going to make some really bad puns along the way as well. And then just when you think it's incredibly bleak, I'll throw in a curveball so funny that you laugh about a man's head getting cut off, which is weird. He just keeps on delivering and delivering. Every moment that you spend with this book, it's a really hard read. I had this book on my shelf for about eight years and every so often I kind of sidle up to it and go, oh, I know, oh, I know. And when I finally took it off the shelf, had about four days or something,

I'm going to commit to this book. I'm going to read it at his pace. That Ridley sort of makes you go on that journey of you learn the world as Ridley learns about the world. You become immersed, it gets easier and easier to read, you fall into the language like you would do with the potluck orange or something and at the other end you're going if I could write something a quarter that good I'd be happy not to write anything else in my life. It's just a major piece of post-war writing. I agree and Max you were saying you read it again last week, right? And how did you

find it coming back to it right now? Well, I mean, it's prophetic and it's the same age as me. And if you think about, you know, for those of us that are worried about new cure apocalypses any day of the week. It's amazing to see how fresh his anxiety is then, but also how funny it is and how robust and sort of fluid is with the mixing of iconographical oddities, as you were saying, you know, the mixing of the green man with the Christian stuff. And then, I mean, to read it now, post-internet, I mean, it's an Anthropocene fable. It's about the lies we're telling each other and whether we bother to tell each other the truth,

how we play with the words. There's a character in it who's like the boss man, and he goes around and he's called the, because the language has got rubbed down, he's called the prime mincer. Okay, all right. And you go, all right, well, this is a rub down prime minister, obviously, but pry looking at something he's mincing around all importantly, he's, you know, biting and nibbling and picking away at things on every low down every single little word. He's playing something and he's leaving the meaning just that tiny bit open for you to go. What am I taking from this? What's this book conveying it to me? The book is anti-propaganda book. The book is all the time about trying to get things right.

Every time he thinks he's got the meaning of the Yusa story. So as well as the Yusa story, which is communicated to people through a puppet show, which is a kind of a sort of, you know, reinforcement of the myth, but that it's the mincery, the government that are sort of sponsoring this show. And as part of the discovery, as a connection man, Ridley uncovers, he's shown for the first time a Punch and Judy show, which is anybody who's ever been to a Punch and Judy show and has been unnerved and slightly terrified.

I remember they tried to ban them recently as being deeply politically incorrect, which they joyfully are. They're incorrect on every level. But this is the great... If you ever wanted to say, there's something really interesting going on in a Punch and Judy show, I don't quite know what it is. This book is the book that makes you feel that you're right.

There is something really going on. And hey, guess what? You don't really know what it is, because that's Ridley's sort of task. I think that's what you've got to a really key thing about the book, which is that you don't know what is going on. And any attempt to fully interpret Ridley Walker is a fool's errand. And I don't believe Russell Ho... I mean, he wrote about it a bit. I don't think he ever wanted it fully worked out. The ideological architecture, but the meaning. Things don't believe Russell, I mean, he wrote about it a bit. I don't think he ever wanted it fully worked out, the ideological architecture, but the

meaning, things don't have meaning. Meaning is slippery as in real life. Because it's an anti-ideology book. Exactly, yeah. If there's a heroism in the book, it's actually of the kind of bringing down of any hierarchy between good or bad or any binary between good or evil. The point is we are all in the shit together and stories are our way of both inflicting harm on one another and also of falling in love and friendship, these odd

friendships bubble up. So the whole point of not knowing what's going on and the fact that the language constantly gives you permission to not quite know what's going on and then it up like a kind of air in a sail. Suddenly you absolutely know what's going on and it's conventional stuff from stories like heroism or bravery or love. And like, that's why I wrote to you last week to say it had made me cry this time. Because it seems-

What it means to be powerful. What it means to give us power. I think it's a- And to be young and to be, and it's like the spirit of the child. And he says, you know, the sacred heart of the wood and the child. And you realize that there's a reason

why some of these myths are generative, which is because they contain love. And some of them are tyrannical, because they contain control. Or why do people throw away happiness just to pay your star? It's so fresh. It's got everything in it, guys. I was thinking about what you were saying, Max, about, I mean, I think one of the things that Ridley Walker is about, if it is about anything, and it's about so many, it's a

book about power. Yeah. It's a power bet we could have both senses nuclear power the power of the individual the power of nature the balance between the long hours what one should do with power and I found a a little essay by dr. Rowan Williams the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who's a huge fan of Canterbury. He appears in the book. Who's a huge fan of Russell Hoeven and of Ridley Walker.

And this is something that he wrote about Ridley Walker. And I ask you both to comment on this. Human beings still have the ability to put themselves right with the power that lies around them. Such ability depends on their readiness to loosen their grip on the world as he's crushed and torn by the force of their holding.

Only in doing so can they achieve a fusion of natural and human energy and a beauty that is so intensely harmonious that it hurts. It is anything but a passive response to the world. It requires our own focused attention, listening for the flow of life to discover an energy that pulls together and not apart. This is what human power is when put right,

an alignment with nature that rather than being destructive leaves behind the violent battles for control and domination. Yes, Doctor. Yes, doctor. Right, honestly. I mean, love Rowan Williams. In the week we got the new prime minister we didn't ask for.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and on the hottest day on record, when power is out of alignment, that seems to me a very good interpretation. But that, you can see why it all got a bit tangled up in David Jones and the ecstatic Catholicism and all this, like that's the Dostoevsky-Ridley-Walker crossover. But for me, that's why I would always define, I'm very happy with science fiction, I'm very happy with literature, experimental, it's bloody blah, all that, you know, all

novels are experiments, it's all by the by. But I always thought of Ridley as a children's book for that exact reason. As a children's book? Yeah, partly because I read... In the way that Alan Darn is, you know, that's the same thing, I think you would... Well, it's the coming of age of a young man, and it's the coming, it's a portrait of an artist

as a young man. And coming to terms with the responsibility of being human and the ecstatic, the sort of jouissance of language and the sort of recognition of death. Like the death instinct erupting in a person is what all his children's books are about in a way, you know, as well. And he's a young man who's offered various types of power. He's sort of, you know, the primates that says, well, come with me. And other people say, well, come with me.

And others say, come with me. And what Ridley finds is, well, there's this line, the only power is no power. But he goes beyond that and goes, well, my power actually is in creating art, in saying no, in speaking truth to power. And that's where Ridley kind of discovers himself. And we're set up in the first paragraph, aren't we? The kind of heroic moments of your first kill, Ridley goes, whole thing felt a bit stupid really, you know? Ridley's always pushing on to find something better. He is also grace and forgiveness. I like the fact that he, what you consider to be major betrayals, for example, Goodparley being a sort of badger, you think, oh, Ridley's done

for now. You know, 20 pages later, Ridley recognizes that person's faults and is able to process them in a highly highly sophisticated. Yeah forgiveness machine Which is probably the most radical philosophy available to human beings really is the power the ability to forgive and what that might mean Yeah, I think it's so good that you read Rowan Williams because as you said it's a major major Philosophical work isn't it Ridley Walker and and and it doesn't it doesn't settle in any way like philosophy is it fluid It doesn't it doesn't French. It doesn't come down. It doesn't settle in any way. Like, philosophy is fluid. And it doesn't flinch, it doesn't come down. It doesn't come down clearly. I mean, in a way, it's beautiful what Rowan Williams said,

but the genius, he's almost saying the genius of the novel is it doesn't give you even that degree of easy resolution. And the ending of the novel, which is an incredibly powerful ending, I think, of them, setting off on a new journey with a ragtag of people joining his new show. His band of players sort of go off. Is positive and affirming, but it's also, you know, they're surrounded by threats.

For us now as well, like it carries the hurt. There's something very aboriginal in that. They go back into the dream time stained by the trauma of the violence that humans have done to one another and that the Holocaust done. And the dogs up and walking, you know, it's really visionary, that movement past pain. In case this seems scary, it's also extremely funny. Really funny.

Here's a little bit, just gives you a bit of that sense of how he manages to get to big issues in a way that would, I think, defeat anyone who was trying to write this in kind of a different way. The prose is the point. He snuggled up in a sleeping bag with Lorna. She were the oldest in our crowd, but her voice weren't old. It made the rest of her seem young for a little. It were cold night, but we were warm in that dust bag

Listening to the dogs howling afterwards and the wind Yeah, he sees what did he do? He's been he freshened the luck up there with old Lorna as a 12 year old. So Yeah, our 18 certificate already Listening to the dogs howling afterwards and the wind weathering and wearying and nattering in the oak leaves, looking at the moon or coal and white and onsen, Lorna said to me, you know Ridley, there's something in us that don't have no name. I said, what thing is that? She said, it's some kind of thing.

It ain't us, but yet it's in us. It looking out through our eye holes. Maybe you don't take no notice yet it's in us. It looking out through our eye holes. Maybe you don't take no notice of it, only sometimes. Say you get woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. One minute you're asleep, and next you're on your feet with a spear in your hand. Well, it weren't you that put that spear in your hand, it weren't that other thing

what's looking out through your eye holes. It ain't you, nor it don't even know your name. It's in us, lawn and loan and shelter and how it can." I said, if it's in every one of us, there's more than one of it. There's got to be a million. There's got to be a million and more. Lorna said, well, there is a million and more. And I said, well, if there's such a million of it, why is it lawn then?

Why is it loan? She said, because the many and the million, it's all one thing. It don't have nothing together with. You look at lichens on a stone. It's all them tiny manions of it. And maybe each part of it might think it's separate. Only we can see it's all one thing. That's how it is with what we are. It's all one big thing

and divvied up amongst the many. It's all one big thing, bigger than all the world, and lone and lonesome. Tremor in it is, and fear it. It puts us on like we put on our clothes. Sometimes we don't fit. Sometimes it can't find the armholes and it tears us apart. I don't think I took all that much find the armholes and it tears us apart. I don't think I took all that much notice of it when I was young. Now I'm old, I notice it more. I don't really like to put me on no more.

Every morning I can feel how it's tired of me and readying to throw me away. I'll tell you something Ridley, and keep this in memberment, whatever it is, we don't come natural to it. Brilliant. I think we'll have a round of applause for that. Well done.

So this is a little bit said, it's on one level, it's the origins of religion. You know, it's kind of golden Bower, James Fraser, another. It's also Jung's collective unconscious, I'd know. And yet you can get that kind of the brilliance of Hoban as he manages to get all of that resonance into something that is also quite a funny back and forth dialogue. I says, you says, she says. Here's a clip of Russell Hoban talking about his creative method. What I do doesn't come through rational thinking. It doesn't come through organization of structures.

It's a repetitive opening of the self to what will come in and an encouragement to whatever is out there to elicit any kind of a response that will get me going or keep me going if I'm started. Well, I can't say what's right for other people, but for me that's a practical way in art is to try continually to be more and more responsive to what there is. That's why I especially like the small hours of the night. I like three o'clock in the morning when the bricks of the shelf move aside

and things can come in through the chinks. Question? He just says questions at the end. He's delivered that amazing definition of remaining open to creativity. 3am in the morning, the moment where the light comes through the chinks, when the light, when you begin to get something. It's like Shane Lassini's idea of the raid on the inarticulate, that that's what you're doing at 3am, is gathering enough booty from your raid

so that when you next go back to the page, you've got so much to hit the inarticulate with. And Hoban, one of the things I found really interesting I didn't know about Ridley Walker is that that idea of Russell Hoban remaining open to whatever influences sparked his imagination. So he's 49 years old and he's invited to speak at the teacher training college in Canterbury. And he comes and does an event and three people come to it. This is 1974. And the person who's invited him takes him the next day to Canterbury Cathedral. And they look at the painting of St Eustace on the wall. And Hoban says this incredible thing. He said, I looked at the

painting of St Eustace and I'd just done this event, three people had come. I was going through a midlife crisis. My wife and my children were on the other side of the world, and I was all alone. And then Ridley came in. That the book is actually, we've talked about it in intellectual terms, it also has that almost visceral, this thing must be channeled through me so I can get it out. It's coming from the brain and the heart and the... It's one of the great, I think, one of the great stories, like Beckett on the end of the pier in Dunnery, and coming back and having written all these novels

that nobody's interested in, and coming back, and he basically writes Waiting for Godot and all the great plays. Ross Durbin's also total badass about his own talent. Have you seen a video where someone says, how could you possibly have written a book as complex as Fritally Walker while you're always doing this? And he goes, they call own talent. Have you seen a video where someone says, how could you possibly have written a book as complex as Fritally Walker while you're always doing this? And he goes, they call it talent. Can I quickly tell my meeting Russell Hoban story?

No. Yes. Well, I was working in a bookshop and the phone rang. And this guy said, this is an extremely strange request, but I'd like an English dictionary, just a very huge English dictionary, the biggest English dictionary you have. My name's Russ Hoban, could you cycle it round to me?" And I was like...

So I said, I mean, obviously it could only have been Russell Hoban, but I was like, do you mean Russell Hoban? Russell Ridley. Russell Hoban. And he went, yeah, come on over. So I just cycled down with this English dictionary and he was in there and he was surrounded by costume jewelry. Little tiny druggie bags, you know, plastic bags of cabochon and like costume.

He did car boots, though. He loved it. And then we talked about how he used to live with Maurice Sendak and had a bit of a falling out with Maurice Sendak. He invited me back to sign my copy of Ridley. It was a bit smelly in his kitchen. That's it, that's the end of the story. And then he died. I am absolutely there for the sitcom of Russell Hoban and Maurice Sendak in a flat together. Rachel, my wife, I know Colin did publicity, but Rachel also did publicity when she was a cape for him and she loved him. He wrote Ridley Walker, which did do very well and he became briefly

famous, but then he wrote Curljuman, which is brilliant, but it's totally different even though I think everybody was expecting something similar. But he never really, I think it would be fair to say, he never really achieved the level of fame. And he once said to Rachel, she was sitting in his office at his study at home, which his fort was, as you say, a cave. Mr Punch sitting on one shelf, and the lion from the Lion of Druckenbach. And then there was also the mouse, the little clockwork mouse, the mouse and his child.

I mean he'd been known as a children's writer really until Ridley Walker started. But he said, yeah, the thing is, Rachel, he said, my readers, they tend to trade in used paperbacks. And I remember she telling me that story and I had literally been on holiday where the five of us who'd been in one house in Italy had all passed the Picador copy of Turtle Diary to one another. But he's that kind of writing. And he was quite pissed off about the fact that he wasn't. And he was pissed off that everybody wanted to talk him about Ridley Walk all the time because he was a kind of a… he was one of those artists who couldn't do the same thing twice. And I haven't read all of his books, but Ridley Walker probably

is the one that will last. Luna, do you want to give us a bit? Do you want to set this up for us? Sure, absolutely. I love that he was coming for a dictionary because he famously said that he couldn't spell after writing Ridley Walker. It ruined his spelling. He just can't, you know, that was it. So this little bit is set, Ridley's kind of been questing through the Badlands, through the wasteland, and he ends up in the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral. And he goes down into the crypt and has this moment of revelation. I don't know who's been to the crypt

of Canterbury Cathedral. It's these sort of stone trees, the pillars sort of come up like this and they're carved like trees and they come over a sort of stone canopy. So pillars sort of come up like this and they're like trees and they come over like a sort of stone canopy. So he comes down into the crypt and this is what he finds there. I don't have nothing, only words to put down on paper. It's so hard. Sometimes there's more in the empty paper, nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things, they turn their backs on you. Yet you'll see standing stones and their backs will talk to you. The living stone will always have the living wood in it, I know that, with the heart of the child in it, which that heart of the child is in that same and very thing what lives inside us and a fear to being birthed.

The wood became stone in the womb of her what has her womb in Cambry. That place under the ground where I were, it were a wood of stone. It was stone trees growing under the ground. Probably that stone being cut and carved by them has made them giant music pipes I've never seen. Round trunks of stone and each one had four stone branches curving up and over north and east, south and west. All then curving branches, they connect and east, south and west, all then curving branches. They connect it, one tree to another. Stone branches holding up the overhead and groped into it. Stone branches under a stone sky, a stone wood under the ground, the heart of

the wood in the heart of the stone in the womb of her, what has her womb in Cambrian. I fell down on my knees then. I couldn't stand up, I couldn't lift up my head. The one big one, the master changes, it were all around me. Wood into stone and stone into wood. Now it show it one way, now another, the stone stands. The stone moves in the standing and the moving is the tree. Pick the apple off it, hang the man on it.

Out of the hollow of it comes the burning child. Under the stone, see the bird bone, thin as grass, becoming grass. I opened my mouth and mummering, only didn't have no words to mummer, just letting my throat make a sound. Because it came to me what it were we'd lost. It came to me what it were has made them people, time back, way back, veteran us.

It would knowing how to put their selves with the power of the wood become stone. The wood in the stone and the stone in the wood, the idea in the heart of everything. If you could even just only put yourself right with one stone, that's what kept saying itself in my head. If you could even just only put yourself right with one stone. That's what kept saying itself in my head. If you could even just only put yourself right with one stone, you'd be moving with the great

dance of the everything, the one big one, the master changes. Then you might have the rest of it and not the boats in the air or whatever. Whatever you'd done would be right. Them has made Canterbury must have put themselves right, only it didn't stay right, did it? Some is in between them stone trees and the power ring. They must have put themselves wrong. Well, now we didn't have one or the other. Them stone trees were standing in the dead town, only we'd lost the knowing of how to put ourselves with the power of the wood, the power in the stone. Plus we'd lost the knowing what would wish the power around the power ring. Maybe all there ever been were just only one minim

when anything ever could be right, and that minim always gone before you seen it. Maybe soon as that one stone tree stood up, the wrongness hung there in the branches of it, the wrongness being the first fruits of the tree. I just got to say I found that incredibly moving. I found that really mo- did anyone else feel the same way? Right, I've got the hairs on my arms. I found that really moody. Did anyone else feel the same way? I've got the hairs on my arms. You do too, actually.

Because I can remember reading that for the first time and not understanding it. And I read it again last week and I was a bit more on it. And then hearing Una read it then for the third time, I was going, oh my God, of course this is what this is about. But also, can you feel the texture of it and the rhythm of it? How it plays like a long solo in a piece of music is just incredible, right, Max? The kind of the poetic flow of it. It's like the novel is all flow. It is a prose poem and the fact that it has these dips and these troughs and these sudden acceleration moments is very musical. But to hear it read so beautifully as well,

you're almost translating it as you read, like as a musician might interpret a score very differently on a different instrument. That was gorgeous. The language is interesting. I think the two things, one is it gets into your, I said this before, I think, on the podcast, that this book gets into your DNA like very few books do.

It's once you've read Ridley Walker, it's kind of in there. And you know, you can't knock, you know, you don't forget it in any way so much. You might even grow around it. Yeah, yeah. The other thing is he says, which is brilliant, he says, it forces the reader to read it at the speed of Ridley's thoughts. And that's, I mean, it looks like a slim volume, right?

That is not a quick book to read. You cannot skim read. That's like, that's like The Inheritors by William Golding, isn't it? It is. All like that. There's a kind of deliberate holding the reader up to make them decode as they read. But this is Ridley's attempt to decode the word, the world around him. You're in his thoughts all the way through it.

Hoban's paying you the compliment that you will listen to every word that he's put there, and I think you have to pay him the compliment of taking your time. I think we're used to reading things quickly, aren't we? And scampering onto the next book. But slow it down with Ridley and let Ridley talk you through this story. So here's a clip of Russell Hoban talking about his influences and they might not be the influences you expect. Nobody has influenced me stylistically. Authors have exerted an influence over me to bear in mind certain standards of writing so that Dickens has fostered

in me a recognition of a certain kind of energy in writing that is a good thing to aim for. I never tried to write in Dickens's style, but I try to get as much energy into my writing as possible. Conrad also, for the density and the woveness of it, Conrad's writing is like muscle fibre almost. And it's very dense and Conrad, with a system of baffles and screams, he keeps you from getting to the heart of matter until he wants you to. He keeps you from getting to the heart of the matter until he wants you to. And actually what you were saying, Max, about Hoban with this book is he wants to walk you around the heart of the thing and then send you on your way.

I think that's why it's really up there with Milton, Dickinson, Dante. I mean, it credits its reader with so much intelligence, which therefore makes it very unusual in the history of the novel, which has tended to belittle and patronise its readers. You said it. There's your inspirational take-home glow, everyone. That's the pull. Well, you know, these days it would be like, dear reader, once upon a time people spoke a bit differently.

Are you ready? Here's a lexicon to help you understand why people speak differently because there's been a nuclear attack. Yeah. I give the first section of Ridley to my creative writing students. I give it completely cold and I read it out to them and I say, okay, well, where do you think this is from? What accent is it? And some of them get to estuary, but they never get to post-apocalyptic cases. They never do. Which is incredible really, isn't it? The other nice thing about Ridley Walk, you know, on backlist of We Always Tell the Truth, I was very stoned when I first read it. And Ridley stops to smoke hash the whole way through it. They barter with hash and Rizzlers. And that does affect one's reading of it. And, you know, if we're making recommendations. But it's interesting going back over, I've read it probably every four or five years

since. I've grown, I've had kids, I've become someone really interested professionally in writing and particularly in the, you know, where prose and poetry meet and things like that. All books change as you read them, and that's the point, because we change when we go back to them. I mean, that's such a cliché, obviously. But something about the prose here is almost as if the book is enchanted. It literally changes. It's like a choose your own adventure. That scene you read then when I got to that this time, I was like, I don't remember them linking up. I don't remember him having a kind of Christian epiphany. I don't remember him inventing the Bible in the middle of a really fangin' walk.

And he does. He's underlined all kinds of different passages 20 years ago. Yeah, he's underlined the whole book. What I like is finding things I've underlined and gone, oh, that's little 25-year-old me. Mind blown. I notice more when I get old. Yeah. Max, do you want to?

Have we got time? Yeah, you're sober and straight. Read us a bit. I notice more when I get old. Yeah. Max, do you want to... Have we got time? Yeah, you're sober and straight. Read us a bit. Yeah. I've had nothing more than a bit of cornish mineral water this morning. Well, this is the Stone song which carries straight on from where Uuna read. He's in the womb. And he says, I just had to sit down and write this and he doesn't explain why.

I mean it is a shamanic thing really and it's this sort of oral tradition. It just erupts out of him and he thinks I must write this down and this is what he writes down. I think I'll read it at the clip because I know we've probably run out of time. Stone. Stones won't be listened to. Then three brown stones in the form of steel don't stand up and talk like men. Sometimes you'll see them lying on the ground with their humps and hollers. They'll say, do you sit awhile and rest easy? Why don't you? Then when you're sitting on them, they'll talk and they'll tell if you listen. That's them what's in them and you won't hear nothing when they're saying, won't you go as far as the stone? You might think

the stone is slow. That's because you won't see it moving, won't see it walking around at them. And it's slow, though. There are so many calls of Adam, which here are the party calls of stone moving in their millions, which is the great dance of everything. It's the face thing there is. It keeps the stillness going. The reason you won't see it move so far away into the stone, if you could fly way up like that satellite bird over the sea and you look it down, you won't see the waves moving. You'd see them change one way to another and you won't see them moving.

You'd be too far away. You won't see nothing, only a change in stillness. It's the same with a stone. It's a kind of stone. It's almost like a mudstone. It ain't hard. Sometimes you'll see one broke open, almost like it, and shape it with an axe. It looks like one cut, then another making a point,

like a short beak, owl beak, or hawk beak. Sometimes you see the eyeball down in the skin of the stone. With them stones ain't been axe-shaped. They've been broke themselves open. It's that bird head in the stone what pecked the stone apart. Sometimes you'll see the two pieces still together, the bird head and the other together. They look like a broken heart.

Come back another time, the bird head won't be there no more. No, it didn't grow a bird body onto itself from far away. Would it done it? Grow it a man body onto itself, and off it gone itself, walking itself away. Stone men grow out of the bird head in the stone one for every one of us. Where there are there, upside down in the ground, like you'll see a picture of yourself up down in the water, there's a stone self of yourself in the ground and walking foot to foot with you. You put your foot down, they'll put their foot up and touch and yours walking with you every

step of the way yet you'll never see them. They'll stand on the ground long as you're on top of it. Come your time to lie down forever then the stone man comes to the top of the ground and they'll think you'll stand up there and they can't do it though. Only as strengths have been when you've been in line. They're lying on the ground trying to talk, only there's no sound. There's green vines and leaves growing out of their mouth. Them vines getting thicker and pulling the sides of the mouth wide and the leaves getting bigger, curling round the head. Vines growing out of the mouth.

Vines and leaves growing out of the nose holes in the eyes. Them breaking a stone man's face apart back into earth again. Them stones been trying to talk, only they never will, they're just one of your earth stones. You are the walkers trying to be men only can't talk. They had earth for sky whilst you had air. It's just only stone men walking on the ground like that. Women have something else. Your other stones, your stone stones, not earth stones, they talk their own way, which is stone talk. They've been there whilst you've been walking.

They'll be there when you lie down. The heart of the wood is in the heart of the stone where the great dance is. That come to me in Ridley Walker in stock. Don't be lightweight. Don't leave here and not go and buy this book. You must go and buy this book. Max, that was amazing.

Thank you very much. No worries. Trouble or not? Trouble or not? Did you want me to end it now? We've got to come to the end. So we want to, we've got five minutes. We've got five minutes.

Just for the humor value. I thought you were going to do the little bit about the, there's a, they find a explanation of the painting of St. Eustace in Canterbury. Oh yeah. Where there is the real, but just to give a little bit of a little bit of the humor of it, this is a good Pali. Do you want to read it, Andy? He's the prime mincer, good Pali.

So good Pali is the prime mincer, passed down from generation to generation is a printout of the legend of St Eustace. So you've been reading all that really dense prose that we've been hearing and suddenly the book goes, The Legend of St Eustace dates from the year AD 120. And this 15th century wall painting depicts with fidelity the several episodes in his life. The setting is a wooded landscape with many small hamlets, a variety of wild creatures are to be seen, and a river meanders to the open sea." Well, as soon as I began to read it, I had to say,

I don't even know half these words. What's the legend? How do you say a governor s with a little t? Good Pali said, I can explain the most of it to you. Some parts is easier to work it out than others. There's bits of it we'll never know for certain just what they mean. What this writing is, it's about some kind of picture or diagram which we don't have this picture, all we have is the writing. Probably this picture been some kind of secret thing because there's here writing. I don't mean the writing you're holding in your hand. I mean the writing time way back way way back when I wrote the same as. It's certainly secret.

It's blipful. It ain't just only what it seems to be, it's the sign and follower of something else. A legend. That's the picture, what depicted it, which is to say, pick it on a wall. It's done with some kind of paint, call it fidelity. Stur, Saint is short for scent. Meaning this bloke used to say, he didn't just turn up, he was sent.

AD 120, that's the year come, they used to have it gone from year one the right way to bad time. AD means all done. 120 years, all done there. Same as this picture of 120, no one ever got it finished till 1480, it says here, well, you know what, there ain't no pit, could take 13, 16 years to do this. These were year numbers.

It's about something else we may never know about. I said, what year is it now by that count? And he goes on to say, well, since we caught it standing, it's come to 2347 OC, which means our count. I said, do you mean to tell me then them before us, by the time they done 1997 years, they had boats in the air and all them things, and here we are, we've done 2347 years and more and still slogging in the mud? He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, now you're talking just like me. I don't know how many times I've said that. (*Laughter*)

(*Applause*) Righty-ho, and blobs you're none cool. Yes, we're totally done. Show's over. Now everyone can do as they like. Governor, thank you to Max and Una. To the whole Pot You Tell It team. And to our poo elite at the back, Nicky Burch.

For sweeten the sound. Andy. You can download all 98, 98 of our shows plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. We're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. Could we have a round of applause for these amazing guests? Matt Porter, Una McCormack. Can I plug the podcast?

What? I plug the podcast. Right. I am into podcasts. I don't really do podcasts. I don't know when people find the time to do them. But Backlisted is phenomenal. It is a treasure trove. And people always say, oh,

you led me to this, you led me to this, you bankrupt me and everything. But also you two are such good talkers about books. There's no preaching or ego or no conventional ideas about hierarchy. You just love chatting about books. It's glorious. I would heartily recommend you all have a listen to it. It's the best book podcast in the world. Hey! Applause Music